Igor's Lab has taken on the task of simulating an RX 7800 XT to see what performance might look like. This was done using AMD's new Radeon Pro W7800 graphics card, with half the memory otherwise occupied. Igor's simulation results and theoretical calculations put this theoretical 7800 XT roughly between an RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, or between Nvidia's competing RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti.

The Radeon Pro W7800 is part of AMD's W7000 series workstation GPUs, featuring its latest RDNA 3 GPU architecture. The GPU sports 70 compute units using AMD's Navi 31 die, with 32GB of memory and a total board power rating of 260W. Due to this, the W7800 is arguably the best current candidate for simulating a theoretical RX 7800 XT. That's because it has a 256-bit memory interface, the same as the rumored RX 7800 XT; disabling half of the VRAM should be a reasonably close stand-in for the future GPU.

Igor provided two different test scenarios. The first involved physically simulating a 7800 XT by artificially disabling half of the memory, leaving the GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The second used theoretical calculations taken from the power efficiency results of the RX 7900 XT. The latter was done to attempt to provide a "more accurate" picture of how an actual RX 7800 XT may perform, since the W7800 is tuned for efficiency rather than performance.

It hopefully goes without saying, but both scenarios are at best an estimate of performance. There are multiple issues, including final clock speeds, core counts, whether the "disabled" VRAM truly mimics a 16GB card, drivers, and more. Igor tested at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. The "simulated" and "calculated" W7800 results were relatively close, with the simulated results looking similar to an RX 6800 XT while the calculated results look more like an RX 6900 XT. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy incidentally puts the 6900 XT about 7% ahead of the 6800 XT. Here's the overall 1440p chart:

Igor used nine games for his testing, two of which have ray tracing enabled (Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition). If the RX 7800 XT performs similarly to what he measured, you can see why AMD may not be rushing to bring the RX 7800 XT to market. It would be more efficient than the RDNA 2 GPUs, but performance wouldn't be much better. That would give very little reason for anyone to upgrade to the new RDNA 3 GPU, depending on pricing, since the RX 6800 XT currently starts at $519.

We do have to reiterate that Igor's predictions likely are not fully accurate. The RX 7800 XT's specifications remain confidential at this point, so we don't know what it will have in terms of compute units, shaders, cache, and GPU clocks. The W7800 also uses a trimmed down Navi 31 GCD with 70 CUs, while rumors indicate the RX 7800 XT will use a Navi 22 GCD with 60 (possibly 64) CUs. Depending on final clocks, the consumer card may or may not deliver better performance than Igor's simulated results.

Another problem is drivers, as workstation drivers tend to be less optimized for gaming and more optimized for professional applications. It's possible that drivers tuned for gaming could improve performance quite a bit.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, we also don't know what the price of the presumed RX 7800 XT will be. Given the rumored specs, $600 is probably the most AMD could ask, and it could potentially sell for less. Even if it only matches the performance of the existing RX 6800 XT, if it has a similar price and uses less power while providing a few new extras (like AV1 encoding support), it could still be a decent card.

There's little reason to expect a massive generational uplift in performance, unfortunately. The RX 7600 barely beats the previous generation RX 6650 XT, with both cards using 32 CUs with 8GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The RX 7900 XT does beat the RX 6950 XT by around 17% in our testing, but it also features 84 CUs with 20GB of memory compared to 80 CUs and 16GB of memory. Trim the CU count down to 60–64, and performance would logically drop by about 25%.

We hope to see RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT hardware ship in the next month or two. Performance may not be significantly higher than the existing parts, but efficiency should be better and the additional architectural changes make them (slightly) more competitive with Nvidia's RTX 40-series. We'll be sure to test the new GPUs whenever they actually ship.

Although the Radeon RX 7900 series has already launched, AMD's Radeon RX 6800 continues to be one of the best graphics cards in the retail market. Sasa Marinkovic, senior director of gaming marketing at AMD, wants to make sure that consumers don't forget that, sharing a chart showing the Radeon RX 6800's dominance over the GeForce RTX 3070.

Both the Radeon RX 6800 and GeForce RTX 3070 are last-generation products dating back to late 2020. Back then, it didn't make much sense to compare the two cards because they belonged to different tiers due to their MSRPs. The Radeon RX 6800 hit the market with a $579 MSRP, whereas the GeForce RTX 3070 launched with a $499 MSRP. Of course, neither graphics card retailed at their respective MSRP during 2020–2022.

Things have thankfully settled down since the end of Ethereum mining. The cheapest Radeon RX 6800 has dropped to $479, while the GeForce RTX 3070 now starts at $456, making them direct rivals.

While Nvidia has now launched the GeForce RTX 4070 to replace the GeForce RTX 3070, AMD hasn't released a successor to the Radeon RX 6800. The GeForce RTX 4070 also enters the market at $599, 20% higher than its predecessor's MSRP while offering GeForce RTX 3080-level performance at lower power requirements. That means pitting the GeForce RTX 4070 against the Radeon RX 6800 sort of misses the point, especially when we expect RTX 4060 Ti to arrive before the end of the month.

