Final words and conclusion

Final words

We do like Sapphire products and the Nitro+ certainly impresses in many ways. The cooling is excellent and just uncommonly silent. I mean even in the default mode you are hard-pressed to hear anything, silent mode then ups that a notch. Realistically though I had hoped for a bit more bite in performance for this product. We've seen a fraction of negative scaling here and there, and sometimes the card was a fraction faster than reference. That differential is limited towards 1 FPS, making this product overall perform similar to the reference design. That's despite the tiny overclock, it seems that the power limiter is holding back the card at default settings. But overall with all other factors combined, we cannot complain. You can see that the L3 cache hit rate works really well for them in 1920x1080 up-to 2560x1440. However, at Ultra HD, these cards slow down a notch, likely due to GDDR6 memory being tied top that 256-bit wide memory bus and thus gets bandwidth deprived. But even there, the cards remain extremely capable.

Performance

Ultimately everything and anything it's all about gaming price, performance, and, of course, rendering quality. Of course, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a product that ticks the mandatory boxes. The 6800 offers more value for money though as stated, it would have been a hit at 499USD.It will serve you well at WQHD. At Full HD, you'll be quite often bottlenecked and CPU limited. AMD's L3 cache brings them some exceptionally fast performance and it really shows in lower resolutions, but still works well at the highest ones. Competition wise you're looking at 3070 to 3080 levels of performance for the 6800 overall. Performance-wise we can safely state that this is a true Quad HD graphics card that is an Ultra HD capable one with current games. Lacking however is some sort of AI supersampling that is assisting Raytracing remarkably well, and here the benefit quickly goes to NVIDIA.  

Raytracing

Looking at raytracing, we have to admit that AMD is performing reasonable at best, sometimes close and in line with NVIDIA but often at GTX 2080 / and maybe RTX 3070 performance levels at best. We had hoped for a bit more as RT wise you'll be playing at WQHD at best, and there is where ML supersampling could have benefit AMD. What helps them is the Infinity cache, so overall AMD is offering a fun first experience in Hybrid raytracing but we expected more. If we look at full path Raytracing, then AMD lags behind significantly as the competition is showing numbers much faster.

Compute performance

Generic compute performance in application like VRAY show a good boost in performance. OpenGL performance is lagging behind. AMD shines in D3D12 and Vulkan, less so on professional workloads.

Cooling & noise levels

The Nitro+ series offers good results in even stressed conditions; we hit close to 35 dBA acoustic values at 40cm distance in perf BIOS mode. That's excellent already. The silent mode does make the card run a fraction warmer, but here 33 Dba is the norm, youcan't hear it. Temperatures are fine, however, they depend on the airflow level inside your chassis; you can expect the card to sit close to a 70~75 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions depending on your BIOS mode preference. FLIR imaging shows the card is hardly bleeding heat. Overall, we're very pleased with what we observe.

Energy

In the previous paragraph, I already mentioned this; your heat output and energy consumption are always closely related to each other as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 100 Watts in (consumption) often equals 100 Watts of heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. AMD is listing them at 250 to 300 Watts for the flagship product, which is okay for a graphics card in the year 2020 at this performance level. We measure numbers to be close to the advertised values for the 6800, roughly 264 Watts on small peaks, and typical power draw settled at 245W.

Coil whine

The SAPPHIRE cards exhibit only a minor amount of coil squeal. It depends on the game, the higher your framerate the sooner you'll hear it.  In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived.

Pricing

Limited availability and nauseating price levels these days for a graphic card are becoming bothersome. I mean, even for us true hardcore PC gamers, it's getting more and more difficult to explain why people should put down this much money to be able to play computer games on a PC. I mean the spread is $999 for the 6900 XT, $649 for the 6800, and $579 for the cheapest 6800 model. Sure you can game at Ultra HD and get 16GB of GDDR6 memory but with the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony in mind sitting at a 500 USD marker for their GPU, CPU, Storage, and hey the console as a package we are getting more and more uncomfortable about the price levels for graphics cards. We do expect AIB cards to be more expensive, as that is a trend as of late.  We'll have to wait and see how that pans out, though, as everything is dependant on the actual volume availability of these cards. We can't comment on their pricing on this card just yet, as we have not tey seen availability. But 600 USD should be the max in our honest opinion.

Tweaking

AMD is enforcing a cap on the memory; we don't like that as we feel we could have gone a notch further. We expect you to reach ~17.2 GBps of effective bandwidth. Of course, increase the power limiter to the max, so your GPU gets (even) more energy budget. In the year 2020/2021, clock frequencies matter LESS than that power limiter. In the end, the card crashed at its max possible 2600 Mhz, 2500 MHz, however, was stable and 2550 MHz did run as well, albeit I am not sure if that would be a long term stable clock as we were pushing it. For our test to be called stable the tweak needs to run the four listed benchmark runs at 3840x2160. 

Conclusion

I feel I staid it all already on this page as the many paragraphs paint the concluding picture. A great product with more than enough cooling, good design, and excellent acoustics. The performance felt like it was lacking a little at that reference level performance, we cannot pinpoint exactly as to why that was as the card is factory tweaked a notch higher than reference. Likely the power limiter is responsible there. None the less you can tweak out a notch more perf of course and that will bring you up-to roughly 4% additional performance. So yeah, as far as the NITRO+ goes, hey, we cannot criticize a lot here; it ticks all the right boxes and as such comes recommended. The one thing holding me back is the fact that availability to date is incredibly poor, of at all. Once the product hits the street we feel we can make a more sound conclusion based on etailer prices. But as a product, this is beefy and nice alright. 

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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.