Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+ Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Control7. F1 20208. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint9. Metro Exodus10. Red Dead Redemption 211. Watch Dogs: Legion12. Clock Speed13. GPU Frequency Response14. Temperatures15. Acoustics16. Noise-Normalised Temperatures17. Power Consumption18. Overclocking19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

After the launch of AMD's flagship GPU, the RX 6900 XT, today we take step down to take a look at another custom RX 6800 XT. In for review is the Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+, a large triple-fan solution with factory overclocked core and increased power limit compared to the reference specifications. We put this card through its paces and see how it compares to both AMD's reference design, as well as the PowerColor Red Devil. 

Sapphire's Nitro+ series has earned a well-deserved reputation for quality, with the RX 5700 XT Nitro+ impressing us when we reviewed it last year. Sapphire also produces slightly more affordable cards as part of the Pulse series, but we are told these models will be coming later.

For now, our focus is on the RX 6800 XT Nitro+, and while stock is still seemingly impossible to come by, we have been told by Sapphire this model has an MSRP of £694 here in the UK. There is also a Nitro+ SE (special edition), which comes with ARGB fans and an extra USB-C port at a slightly higher price point, but this review is focused on the regular Nitro+.

	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 5700 XT	RX 5700
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	519 mm²	251 mm²	251mm²
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60	n/a	n/a
Compute Units	80	72	60	40	36
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840	2560	2304
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 1755MHz	Up to 1625MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 1905MHz	Up to 1725MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 23.04 TFLOPS	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 46.08 TFLOPS	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 720 GT/s	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	128MB	n/a	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	300W	250W	225W	185W

As a quick recap, here we can take a high-level overview of the Navi 21 GPU that forms the basis of the RX 6800 XT. While it is still fabricated on TSMC’s 7nm process node, as per the RX 5000-series, Navi 21 sports a much larger GPU die, measuring 519 mm². For the RX 6800 XT, it houses 72 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 Stream Processors each, giving a grand total of 4608 shaders.

Rated clock speed has increased significantly for the RX 6000 series. The reference RX 6800 XT, for instance, has a rated game clock of 2015MHz and a rated boost clock of up to 2250MHz. The Sapphire Nitro+ has increased this to 2110MHz and 2360MHz, respectively.

AMD has also increased the memory capacity, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory found on every RX 6000 SKU (so far). The memory is clocked at 16Gbps, and operates over a 256-bit memory interface for total bandwidth of 512 GB/s. AMD has also implemented a 128MB Infinity Cache on the Navi 21 GPU, to significantly increase effective memory bandwidth without excess power draw.

Speaking of power, the reference RX 6800 XT has a rated total board power (TBP) of 300W, though Sapphire has increased this for the Nitro+, as we will see later in this review.

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