A better comparison will be between the upcoming Radeon RX 7700 (XT) and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, or between RTX 4070 and whatever equivalently priced GPU AMD wants to ship. But let's go ahead with AMD's comparisons for now.

Although the chart claims that the Radeon RX 6800 delivers faster ray tracing (RT) and rasterization performance, Marinkovic later clarified that it was an error. The above performance figures only apply to rasterization performance. Oops.

In Marinkovic's comparison across 32 games, the Radeon RX 6800 was, on average, 13.4% faster than the GeForce RTX 3070. The performance delta varies between -2% and +31%. The GeForce RTX 3070 only outperformed the Radeon RX 6800 in Metro Exodus, Grand Theft Auto V, and Dota 2, though the performance difference was basically a tie. The tweeted image also highlights how the Radeon RX 6800 offers twice as much onboard memory as the GeForce RTX 3070, a selling point that AMD has been very vocal about.

AMD tested the two graphics cards at a native 1440p (2560x1440) resolution. However, the chipmaker didn't clarify which graphics settings it had used for the tests, which is an important piece of data. Nevertheless, AMD's claims generally align with our own results so there doesn't seem to be any funny business going on.

In our test suite across nine games (data from our updated GPU benchmarks hierarchy, using a 13900K), the Radeon RX 6800 delivered 14.3% higher rasterization performance than the GeForce RTX 3070 at 1440p with Ultra settings. However, the scale tips in the GeForce RTX 3070's favor when it comes to ray tracing performance. That's probably the reason why AMD omitted that comparison. The GeForce RTX 3070 offered 17.2% and 14.9% higher ray tracing performance in our 1080p and 1440p tests, respectively, across six demanding ray tracing games.

Neither AMD's numbers nor our own testing results include upscaling technologies like DLSS and FSR 2, which could further muddy the waters. Perhaps more importantly, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed a week ago that AMD's mainstream Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards will launch before July. She didn't explicitly state which lineup, so there's no guarantee that we'll se an RX 7800 or 7700 by then, but the Radeon RX 7600 is expected to arrive within the next month.

If you're mostly concerned with rasterization performance, yes, the Radeon RX 6800 can beat the RTX 3070. The RTX 4070 can also beat the 3070 in rasterization performance, by around 30%, which means it's also beats the RX 6800 by around 13%. Factor in ray tracing and DLSS and the gap would only grow. But really, no one should be purchasing a last-generation graphics card for $480 right now when potential replacements are right around the corner.

AMD is firing back at Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 launch today, with some serious discounts on its mid-range and top-end RX 6000 series graphics cards. RX 6000 series GPUs, which compete favorably with the RTX 4070 in terms of performance have been discounted up to $110 below MSRP.

These new price discounts come hot off the heels after AMD's attack on Nvidia's stingy VRAM, which was released shortly before RTX 4070 reviews went live yesterday. Now, AMD has added additional discounts on top of its RX 6800 series graphics cards to compete with the RTX 4070.

AMD's discounts represent some serious competition for Nvidia's RTX 4070. Both the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT have seen $30 to $50 discounts with various AIB partner cards, to the point where the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT are now selling for $110 below MSRP. This means the RX 6800 XT can now be had for just $539, and the RX 6800 for $469.

As the cherry on top, AMD is also still selling its previous-generation flagship RX 6950XT for just $9 over the 4070's MSRP, with superior rasterized gaming performance.

AMD's price cuts are strategically applied to the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT exclusively. Both GPUs sit right next to the RTX 4070 in terms of performance, offering very similar frame rates at 1440P when ray tracing is not being used based on our review of the 4070. The RX 6800 XT in particular, sits closest to the RTX 4070 offering nearly identical frame rates. The RX 6800 is a bit slower, but not by that much, a hefty overclock could bring its performance in line with a 4070.

In terms of value, the RX 6800 XT at $539 will offer you RTX 4070 performance at 90% of the price. The RX 6800 will offer you 90% of the RTX 4070's performance but at 72.2% of the price - or a 28% discount.

At these price points, AMD's previous-generation RX 6800 series cards may be an excellent alternative to the RTX 4070 for gamers who don't care about having bleeding-edge hardware.

Gigabyte is reportedly prepping another iteration of its Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, one that uses an enhanced cooling system and a printed circuit board which was perhaps meant for more advanced Radeon RX 6900-series boards, according to VideoCardz. While the idea that there is another Radeon RX 6800 XT card coming seems curious, perhaps a more interesting question is why it would come at this time.

The rumored Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Pro graphics card is based on the Navi 21 graphics processor with 4608 stream processors enabled and carries 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Yet, it allegedly  uses a printed circuit board with an enhanced voltage regulating module (VRM) as well as a cooling system originally designed for a much more powerful add-in-card with all 5120 SPs enabled, the Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 6950 XT.  

Because of its almost unlimited voltage regulation module and three eight-pin PCIe power connectors that grab up to 450W, this might end up being one the best graphics cards for overclocking.

