AMD announces Radeon RX 6000 series gaming graphics cards

AMD today announced the Radeon RX RX 6000 Series gaming graphics cards. Built on the new 7nm RDNA 2 architecture, these cards offer 2x improvements over the previous generation AMD flagship, including support for the new Microsoft DirectX X Ultimate API, which will be available from November.

The most important card in this range is the $ 649 Radeon RX 6800 XT. It has 72 compute units and 16GB 16GB GDDR6 memory in a 256-bit wide memory bus. 6800 XT can clock up to 2015MHz under load (or AMD as it is called Game Clock) and can occasionally touch 2250MHz peaks in short periods under ideal conditions (boost clock). AMD claims a total power of 300W for this card.

The 6800 XT also has 128MB called AMD Infinity Cache. It is a high density, high-speed cache based on Gen L3 cache. It is designed to reduce DRAM interruptions, delays and power consumption and is effective at 4K and 1440p resolutions. In conjunction with VRAM, AMD claims that Infinity Cache 2.17x offers the impressive bandwidth of 384-bit GDDR6 memory.

AMD has some charts to compare the performance of the 6800 XT with the 99 699 RTX 3080. We usually take these with a grain of salt but in the absence of reliable third party reviews, these can be taken as a strict guide.

The next is the $ 579 Radeon RX6800. Although cheap, the 6800 doesn’t lose much compared to the 6800 XT. The main difference was the number of compute units, which dropped from 72 to 60 due to the shutdown of one of the shader engines. “Game Clock” also dropped to 2105MHz with a boost clock of 1815MHz.

However, the Radeon RX6800 still comes with a full 16GB 16GB GDDR6 memory and 128MB Infinity cache. As it was a bit slower, the board power also dropped to 250W instead.

The 6800 is more expensive but competes with the $ 499 RTX 3070. AMD claims in its charts that the RTX is 6800 faster than the 2070, which has similar performance to the RTX 3070. However, we still take this chart with a big pinch of salt when using the feature called Smart. Access memory, we will discuss soon.

Finally, the flagship is the Radeon RX 6900 XT. This $ 999 graphics card comes with the same gameplay and a full complement of 80 compute units, increasing the clock speed to 6800 XT. The rest of the features are the same.

AMD decided to swipe at $ 1499 RTX 3090 with 6900 XT on its comparison charts. However, this time we suggest a small teaspoon of salt, because these results are taken with smart access memory and are called “Rage Mode”.

So what’s this called humorous rage mode? AMD calls it the One Click Overclocking Solution. According to Gamers Nexus, Rage Mode unlocks power targets on these cards so they can get more clock. It does not actually overlock the card, in some cases removing some of the power limits that can prevent it from overheating. For manual overlockers, this is not new but for those who are new or uncomfortable with overclocking click this single button and hope it does anything.

When it comes to the smart access memory mentioned above, it can be a little interesting. For this to work, you need a Radeon RX 6000 Series GPU, a Raizen RX 5000 Series desktop CPU and a 500-Series chipset motherboard. Once you have this Trifeta and enable an option in the BIOS, it allows CPU access to the full 16GB of VRAM on the graphics card, which reduces memory fragmentation on the VRAM and improves performance.

Among AMD’s test models, they say anywhere from single digit to low double digit gains in performance with Rage mode and smart access memory enabled on the 6800 XT.

RDNA 2 also includes support for Microsoft’s DirectX12 Ultimate API. It supports features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shaders and sampler feedback, previously only available on selected Nvidia GPUs.

Ray Tracing is what most people are looking forward to. AMD has announced that it will soon make available some titles that support beam tracing on AMD cards, but technically nothing will stop the existing titles such as Control, Metro Exodus, and Battlefield V from working on RDNA 2 hardware. On the implementation of Microsoft’s DXR. It is up to AMD to support them in its drivers. Finally, all DXR based titles are all RTX, Radeon RX 6000 and Xbox Series X | Must work on S hardware.

AMD also supports the Microsoft Direct‌storage API, which improves load time and configuration quality. In addition, the company supports its own technologies such as AMD FidelityFX, Radeon Anti-Lag and Radeon Boost.

What is currently missing from AMD’s arsenal is an alternative to Nvidia’s DLSS or Deep Learning super model. It enabled game-asset AI-assisted upsampling using high-resolution asset scans, resulting in local resolution close to image quality but with a lower rendering budget.

AMD has promised a technology called Super Resolution, which is similar to DLSS, but did not provide more details that tell us how well it works. This feature is still under development and will not be available for a while after these cards are launched. This should put a serious dent in AMD’s ray tracing performance compared to NVIDIA’s DLSS, so AMD did not declare support for existing DXR titles, as most of them have some form of DLSS.

Now for availability. The RX 6800 and 6800 XT will be available from November 18 on AMD.com for the above-mentioned $ 579 and 9,649 prices. The RX 6900 XT will be available from December 9 to 99 999. Cards will also be available in November from regular board partners such as ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, and XFX.

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