AMD, a company that has always been the second fiddle to Nvidia when it comes to GPUs, has finally crossed that bridge and launched the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards in a live event today. These new GPUs are based on AMD’s latest RDNA2 architecture that provides a much better performance at a very economical board power.
Before going on to the GPUs, let’s mention what the RDNA2 has to offer. The RDNA2 architecture is a successor to AMD’s first-generation RDNA. The new architecture gives almost an over 50% increase in performance over its predecessor. Based on the 7nm process nodes, the RDNA2 aims to provide higher performance with the help of a better infinity cache, which all in all consumes very less power.
The RDNA2, with the help of DirectX 12 ultimate, comes with DirectX ray-tracing and variable rate shading for a much detailed and smoother gaming experience.
A direct competitor to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080, AMD announced the Radeon RX 6800 XT. The 6800 XT looks like a beast with 72 compute units, a 2015 MHz game clock and a 2250 MHz boost clock. The RDNA2 architecture gives the new graphics card 128 MB of infinity cache. It will boast a massive 16GB GDDR6 graphic memory, and will be able to function at just 300W of power. AMD showed data representing RTX 3080’s performance at 4K against the new RX 6800 XT, and it looks like 3080 might be in some troubles here.
The lower end of the Radeon RX 6800 models, is the Radeon RX 6800, which AMD has put up for a fight against the Nvidia RTX 3070. The RX 6800 has 60 compute units, 1815 MHz game clock and 2105 MHz boost clock. It boasts a similar cache structure to its higher-end and comes with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and 250W of board power. Its comparison against Nvidia’s RTX 2080Ti (since the card has similar performance as RTX 3070) shows the AMD graphic card beating the Nvidia graphic card by quite a margin.
That’s not all, as AMD has also launched a competitor to Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3090. The company introduced the flagship of the Radeon RX 6000 series, the Radeon RX 6900. The RX 6900 XT is completely similar to the RX 6800 XT, with only a higher number of 80 compute units. The card fairs pretty well against the RTX 3090, and costs much less than Nvidia’s flagship, which might help it beat out the competition.
The pricing has been done in a way to compete with those of Nvidia’s. The Radeon RX 6800 XT costs $649 ($50 less than RTX 3080) and will be available on November 18. Radeon RX 6800, competing the RTX 2080Ti, is priced at $579 (nearly $80 more than RTX 3070) and will be available on November 18. The flagship RX 6900 XT will cost $999 and will be available starting December 8.
AMD produces both CPUs and GPUs and took that into consideration while launching the new GPUs. It has introduced a new Smart Access Memory (SAM) that will be enabled when a user combines the AMD 5000 series CPUs with the new Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. AMD claims SAM will juice out every performance level that these AMD products have to offer.
The graphic chipmaker also introduced a new Radeon Anti-Lag and Radeon Boost features, that can be enabled from Radeon desktop software to reduce latency and lagging during heavy gaming.
Also read: Nvidia announces its next gen of GPUs- RTX 3070,3080 and 3090