The information about the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Pro graphics card comes from an unofficial source so take it with a grain of salt. Launching another AIB based on RDNA 2 architecture barely makes sense these days for many reasons. Yet, there could be some rationality here. 

One of the reasons why Gigabyte might want to release another Navi 21-based graphics card in late Q1 2023 — about time when one could expect AMD to release its new high-end offering that is going to sit below the Radeon RX 7900-series enthusiast-grade offerings — is indeed the approach of AMD's next-generation. Disposing of Navi 21 GPU silicon, PCBs, and cooling systems makes sense to clear the road for newer offerings. 

The only question is when exactly these newer AMD Radeon products are set to arrive.

AMD's Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards will not offer performance akin to that of the company's Radeon RX 7900 GPUs, but since they are now available at discounted prices, they still provide quite some value. To further increase their value, AMD kicked off its new Raise the Game bundle campaign with select Radeon RX 6000-series products on Tuesday.

If you buy AMD Radeon RX 6600 or a better graphics card, you will get a free Steam copy of Dead Island 2 and The Callisto Protocol game if you purchase a product from an eligible retailer and meet other requirements of the campaign. If you get a Radeon RX 6400 or Radeon RX 6500 XT, you will only get a copy of Dead Island 2. Those who get a PC with a Radeon RX 6000-series GPU from a participating system integrator will also get an appropriate title or title.

AMD's new bundle promotion aims to attract attention to its outgoing product line and enable its partners to sell as many boards as possible in the remaining months before replacing them with newer Radeon RX 7000-series products. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX products will offer higher performance than the company's existing products. Still, graphics cards like the Radeon RX 6950 XT provide a good value at $785 or $800 (and keep in mind that these prices will go down once the new series comes closer to release), whereas the Radeon RX 6800 looks like a bargain at $480, especially with two games worth $120 included. Both models are still among the best graphics cards around.

The Callisto Protocol is an upcoming Unreal Engine 4-based survival horror game from the creator of the Dead Space series set to release on all modern platforms on December 2, 2022. The title became known recently for being canceled in Japan due to violent content and the developer's unwillingness to change it. Unfortunately, the developer has not published recommended PC specifications for the game, so we do not know whether it needs a Radeon RX 6700 XT or the Radeon RX 6950 XT to look well.

Dead Island 2 is another Unreal Engine 4-powered action zombie apocalypse role-playing game due to be launched on all major platforms on February 3, 2023. Unfortunately, the developer has not announced any recommended PC hardware configurations for the title, so we can only wonder whether Radeon RX 6500 XT will be enough to play it with decent quality settings.

Both games look good on screenshots, so they take advantage of AMD's RDNA 2 architecture behind the company's Radeon RX 6000-series graphics processors.

The new Raise the Game bundle promotion will run from November 8, 2022, till February 4, 2023. All coupon codes must be redeemed no later than March 4, 2023.

On Thursday, AMD issued a blog post claiming that its latest AMD Software: Pro Edition 22.Q3 driver increased performance in OpenGL applications by up to 72%. While the driver technically caters to AMD's professional graphics cards, it also supports high-end Radeon RX 6000-series graphics boards. Furthermore, the new OpenGL driver architecture is already present in AMD's drivers for consumer boards.

AMD has been criticized for mediocre OpenGL drivers for ages as its graphics processors were behind comparable GPUs from Nvidia in OpenGL-based games and professional applications. Over the years, the company attempted to redesign its OpenGL software at least a couple of times. However, Nvidia GPUs were still better in software (games and professional applications), relying on this application programming interface. But this time around, AMD says it completely re-architected its OpenGL driver, which improves the performance of its GPUs by 2% ~ 115% depending on the actual graphics board and workload. AMD says its Radeon W6800 is faster than Nvidia's RTX A5000 graphics boards in several applications.

"The release of AMD Software: Pro Edition 22.Q3 […] brings our most significant performance advancements to date in all OpenGL applications and many of your other favorite creating, designing, modeling, and CAD software applications," a statement by AMD reads. "We took the rearchitected OpenGL and tailored it to increase performance for OpenGL-based Creator and CAD applications, such as Autodesk Maya, which has seen improvement increase up to 72% over the previous driver and up to 41% over the competition. The latest driver has also continued to increase performance in non-OpenGL applications, which has seen up to 72% over the competition."

For obvious reasons, the number of people who use professional visualization (ProViz) applications is lower than those who play games. So, the sweetest part is that AMD has already implemented OpenGL improvements into its existing Adrenalin drivers, so gamers who still play OpenGL games can take advantage of the improvements. Furthermore, those who use ProViz applications with consumer-grade Radeons (e.g., Radeon RX 6950 XT) can try the new drivers to improve performance. These boards are not certified by developers of Proviz software, but if they work faster with new drivers, that's good.

"This new [OpenGL driver] architecture was first introduced to consumers in July 2022 with our AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1," says AMD. "The current market feedback on performance improvements has been highly positive for performance and stability."

