Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ is the company’s flagship air-cooled custom-design RX 6800 XT “Big Navi” graphics card. It launches today alongside the slightly more value-oriented RX 6800 XT Pulse, and numerous other custom RX 6800 series graphics cards by AMD’s board partners. The NITRO+ represents Sapphire’s highest grade of custom engineering, with the most capable cooling solution, the best aesthetics, and the fastest factory-overclocked speeds. AMD debuted the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 earlier this month, marking the advent of the the RDNA2 graphics architecture to the PC. It meets all requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including raytracing, and shares its DNA with popular next-gen game consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Real-time raytracing is the next frontier for consumer 3D graphics, and as NVIDIA’s “Turing” and “Ampere” architectures have shown, it takes enormous amounts of compute power and fixed-function hardware. The RDNA2 architecture, too, calls for a doubling in SIMD power over the previous-generation RDNA architecture, and introduces hardware to accelerate certain stages of the GPU’s raytracing processing. The obvious dividend of chasing down raytracing performance goals is enormous amounts of raster 3D performance at your disposal, and that’s where AMD claims to have caught up with NVIDIA’s fastest; with the company stating that the RX 6800 XT plays in the same league as the flagship RTX 3080, and the RX 6800 beating the RTX 2080 Ti, in effect the RTX 3070.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ is based on the 7 nm “Navi 21” RDNA2 silicon, and comes with an 80% increase in compute units over the RX 5700 XT, each with Ray Accelerators. The memory amount, too, is doubled to 16 GB, and AMD is using the fastest JEDEC-standard GDDR6 memory, running at 16 Gbps. The memory bus width, however, is unchanged from 256-bit. To make up ground, AMD devised an ingenious solution it calls Infinity Cache, which is a 128 MB on-die level 3 cache that runs at an astounding 2 TB/s, accelerating most workloads that aren’t too data-intensive. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review goes into the details of the RDNA2 architecture as implemented on the RX 6800 series.

The Sapphire RX 6800 XT NITRO+ builds on the solid thermal- and noise foundations laid by the reference design, giving the chip a large triple-slot cooling solution with multiple aluminium fin-stack heatsinks that use both heat-pipes and a vapor-chamber base-plate; a trio of fans, and a design that ensures much of the airflow from the third fan flows through. As Sapphire’s premium custom-design RX 6800 XT offering, the NITRO+ also features lavish use of RGB LED embellishments, dual-BIOS, external RGB headers, and a factory-overclock that boosts the GPU up to 2360 MHz, compared to 2250 MHz reference. Sapphire is pricing the RX 6800 XT NITRO+ at $770, a $120 premium over the $650 baseline price for the RX 6800 XT. There’s also the $800 Special Edition, which adds RGB fans on top, the RX 6800 non-XT Nitro+ costs $640.