Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+: a strong rival for the RTX 3060 Ti

After more powerful cards (with Navi 21 GPUs), the Radeon RX 6700 XT is the first graphics card with a smaller Navi 22 core. This means that even Nvidia’s middle class with the RTX 3060 Ti now has competition. The RX 6700 XT fights back hard and can give GeForce a hard time even without active SAM. We haven’t seen such a tight comparison yet, and choosing the right card depends on specific games or non-gaming apps and the ways of use.

Conclusion

The overall performance score of the Sapphire RX 6700 XT overlaps almost perfectly with the MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio, even without SAM. With active SAM (we will release these tests at the end of the week), it will likely go after the RTX 3070 aggressively. It is true that once the Resizable BAR support expands more, the situation will be different, but at the moment we need to work with what we have in our hands now.

Compared to the reference RX 6800, the Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ is on average 5–14% slower, the lowest difference is in Full HD resolution. The answer to whether the RX 6700 XT or RTX 3060 Ti is a better choice for you is to be found in specific games. With Battlefield V, it also depends on whether or not you play with ray-tracing graphics. Without it, the RX 6700 XT Nitro+ has an 8–16% lead over the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X, after turning on DXR (Ultra), it starts losing 19–34% performance. RX 6700 XT is also faster in Borderlands 3 (+9–14%) or DOOM Eternal. Especially in UHD, where the difference ranging from 5–7% (measured in FHD and QHD) increases up to 18%. The larger 4 GB memory of the RX 6700 XT was demonstrated here.

But there’s also a list of games where the RX 6700 XT loses against the RTX 3060 Ti (but again, that’s with SAM off). In Mafia: DE it’s 7–16%, in Forza Horizon 4 it’s 7–11%, in Total War Saga: Troy 5–16%, in Control 4–8% (DXR off), with DXR it’s naturally worse significantly and Radeon is also slower in Metro Exodus. A rarely balanced is the performance in Cybeprunku 2077 (with FidelityFX CAS and also without it) or in Red Dead Redemption 2. Using Vulkan, the RX 6700 XT loses slightly by 2–4%, but with DX12, in turn, it is 3–5% faster compared to the RTX 3060 Ti. Neglectible difference is also in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where the RX 6700 XT performs slightly worse, by 1–4% according to the resolution.

The power efficiency of both cards is also extremely balanced. A very similar gaming performance also means a very similar power draw. In F1 2020, the difference is 5 W (the RX 6700 Nitro+ draws 243.5 vs. 248.8 W), in Shadow of the Tomb Raider it’s only 0.5 W (233.4 vs. 233.9 W). Performance per watt coefficient is significantly worse on the RX 6700 XT Nitro+ than the RX 6800. The Sapphire Nitro+ cooler is well prepared even for 250 W, as evidenced by the relatively low GPU temperatures. But in “performance” mode, the card is louder than you may have expected. Therefore, we will soon look at how the “silent” BIOS option will affect the operating characteristics. However, coils also make a relatively significant contribution to the overall noise level. These are quite loud, which may let you down. Changing the BIOS probably won’t help it…

The Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro can also be classified as a nice gaming graphics card appropriate for Quad HD resolution (2560 × 1440 px). In computational tasks, it usually loses against the RTX 3060 Ti, in Blender – Cycles it’s significant. But certain ciphers like WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2, SHA1, SHA2-256 or SHA2-512 can be cracked quicker.

We’ve got the test games from Jama levova