The new AMD Software: Pro Edition 22.Q3 driver has been certified by developers of popular CAD, CAM, and DCC applications as well as tested and approved by Dell, HP, and Lenovo for stability (owners of appropriate workstations have to download their drivers from PC makers' websites).

Modern graphics processors have so many features and capabilities that even hardcore gamers and tweakers sometimes have difficulties finding the proper settings to achieve desirable performance. That's where one enthusiast claims that his professionally tuned performance profiles come in.

Yuri Bubliy claims that his upcoming Radeon Monster Profile (RMP), a third-party utility he is creating, will boost the performance of AMD's RDNA2 GPUs through voltage/frequency curve modifications. The creator even says the app can boost a Radeon RX 6800 XT up to the level of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti — but in one specific synthetic benchmark that doesn't tell us a lot about the broader picture. 

AMD's Adrenaline software for Radeon graphics processors already offers plenty of performance features, which even overvolt the GPU for overclocking. Furthermore, AMD's pack of FidelityFX features like FSR 2.0 also boost the performance of Radeon graphics cards. Yet the Radeon Monster Profile developed by Yuri Bubliy claims to deliver even more tweaked performance.

Based on the tests done by the developer, the profile purportedly increased the Radeon RX 6800 XT's performance in 3DMark: Time Spy tests by 13% over stock, bringing it up the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti level. It's an excellent way to improve one of the best graphics cards, if it works as claimed. 

Bubliy claims that the Radeon Monster Profile combines unique settings and a new volt-frequency curve for Radeon RX 6000-series graphics chips.

"Particular attention was paid to the memory subsystem, the operating voltage was reduced by 6%, which ultimately reduced the heat of GDDR6 modules," Bubliy said. "The main mechanism for increasing performance is to increase the requested core frequency relative to the operating voltage."

According to the developer, the result is that RMP increases GPU frequency by 300 MHz without affecting factory settings for thermal throttling and fans. Of course, a 300 MHz overclocking requires a decent cooling system, so while the maker does not urge the owner to buy an aftermarket cooler for AMD's reference graphics boards, he stresses that non-reference boards should be good with the profile.

"The profiles are universal and adaptive," Bubliy said. "The RMP does not increase the operating voltage or change the current limit."

Naturally, we would all like to boost the performance of our gear through simple software utilities, but you should keep your expectations in check, particularly when claims are made based on a single benchmark. Seeing is believing, especially when it comes to big claims like these. The utility is due later this fall, and we'll give it a spin to see how it fares. 

As we begin August, we have the dubious pleasure of getting another month of Steam Hardware Survey data to pick through. The last month on record was a great one for AMD’s CPUs, but not so good for its GPUs. Meanwhile, it's starting to look like Linux could overtake MacOS as the second most popular Steam gaming platform within a few months — no doubt thanks in part to the Steam Deck.

Red CPUs Run Rampant

Turning our attention to the CPU landscape first, it looks like AMD has achieved a new record Steam user share. According to the latest data, AMD’s CPU share went up 2.22% in July. That is a mighty bump in a single month.

The latest stats suggest AMD CPUs power 33.73% of Steam user PCs, with Intel CPUs coming in at 66.26%. We are nearing the end of the Zen 3 vs Alder Lake battle, with the conflict between Zen 4 Ryzen and Raptor Lake looking to win PC gamers' hearts and minds in the coming months.

Again, it's worth noting that the Steam Deck might be factoring into this equation, as it uses an AMD processor. There's also the difficulty of Valve not providing clear details on how the data is collected. There are many opinions on what might be happening, but the only truly valid way of gathering statistics would be fully random sampling, or just sampling every PC that logs into Steam. We suspect neither option is currently used.

Red GPUs Green with Envy

When it comes GPU sales data, we prefer to use the DX12 API data as our reference point, as it provides far more granular detail than the overall Video Cards table. It also eliminates truly old hardware that's not DX12-compatible as an added bonus.

We've taken Valve's data and then adjusted it (i.e., dividing by the monthly percentage sum of all GPUs in the table) so that the totals equal 100%. (They actually sum to anywhere from 89.13% to 92.18%, perhaps because the remaining GPUs weren't DX12 capable.) If you're wondering why our figures are slightly different than those listed in the survey, that's the explanation. Here's the breakdown.

The latest Nvidia advances have pushed back against gains AMD had started to enjoy over the preceding few months. Comparing the most modern Nvidia RTX 30 series and AMD RX 6000 series GPUs looks a little more positive for AMD. Here you can see consistent growth month-by-month for the red team, but the increases aren’t inspiring. Indeed, AMD’s progress with the RX 6000-series is a small compared to the RTX 30-series' adoption over the same period.

At present, Nvidia GPUs represent 5.85X as many surveyed PCs as AMD GPUs. Looking just at the current generation Ampere and RDNA 2 solutions, Nvidia holds a 10.9X advantage. AMD's most popular RDNA 2 GPU right now is the RX 6600 XT, sitting at 0.4% of the total surveyed PCs. Nvidia's most popular Ampere GPU by contrast is the RTX 3060 for Laptops at 3.59%, with the desktop RTX 3060 coming in slightly lower at 2.76%.

