The 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, best aesthetics, and fastest factory-overclocked speeds. AMD debuted the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 earlier this month, marking the advent of 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 also 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. Enormous amounts of raster 3D performance make for the obvious dividend in chasing down raytracing goals, and this is where AMD claims to have caught up with NVIDIA's fastest, stating that the RX 6800 XT plays in the same league as the flagship RTX 3080, and that it has the RTX 2080 Ti, effectively the RTX 3070, beat with the RX 6800.
