Overclocking RDNA2 is great when it comes to numbers, finally, after some time we actually get to crank the clocks on the Radeon side of the family. The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 6800 XT was a decent overclocker from our experience. We’ve seen reports of others getting wild high overclocks but ours seemed to fair much more conservatively with the GPU Core reaching around the 2600MHz mark and getting the memory up to 2100MHz (base) with Fast Timings. Anything nearing the 2650MHz or greater mark on the core resulted in extremely wild artifacts that I originally attributed to the memory being unstable but it seems that it was starting to interfere with the Infinity Cache at that point.
As you’ll see below the result was quite welcome. While the massive clock speed increase doesn’t yield insane levels of performance pumping numbers we still see a very competent and good level of uplift that I wouldn’t recommend leaving off the table.
Firestrike
Firestrike is running the DX11 API and is still a good measure of GPU scaling performance, in this test we ran the Extreme and Ultra versions of Firestrike which runs at 1440p and 4K and we recorded the Graphics Score only since the Physics and combined are not pertinent to this review.
Time Spy
Time Spy is running the DX12 API and we used it in the same manner as Firestrike Extreme where we only recorded the Graphics Score as the Physics score is recording the CPU performance and isn’t important to the testing we are doing here.
Forza Horizon 4
Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series. The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games. We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.
Watchdogs Legion
Watchdogs Legions sees a return of the Disrupt Engine they’ve been using since the early days with the original Watchdogs but this time it has been updated to next generation feature support. Dropping DX11 for DX12 we see much better utilization than in the past. Being one of the recent top sellers it earned a place in our test suite.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the two major PS4 exclusives that rocked their way onto the PC scene with massive acceptance and sales. Horizon Zero Dawn is powered by the Decima Engine and has been ported to DX12. We used the in-game benchmark to account for performance.
Waiting for FidelityFX Super Resolution? We did test out Sapphire’s own TRIXX Boost to see if we could squeeze extra performance without hitting image quality too hard.