Overall, current generation AMD and Nvidia GPUs represent 21.55% of all surveyed PCs. The top three most popular GPUs meanwhile represent a combined 20.18%, and they're all older models — GTX 1060, GTX 1650, and GTX 1050 Ti. The most popular AMD GPU is still the RX 580, at 1.58%.

Windows 11 User Share Slips

Lastly, we saw some interesting movement in the Operating System data. Most curiously, Windows 11 has slipped in July, down 0.11% during the month. At the same time, Windows 10 has taken a step forward, by a rather convincing 1.91%.

MacOS fell to 1.74% of user share in the most recent results, which is down 0.71%. Conversely, Linux is up, as the OS of choice for 1.23% of users. If this pivot continues, it wouldn’t be a surprise for Linux to elbow past MacOS, and we reckon the Steam Deck with Steam OS might be adding some weight to the Linux side.

While the Steam Hardware Survey provides interesting data, it has rather nebulous survey policies and methodologies. Valve provides no insight on how users are selected, confidence intervals, or margins of error. It doesn't even claim to use random sampling or full sampling, which would be required for the data to be statistically useful. Still, it's the best publicly available information on what hardware PC gamers are currently running, and for better or worse, we have to take what we can get.

It has felt like forever since the silicon shortages and mining craze sapped all the graphics cards out of the hands of PC builders and gamers looking for an upgrade to their PC. Today you can get a tremendous high-end GPU, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC for just £659 at Overclockers. 

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC features 4608 stream processors, a core clock of 2045 MHz with the ability to boost up to 2285 MHz, and 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. 

This is the cheapest you can get this graphics card brand new from a legitimate and reliable seller, and it's one of the most potent GPUs that you get from AMD's lineup of 6000 series cards. Have a look at our GPU hierarchy to see where it sits in comparison with all the other graphics cards that we have tested. 

If team red isn't your brand of choice, then you might want to try a graphics card from team green and pick something comparable like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080. These are some of the most powerful graphics cards you can finally get your hands on right now and are more than capable of playing the latest games at the highest settings. 

Thanks to supply chain issues improving and a slight collapse in the mining economy, the availability of graphics cards has improved significantly. Combine that with the next generation of GPUs on the horizon and it's meant that we've seen a nice downward trend in the price of cards on the market. 

We're well over a year removed from the launch of AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, and the graphics cards are still selling for well over MSRP. You can chalk this situation up to the ongoing global chip shortage, which is forcing gamers to pay up to twice the MSRP from third-party sellers to get their hands on the cards. Even though existing RX 6800 XT/6900 XT SKUs are hard to obtain, MSI is pushing forward with refreshed versions that could land on our best graphics cards list.

First up is the refreshed Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Z Trio 16G, where MSI swapped out the X for a Z. It sees its game clock rise from 2045MHz to 2065 MHz, a mere 20 MHz uplift. Likewise, the maximum boost clock climbs to 2310 MHz, up from 2285 MHz. These slight clock increases mean that MSI hasn't altered the TDP of the card, which still stands at 300 watts.

Next, we have the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Z Trio 16G. This card receives an even greater performance boost, with the game clock increasing from 2105 MHz to 2235 MHz. MSI also cranked the boost clock from 2340 MHz to a heady 2425 MHz, making this one of the fastest cards in the Radeon RX 6900 XT kingdom. Like its RX 6800 XT Gaming Z counterpart, the RX 6900 XT Gaming Z holds the line with a 300-watt TDP.

While the previous Gaming X graphics cards featured a graphene-reinforced backplate, the new Gaming Z offerings use a stronger aluminum counterpart. You'll still find a Tri Frozr 2 cooling system with triple Torx 4.0 fans, precision-machined core pipes, and the ability to stop the fans when the GPU isn't under load, which goes a long way towards lowering acoustics. And for the RGB fanatics out there, Mystic Light support is naturally available.

All other specs remain the same, including 4,608 stream processors (5120 for the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Z), 16GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory bus, three 8-pin power connectors, three DisplayPort 1.3 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port.

At this time, there is no information on pricing or availability for the new Gaming Z cards. However, no matter what MSRP these cards carry, we'd imagine that the actual street prices will continue to be highly inflated for the foreseeable future.

Gigabyte is reportedly hiking pricing of its RDNA 2-based graphics cards by up to 6% according to a report from BoardChannels (via VideoCardz). Other makers of graphics boards will likely follow Gigabyte's lead and increase prices, which is bad news for gamers.

Gigabyte allegedly notified its partners that it is following AMD's price increase and passing amplified GPU production costs on to the end-user. Depending on the GPU model, the hike is between 3% and 6% on all Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards models except the top-of-the-range Radeon RX 6900 XT. This translates into a $16 to $31 hike for the Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6700 XT, a $47 surge for the Radeon RX 6800, and a $78 jump for the Radeon RX 6800 XT. 

It should be noted that Gigabyte's prices are FOB (free on board) prices and do not include shipping costs or taxes. Once those costs are added, actual retail prices of Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards could increase by more than $78.

