Conclusion
We can sum up AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT overclocking as such. Overclocking the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT makes it competitive with the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. It needs to be overclocked to make it on par with default stock GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition performance. Otherwise, it underperforms the GeForce RTX 3080 FE quite noticeably, especially at 4K.
There is no amount of overclocking on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT that will make it competitive with Ray Tracing performance, however. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE has a big performance advantage in Ray Tracing performance. Overclocking the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT only barely improves performance as it is very bottlenecked with Ray Tracing, especially at 4K.
It does also seem that the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is becoming troubled at 4K performance. It seemed to underperform the GeForce RTX 3080 FE quite a bit more at 4K than it did at 1440p. It also seems that the performance loss at 4K versus 1440p was greater than we thought it should be.
Keep in mind that the GeForce RTX 3080 FE was not overclocked in this review. While the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is at the top of its performance, the GeForce RTX 3080 FE can be overclocked as well, which takes the advantage back in-game performance. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is reaching the end of its ropes to just catch up to the GeForce RTX 3080 FE, while the GeForce RTX 3080 FE can also be overclocked, taking back the performance lead.
Final Points
Overall, overclocking the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT does help gameplay performance. There were many situations where it was advantageous to performance, and if you are gaming at 4K you will definitely want this.
It was, however, more complex to overclock the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT versus the competition. The current idea between the minimum and maximum clock frequency is confusing and purely based on trial-and-error. There is no clear science or the solid setting of a single frequency option available. In addition, right now memory overclocking is software limited, and we had no control of Voltage. TDP is also held tight, and overall we do wonder about the power headroom of the video cards curtailing their limits.
That said, our reference sample did seem to overclock very high and added 6-8% or even sometimes 10 and 11% to performance. This helps gameplay quite a bit. We do wonder what custom video cards will do to add to the frequency and how high they will come with factory overclocks and how much headroom over the factory overclock we will have. We will have to wait to get AIB cards to test. It looks like though, from our testing, overclocking will positively help performance, and it is something you will probably want to do.
For overclocking, if you can muster through all of this and are patient, and willing to give it lots of time in trial-and-error testing, then you might find it worth it for the performance uplift. Especially at 1440p and 1440p with Ray Tracing.