AMD Introduces Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics Cards: Ampere Defeated
As part of the special event, AMD has officially unveiled the next generation of graphics solutions built on the RDNA 2 architecture – the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards. The new products promise a two-fold superiority over the previous generation video cards in terms of performance, and the new flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT card, according to the company, will be a comprehensive solution for gaming in 4K resolution.
The Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards are built on the new RDNA 2 architecture, which is also used in next-generation gaming consoles. According to AMD itself, thanks to the new architecture, the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT video card is up to two times faster than the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which used the original RDNA architecture. And when comparing the Radeon RX 5700 XT and the Radeon RX 6800 XT, the new generation video card shows a 54 percent advantage in terms of “performance per watt”, despite the fact that both of these video cards are based on 7nm chips.
As part of the presentation, AMD compared the performance of the Radeon RX 6800 XT with a competing solution, the GeForce RTX 3080. The data presented suggest that AMD’s sub-flagship graphics card will be able to offer comparable or even better frame rates with slightly lower power consumption.
The Radeon RX 6800 was compared with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and showed a convincing advantage, which allows us to assert the superiority of the AMD video card, including over the GeForce RTX 3070.
As for the flagship, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, this card in AMD’s test shows comparable performance to the GeForce RTX 3090.
Interestingly enough, among the games in which AMD compared its own new products with the offerings of the NVIDIA Ampere family, there are games with support for ray tracing, in which representatives of the Radeon RX 6000 series look just as convincing. As mentioned during the presentation, AMD graphics cards received a dedicated fixed ray accelerator engine, so they are well optimized for calculating realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections in real-time using XDR.
The characteristics of new AMD products are shown in the table.
High-speed performance in games with a relatively low memory bus width is provided by AMD Infinity Cache technology – a high-performance data cache of the last level. This 128MB cache sits directly on the GPU and reduces latency and power consumption over traditional architectures. In addition, AMD has introduced a dedicated Smart Access Memory technology that provides accelerated access to GDDR6 graphics memory for Ryzen processors.
The Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards are PCIe 4.0 compliant and feature 16GB of GDDR6 memory. The company emphasizes that the new video cards are 267 mm long and are equipped with two standard 8-pin power connectors. This allows gamers to easily upgrade existing systems and get by with 650-750W PSUs.
The reference design Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics accelerators will ship on November 18th with a suggested price of $ 579 and $ 649. In addition, the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards, developed by AMD partners including ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, and XFX, will also be on sale later in November.
Sales of the flagship video card Radeon RX 6900 XT performed by AMD itself will begin on December 8, the price will be $ 999.