The average selling prices of graphics cards have set records in the past few quarters as everyone in the supply chain — starting from GPU designers and their contract makers of chips and all the way up to retail stores — have been trying to capitalize on strong demand for PCs in general and graphics cards in particular. Last week we reported that AMD was hiking prices of its GPUs by about 10%, citing increased production costs set by foundries, which could translate into a $50 to $100 increase in retail pricing. Unsurprisingly, AMD's add-in-board (AIB) manufacturing partners are following suit, making today's best gaming graphics cards even more expensive. 

It is hard to say whether AMD and/or its AIB partners plan to limit price surges of their graphics cards somehow. However, given the continuing chip shortage, this is highly unlikely, so gamers will continue to suffer from price hikes in the foreseeable future.

AMD on Tuesday launched its new campaign to make its gaming-oriented CPUs and GPUs more attractive to the target audience. From now through the first half of next year, AMD will provide a free subscription to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass for PC with a purchase of qualified hardware. 

Gamers who purchase a Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card or Ryzen 5000X/3000X/XT processor from a participating retailer will get a free one-month subscription to Microsoft Xbox Game Pass for PC as part of AMD's Equipped for Battle game bundle. Typically, Microsoft charges $1 for the first month and then $9.99 per month.  

While the bundle's value is not exactly high for graphics cards that cost from $650 to $1700, it allows gamers to try out over 100 new games and enjoy their graphics board without purchasing a bunch of titles.

AMD Equipped for Battle Game Bundle

AMD said that the campaign starts on October 26, 2021, and ends on June 30, 2022, at 11:59:59 PM ET, or when the supply of Coupon Codes is exhausted, whichever occurs first.

In addition, AMD offers the Raise the Game bundle that includes complimentary copies of Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village with a purchase of a Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics board, but this campaign ends on December 31.

Apple announced the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros on Monday, marking the debut of the company's new M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs. While we've already seen a bit of the M1 Max's computing power, one Redditor has found a new benchmark of the M1 Max stretching its feet in a graphics benchmark.

The M1 Max wields a 32-core GPU with 16 execution units each. Each execution unit houses eight ALUs, bringing the total number of ALUs in the M1 Max to 4,096. According to Apple, the GPU delivers performance up to 10.4 TFLOPs. In theory, the M1 Max's GPU should perform somewhere in the area of the GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile, which offers 10.91 TFLOPs.

During its presentation, Apple claimed that the M1 Max's GPU (60W) rivals Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile (160W). Apple's SoC reportedly offers equivalent performance at 100W less power. The company also provided a comparison to the 100W variant of the GeForce RTX 3080 where the M1 Max showed a 40% lower power consumption. For the time being, we should take Apple's numbers with a bit of salt since the company didn't provide any context, only having used "select industry-standard benchmarks."

GFXBench originated as a smartphone benchmark, therefore, the tests aren't suitable for modern graphics cards. Unlike 3DMark, we recommend you approach GFXBench results with lots of caution. Furthermore, the M1 Max submission was on Mac OS X with the Metal API, whereas the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile and Radeon RX 6800M submissions were carried out on Windows and the OpenGL API. We've used the offscreen results for comparison.

Apple M1 Max Benchmarks

Apple touted that the M1 Max's graphics performance was up to four times faster than the original M1. The results showed that Apple's claims were mostly on point, although not in every workload.

The M1 Max looked pretty good beside the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile or Radeon RX 6800M. Apple's chip outperformed Nvidia and AMD's GPUs in some workloads and stayed within a small margin in others. The M1 Max's power efficiency was the most impressive feat, considering that the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile and Radeon RX 6800M conform to TDP ratings of 160W and 145W, respectively.

Logically, we'll have to watch for more benchmarks to see whether Apple's M1 Max is what the company claims. It's fine if it doesn't beat the latest and greatest GPUs from Nvidia or AMD since Apple didn't conceive the M1 Max for gaming. Instead, the 5nm SoC is tailored for professionals to deliver potent CPU and graphics performance on-the-go in the new MacBook Pros.

The first four entries in AMD’s Big Navi line of graphics cards are finally out, meaning that there’s now a group of worthy contenders to Nvidia’s RTX throne. We spoke highly about both the now-released RX 6700 XT, RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT in our reviews for these cards, praising their price-to-power ratio and their attempt to snag the best GPU crown for Team Red. Our RX 6900 XT and RX 6600 XT review, though, were a bit more mixed. 

These cards are new powerhouses for AMD, packing ray tracing and hitting average frame rates of up to 93 fps at 4K across a 9-game average in our testing. But they also have another potential strength to wield against Nvidia- in an era where pretty much every new piece of fancy tech sells out almost instantly: They’re another option.

That doesn’t mean stock is easy to come by, because like the RTX cards before them, the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT quickly sold out when they launched early November 18th, and the same happened when custom versions of the cards hit store shelves on November 25th and the RX 6900 XT launched on December 8th.

