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AMD Big Navi graphics cards are on the way, and Sapphire has given us a look at what their versions of the RDNA 2 GPUs will look like.
The graphics card maker provided a sneak peek at its Radeon RX 6800 XT PULSE and RX 6800 XT Nitro +, both of which look very impressive despite their rather silly names.
The Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro + features a gray and black livery with various bars and accents on the GPU shell to enhance its gamer aesthetic. And there is what appears to be an illuminated logo and RGB lighting to really show off the graphics card when on a gaming PC with a windowed side.
The Nitro + will come with 12-blade fans and potentially improved passive cooling in the form of additional heatpipes and heat sinks under the hood. While the graphics card design says “gamer” in no uncertain terms, it still looks pretty good for a collection of transistors, fans, and silicon. And it also evokes the appearance of something outside the lived Star Wars universe. PC gamers who have an RGB-centric desktop setup will no doubt be looking at this card with joy.
For people who want something a little more discreet but still worth looking inside a PC case, the Radeon RX 6800 XT PULSE from Sapphire might be the card to consider. Its metallic gray / black casing is dotted with red lines running through it, conveying the idea that the graphics card has a pulse.
And the triple-fan array, while thick, conveys a functional aesthetic that seems to promise a lot of GPU performance without getting too hot or annoying. Both cards come with an HDMI port and a trio of DisplayPort connections, with all four ports capable of outputting a maximum resolution of 8K.
Speaking of resolution, both cards are configured to target gaming at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, all with the goal of taking on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. With 16GB of GDDR6 video memory and the new GPU architecture RDNA 2 to take advantage of (the same GPU architecture found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X), the Radeon RX 6800 XT seems to be on its way to offering some serious competition to the RTX 3080.
Sapphire hasn’t revealed pricing for its versions of the RX 6800 XT. But AMD has the base price for its new graphics cards set at $ 649, undercutting the $ 699 RTX 3080.
We’ll have to wait and see if the Radeon RX 6800 XT can beat the RTX 3080 in real-world gaming benchmarks on November 18, when AMD launches its next-gen GPU. We quietly hope that more competition in the field of graphics cards will produce more exciting and powerful GPUs at more affordable prices, which will make 2020 a good year to be a PC gamer.
