Final Thoughts on the Sapphire NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Graphics Card
As we come to the end here I have to say that for the most part AMD has impressed us once again this generation. It seems like more and more AMD is giving gamers what they want and NVIDIA is falling short. In terms of pure performance this is really going to be your solid 1080p card. In our test suite, without ray tracing or FSR we averaged 111 FPS at 1080p. This makes the card quite competitive against the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and we saw it trade blows with it in our testing. If you wanted to bump things up to 1440p you can either drop down your settings or enable FSR upscaling, so 1440p is for sure possible as well. I know we probably don’t have to say it, but this is in no way a 4K card.
If you want even more performance you can of course enable FSR4. Instead of just enabling it within your game you can enable it in the driver software either globally or on a per-game basis. It is pretty easy to do once you know how to do it. What is nice about FSR4 is that it will work with any game that supports FSR 3.1 so there are already a bunch of titles that it will work on. In our testing we were able to essentially double our frame rate with FSR4 with frame generation. Although NVIDIA is still beating AMD here with their multi-frame generation in DLSS4.
One notable improvement you’ll see over 7000 series AMD parts is that with the 9000 series ray tracing have been improved quite a lot. This was a big focus with RDNA 4 and it is good to see AMD essentially “catch up” with NVIDIA. Case in point is that with ray tracing enabled we only see the Radeon RX 9060 XT fall behind the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB by 3-4%, which is exactly what we saw in just pure rasterization! Ray tracing is becoming incredibly important as many games these days require it out of the box so it is great to see AMD make this drastic improvement.
For Sapphire’s part at least currently the NITRO+ will sit as their flagship for the Radeon RX 9060 XT. The card is factory overclocked so you are going to get a bit better performance in games, you have an excellent cooling solution, and one of the better designs for an AMD partner in my opinion. Now Sapphire has told us that this card will retail for $399, which means a $50 premium over the retail MSRP of the RX 9060 XT. I think that price is justified, if of course you can find it at that price with how pricing is going these days.
When it is all said and done if you can pick up any Radeon RX 9060 XT at its MSRP it is going to be a solid buy and a perfect card for 1080p gaming. This card brings back the possibility of $1000 PC builds that actually aren’t crap!
Pros:
– Great 1080p performance
– Noteable performance uplift in ray tracing
– FSR4 works and looks good!
– Good price, if you can get it at MSRP
– Low temperatures and noise levels
– Factory overclocked
Cons:
– Pricing is questionable
– DLSS4 multi-frame generation beats FSR4
