SAPPHIRE Nitro + Radeon RX 6800 XT Review

The flagship Navi-based graphics cards have been highly anticipated since AMD introduced its first generation RDNA line. While the first generation of RDNA gave us a little glimpse of what we could expect from a flagship offering, the line never really featured its own flagship variant and instead focused on more conventional end-performance products. But two years later, the wait is finally over!

AMD officially launched its line of Big Navi graphics cards and is not only the largest Navi GPU we’ve seen so far, but also based on 2nd generation RDNA 2 architecture, which offers an impressive leap in performance per watt, offering a range new features to place AMD Radeon ack in the sophisticated and enthusiastic market segment.

Analysis of MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio 16 GB GDDR6 – RDNA 2 graphics card with Tri-Frozr 2S cooling

AMD RDNA 2 architecture for your Big Navi Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6900 series graphics cards has a lot to offer. In addition to architectural enhancements, you can expect hardware-accelerated lightning tracking, intelligent access memory, Infinity Cache and many other features available, making the line one of the most competitive enthusiastic families AMD has ever positioned against NVIDIA.

Some of the main features of AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards include:

  • OMG Infinity Cache A high-performance, high-level data cache, suitable for 4K and 1440p games with the highest level of detail enabled. 128 MB of on-die cache dramatically reduces latency and power consumption, offering higher overall gaming performance than traditional architectural designs.
  • OMG Smart Access Memory – A feature exclusive to systems with AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors, AMD B550 and X570 motherboards and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards. It gives AMD Ryzen processors greater access to high-speed GDDR6 graphics memory, accelerating CPU processing and providing up to 13 percent performance increase on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card in Forza Horizon 4 in 4K when combined with the new Rage One-click overclocking configuration.
  • Built for Standard Chassis – With a length of 267 mm and 2×8 standard 8-pin power connectors, and designed to operate with existing 650W-750W power supplies of the enthusiast class, players can easily upgrade their existing PCs from large to small format at no additional cost.

16 GB graphics card with AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU “Big Navi 21 XT”

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT will come with the Navi 21 XT GPU, which is a reduced SKU with 72 compute units or 4608 SPs. The card will also have 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus interface, total bandwidth of 512 GB / s and base clock speeds of 2015 MHz and 2250 MHz increase in reference specifications. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT also contains 72 Ray Accelerators, which are dedicated to real-time raytracing workloads. The card will have a 300W TBP based on factory overclocked models pushing it above 350W and will arrive at a later date.

MSI destroys Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio, custom PCB with 12 + 4 VRM phases and Tri Frozr cooling

In addition to standard memory, Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards will also have 128 MB of Infinity Cache on the GPU chip. The cache will help increase bandwidth for better performance at resolutions beyond 1080p HD. The 128 MB Infinity Cache increases the standard bandwidth from 512 GB / s by 3.25x, offering an effective bandwidth of up to 1,664 TB / s on all GPU-based Big Navi graphics cards.

In terms of performance, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is shown to compete with the GeForce RTX 3080 video card. The card has a 20W lower total card power and offers better GPU performance in several AAA titles using the best API (Vulkan / DirectX 12). AMD is also bringing back its Rage mode, which is an automatic overclocking tool within its Radeon software package that offers even greater performance along with a nifty new feature known as Smart Access. Gains of up to 13% were presented with these resources, as can be seen below.

So for this review, I’m going to take a look at SAPPHIRE Nitro + Radeon RX 6800 XT. SAPPHIRE Nitro + Radeon RX 6800 XT is said to have a suggested price of around $ 770, which means a premium of just over $ 100 compared to the reference price of $ 649. For that price, you get a cooling solution with triple fan and factory overclock ready for use.

Line of graphics cards AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series “RDNA 2”:

Video card AMD Radeon RX 6700 AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT AMD Radeon RX 6800 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
GPU Navi 22 (XL?) Navi 22 (XT?) Navi 21 XL Navi 21 XT Navi 21 XTX
Process Node 7nm 7nm 7nm 7nm 7nm
Transistors TBA TBA 26.8 billion 26.8 billion 26.8 billion
Computing units TBA 40 60 72 80
Flow processors TBA 2560 3840 4608 5120
TMUs / ROPs TBA TBA 240/96 288/128 320/128
Game Clock TBA TBA 1815 MHz 2015 MHz 2015 MHz
Boost Clock TBA TBA 2105 MHz 2250 MHz 2250 MHz
FP32 TFLOPs TBA TBA 16.17 TFLOPs 20.74 TFLOPs 23.04 TFLOPs
Memory size 12 GB GDDR6 12 GB GDDR6 16 GB GDDR6 + 128 MB Infinity Cache 16 GB GDDR6 + 128 MB Infinity Cache 16 GB GDDR6 + 128 MB Infinity Cache
Memory Bus 192 bits 192 bits 256 bits 256 bits 256 bits
Memory clock 14 Gbps? 16 Gbps? 16 Gbps 16 Gbps 16 Gbps
Bandwidth 320 GB / s 384 GB / s 512 GB / s 512 GB / s 512 GB / s
TDP TBA TBA 250W 300W 300W
Price TBA TBA $ 579 US $ 649 US $ 999 US

If you want to read our complete dive into the AMD RDNA 2 GPU architecture and review the reference model Radeon RX 6800 XT, visit this link.

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