Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT OC is Sapphire’s top-tier 16GB RX 9060 XT model. Alongside powerful cooling and excellent operating characteristics, the manufacturer also bets on stylish looks and prominent ARGB lighting—elements that help it fit right into popular PC design cases. If you’re building a PC for gaming at the lower 1080p and 1440p resolutions and care about aesthetics, it’s certainly worth considering.
Cyberpunk 2077, native resolution
Ultra, RT Ultra and RT Overdrive settings
The first set of tests compares performance in native resolution using various anti-aliasing techniques. Traditional aliasing falls slightly behind in image quality compared to FSR or DLSS in native resolution, i.e., Native AA or DLAA modes.
The image quality varies between anti-aliasing methods, with DLSS currently offering the highest quality, although it’s exclusive to GeForce cards. GeForce owners have no real reason to choose anything other than DLSS. To compare GeForce cards with Radeons, however, all cards are also tested with FSR.
For weaker cards, we include tests at Ultra settings without ray tracing, and for more powerful cards, we also run RT Ultra and RT Overdrive with path tracing.
Global settings Ultra
The lower, Ultra settings are tested mainly for older cards. On high-end cards, performance is bottlenecked by the CPU, so the performance increase doesn’t reflect raw GPU performance. Ray tracing is not used, and DLSS isn’t necessary either.
1920 × 1080
2560 × 1440
3840 × 2160
Global settings RT Ultra
The RT Ultra setting uses hybrid ray tracing—a combination of rasterization and ray-traced effects—and is suitable for comparing the performance of the latest generation cards.
1920 × 1080
2560 × 1440
3840 × 2160
Global settings RT Overdrive
RT Overdrive employs path tracing, using full ray tracing to render scenes. On GeForce cards, DLAA with transformers is used.
1920 × 1080
2560 × 1440
3840 × 2160
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– It is obvious that a big advantage of this card are its dimensions. This is never mentioned in the review.
– I always power-limit my GPU during gameplay as a way to optimize (1) fan noise, (2) case temperate, (3) adjust for summer vs. winter room temperature and (4) to lower the electricity bill.