As with the Ryzen 5000 launch, AMD’s aiming to keep stock high and steady, but we’re not expecting these cards to be readily available for a while. But if you’re struggling to get your hands on a next-gen graphics card, here’s how to broaden your net a bit and maybe find a few active AMD listings for your trouble.

One trick that might sign up your chances of snagging a new high-end card: Break out your Raspberry Pi and use it to build your own bot to snag a card. Using a Pi and the open-source Python-based Inventory Hunter app and the shared code and instructions on Github you give it a shot. If it doesn't work, at least you've killed some time between now and that foggy future where Big Navi cards are actually readily available.
 

Radeon RX 6600 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6600 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H | Micro Center

US Radeon RX 6700 XT resellers at a glance: eBay 

The RX 6600 XT is the least powerful Big Navi card you can get, targeting 1080p performance for an MSRP of $379. It's got 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 32 CUs and 9.7 teraflops of power. That's a little lower than we'd like for the cost, as we stated in our review.

But even the MSRP is low compared to what aftermarket sales are likely to be. As with other major tech releases as of late, stock is low across the board.

AMD: The RX 6600 XT doesn't even show up on AMD's online store.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s got three sold out RX 6600 XT models on its site, ranging form $379 to $479 in price.

Newegg: Like most tech releases, Newegg's got the widest selection. But all of its cards are also sold out, so you're going to have to resort to the Newegg Shuffle to buy from here.

Amazon: The RX 6600 XT doesn't even show up in searches on Amazon right now, which instead take you to products with similar names.

B&H: There's one RX 6600 XT model on B&H's site, but it's sold out for now.

Micro Center:  Micro Center has four models with limited in-store availability. Prices range from $379 to $549, and stock differs from store to store. 

eBay: We could actually only find one eBay auction for the RX 6600 XT as of writing, and it costs more than double the MSRP. Yikes.

Radeon RX 6700 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6700 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H | Micro Center

US Radeon RX 6700 XT resellers at a glance: eBay 

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is, like we stated in our review, sort of the diet version of Big Navi. It's got 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 40 CUs and 12.4 teraflops of power, which lets it hit clock speeds of 2,424 MHz. All of that will cost you $479, which we thought was a touch too high for a card that's geared towards 1080p/1440p performance.

But it's still nothing compared to what you're likely to find right now. As with other major tech releases as of late, the only way you're probably going to be able to buy a Radeon RX 6700 XT at the moment is either going aftermarket or buying an expensive AIB model.

AMD: AMD has a store that lets you buy graphics cards directly through its website, but stock is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s amped up its 6700 XT model selection lately, including one $899 model that's actually available to buy online and one $999 model that's available at select stores.

Newegg: Newegg is where you'll find the widest selection of RX 6700 XT listings, from Asus to Gigabyte to MSI and more, but all the official listings are out of stock at the moment. Watch out for high prices from third-party sellers, though.

Amazon: Searching for an RX 6700 XT on Amazon just brings you to aftermarket sales, so maybe wait a bit before putting it in your search rotation.

B&H: Like Best Buy, B&H actually has 6700 XT models in stock. This includes a $949 model from XFX and a $999 model from MSI.

Micro Center:  Micro Center has several RX 6700 XT models listed on its site, all of which are only available for purchase in store and have limited stock depending on location.

eBay: eBay is an especially dangerous place to search for RX 6700 XT models right now, since anything under around $800 actually won't net you a product if you look at the fine print. Be on the lookout for scammers.

Radeon RX 6900 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6800 retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 resellers at a glance: eBay 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is AMD’s most recent Big Navi GPU, as well as its most powerful. It has a $999 starting price of and comes with 80 compute units and 23 teraflops of power, plus 16GB of VRAM. Clock speeds start at 1,825 MHz and can hit up to 2,250 MHz when boosted, and the average 4K fps on the RX 6900 XT across our 9 game suite was 85 out-of-the-box and 90.7 when overclocked. 

This card's other big feature is ray tracing, and while all of these numbers and capabilities come together to make an impressive suite, our review concluded that it's not too much more impressive than AMD's other Big Navi given the steep price increase. Hence, you're going to want to be extra conscientious when shopping.

AMD: Unlike Nvidia, AMD allows you to buy graphics cards directly through its website. Unfortunately, stock is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy has beefed up its RX 6900 XT selection, and currently has a $2,059 model from Gigabyte up for sale on its site.

Newegg: Newegg is normally where you'd find the largest selection of RX 6900 XT models, but the site doesn't seem to have any in stock right now, with listings simply pointing to other graphics cards and third-party sales. 

Amazon: Searching for an RX 6900 XT on Amazon mostly brings up third-party sellers, so don't expect to get an official card here quite yet.

B&H: Searching for the RX 6900 XT brings up listings from MSI, XFX and Asus. The XFX cards are actually in stock, starting at $1,799.

eBay: eBay markups for the RX 6900 XT are especially ridiculous, with most reasonable-seeming listings turning out to just be pictures. When you start to look for people selling the actual card, their listings start at $2,000.

