Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
AMD hosted their second of two scheduled October product events today with a focus on their newest graphics cards for PC gamers. Leveraging the power of the Navi graphics architecture, these new cards mark the first time AMD has competed at the highest tier of the gaming GPU market in nearly a decade. The Radeon RX 6900XT is the company’s new flagship graphics card aimed at competing with NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 and will launch on December 8, 2020, for $999. The Radeon RX 6800XT will take aim at the NVIDIA RTX 3080 and arrives on shelves November 18, 2020, for $649. Finally, the Radeon RX 6800 aims to dethrone the RTX 2080 Ti and launches alongside the RX 6800XT on November 18 for $579.
The Radeon RX 6900XT graphics card consists of 80 compute units and has a 2015MHz stock clock speed (with boost up to 2250MHz). It comes equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 128MB Infinity Cache designed to increase memory bandwidth. AMD says the card has a TGP of 300 watts, which is significantly less than that of NVIDIA’s RTX 3090. AMD’s own benchmarks show the RX 6900XT trading blows with NVIDIA’s flagship card across a variety of DirectX 12 titles.
The Radeon RX 6800XT is built on the same architecture as its bigger brother and consists of 72 compute units with a stock clock speed of 2015MHz (with boost up to 2250MHz). Like the RX 6900XT, it is also equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and the 128MB Infinity Cache. It shares the same 300 watt TGP as the flagship card. AMD’s benchmarks showed the RX 6800XT trading blows with NVIDIA’s RTX 3080 in DirectX 12 titles.
Finally, the Radeon RX 6800, the GPU most likely to be adopted by mainstream users, comes with 60 compute units and a stock clock speed of 1815MHz. Much like its siblings, it will ship with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and the 128MB Infinity Cache. AMD is positioning it to compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 graphics cards and showed some benchmark data that had the RX 6800 meeting or exceeding the speed of those NVIDIA cards.
AMD says that these new graphics cards have full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, including variable-rate shading and ray tracing. The presentation featured a few short looks at some upcoming PC games that are expected to make use of AMD tech, with the promise of detailed overviews from the developers themselves in the coming weeks. AMD did not comment or show any internal benchmarks of the ray tracing performance of the Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards during the event. Still, these are exciting times for PC gamers, and having new graphics cards in the retail channel will help alleviate the current difficulty in acquiring new GPUs.