After focusing on mid-range and entry-level graphics for years now, AMD is taking a step back into high-end graphics cards with the Radeon RX 6800XT. It’s the company’s first RDNA 2 video card for PCs, though that architecture will also appear in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. At $649, the Radeon RX 6800XT is meant to compete with NVIDIA’s powerful $699 RTX 3080.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company has tried to achieve the same generational leap in performance as it did when it went from GCN to RDNA. That means RDNA 2 should be able to deliver two times the performance of the RX 5700 XT (RDNA). In terms of efficiency, Su explained the new generation of GPUs affords a 50 percent improvement in performance per watt.
The company crammed 26.8 billion transistors into Big Navi chips, and employed a number of architectural improvements such as pervasive fine-grain clock gating, aggressive pipeline rebalancing, and redesigned data paths for efficient movement. With the Radeon 6000 series, AMD is also leveraging the same Infinity Cache it used in the Ryzen 5000 series CPUs to achieve more than two times the bandwidth of RDNA at 0.9x the power consumption.
First up is the RX 6800, which is a $579 graphics card that AMD is comparing with the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. The company claims the RX 6800 is able to match or even beat Nvidia’s older card in a number of games at 1440p and 4K. This is a 250 watt card and comes equipped with 60 compute units that run at a 1,815 MHz base clock and 2,105 MHz boost clock.
The RX 6800 isn’t short on RAM like Nvidia’s offerings, packing a whopping 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. AMD is not just unleashing enthusiast-level cards to make a point, it’s trying to sway people away from Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series with great value. On that note, AMD didn’t show any direct comparisons with the RTX 3700, but we can be pretty sure the larger memory buffer on the RX 6800 will hold up well in 4K gaming for years to come. Nvidia’s could become a disadvantage given the current trend.
Next up is the RX 6800 XT, which comes with 72 compute units that run at a base clock of 2,015 MHz and is capable of boost clocks of up to 2,250 MHz. It also sports the same 16 GB GDDR6 memory buffer as the RX 6800, but has a higher total board power of 300 watts. It has more memory than Nvidia’s RTX 3080, which only comes with 10 GB (admittedly of the faster, GDDR6X kind), and has a power rating of 320 watts.
The RX 6800 XT is no slouch against the Nvidia card at 4K in titles like Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Forza Horizon 4, and it easily matches it in others like Doom Eternal, Gears of War 5, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But drop the resolution to 1440p and that difference is even clearer, especially in Battlefield V.
So there you have it. AMD finally has some powerful 4K gaming GPUs coming. And combined with its intriguing Zen 3 CPUs, they should make for a killer gaming rig. Meanwhile, Intel seems to be lagging behind, after announcing that it will delay its 7nm chips until 2022. And even though its upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs could be compelling for gamers, it still seems like Intel is playing catch-up since those are its first PCIe 4.0 chips