Radeon RX 6800: Where to Buy 

US Radeon RX 6800 retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 resellers at a glance: eBay | stockX 

The Radeon RX 6800 is AMD’s base-level Big Navi GPU, coming in at a starting price of $579 and packing 60 compute units with 16.2 teraflops of power and 16GB of VRAM. Clock speeds start at 1,815 MHz and can hit up to 2,105 MHz when boosted, and the average 4K fps on the RX 6800 across our 9 game suite was 80. Throw in ray tracing, and that’s a pretty impressive suite, coming in just below the RTX 3080 and the RX 6800 XT while only costing $80 more than an RTX 3070. That also means this card is in high demand though, so you’ll want to keep a diligent watch on the following stores.

AMD: While AMD does sell graphics cards directly through its website, stock on all Big Navi cards is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s RX 6800 selection is slim, with the store only stocking the MSI and XFX models, plus a few from Gigabyte. Most are sold out right now, although one model from Gigabyte and one model from XFX have limited in-store availability depending on location.

Newegg: Newegg currently has the largest selection of RX 6800 models, with cards from Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Asrock, PowerColor and Sapphire. All of these cards are sold out right now, but you can add them to a wishlist to get email notifications for when they restock.

Amazon: Amazon is currently sold out of Radeon RX 6800 cards as well, and searching for them right now simply brings up pages from third-party sellers.

B&H: B&H now has Asus, XFX and MSI RX 6800 cards listed, but none are available.

eBay: As usual, aftermarket sellers have more availability, but the markup here is steep. RX 6800 cards are starting at $700 on eBay and going all the way into the thousands. Value is a key reason to buy this card, making these listings much less appealing.

stockX: This is another gray market site, and it currently has one RX 6800 listing up for a starting price of $1,220. That’s a more than 100% markup.

Radeon RX 6800 XT: Where to Buy 

US Radeon RX 6800 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 XT resellers at a glance: eBay | stockX 

The Radeon RX 6800 XT is AMD’s big new competitor for the RTX 3080, with our review placing it at a 92 fps average on 4K ultra settings across 9 games. That’s just 4 fps below the 3080’s average, despite the RX 6800 XT costing just $50 less. Assuming you can find it, that’s a great deal, so keep an eye out for this 20.7 teraflops, 72 CU card with clock speeds of 2,015/2,250 MHz and 16GB of VRAM at the stores below.

AMD: Like the RX 6800 and the 6900 XT, you can also buy 6800 XT stock direct from AMD, assuming you can find it. Unfortunately, AMD’s store is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy only has six RX 6800 XT units listed right now, with thee from XFX, two from Gigabyte and one from MSI. They're all sold out, except for one XFX model with limited in-store availability depending on location. 

Newegg: Newegg has the widest selection of RX 6800 XT listings, with cards from Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Asrock, XFX, PowerColor and Sapphire. Each of these listings is sold out right now, but you can add them to a wishlist to get email notifications for when they restock.

Amazon: Amazon is currently sold out of Radeon RX 6800 XT cards as well, with searches for them simply redirecting to third-party sellers.

B&H: B&H currently has five RX 6800 XT cards listed on its site. You can't buy any of them as of yet.

eBay: If you don’t mind a markup, you can turn to the gray market to get a Radeon RX 6800 XT, but prices on eBay currently start at over $1000, seriously mitigating the value this card offers.

stockX: B&H currently has four RX 6800 XT cards listed on its site, with two from XFX, one from MSI and one from Asus. You can't buy any of them as of e cost of buying new.

Hardware leaker and Twitter user @Komachi_Ensaka has spotted a very strange AMD Radeon graphics card based on the Navi 21 GPU that's equipped with just  8GB of memory, down from 16GB of memory typically installed on Navi 21-based Radeon RX 6800/6900-series boards. The product was spotted in the UserBenchmark database. Could this be a new contender for the best graphics cards, or perhaps an OEM-only card?

The card in question carries Navi 21's device ID (1002 73BF) and subsystem ID (1002 0E3A), which matches up with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU. Assuming it's not just a faulty reading, or a faked entry, it's also only equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

Rumors about AMD's intention to build a cheaper Radeon RX 6800 SKU with 8GB of memory have been floating for quite a while, but AMD has never confirmed them, perhaps because the cost of memory is not something that concerns it (and its partners among makers of graphics cards) the most. There's also the fact that AMD made a point of how it provided substantially more memory than Nvidia's competing RTX 30-series parts, and might now be forced to step back to 8GB given the various component shortages.

If AMD is indeed testing and/or mulling a release of a Navi 21-based graphics card with 8GB of memory, there are two ways how AMD could build it:

• Use a cut-down version of the Navi 21 GPU with half of the memory interfaces enabled and equip the card with four 16Gb GDDR6 memory chips. This would allow the company to make use of its Navi 21 processors with faulty memory controllers/PHYs and/or reduce the bill of materials (BOM) cost of its card. Performance of such a product will likely be rather low in high resolutions and in cases that require more than 8GB of memory.
• Use a Navi 21 GPU with all of its memory controllers/interfaces enabled, but install 8Gb GDDR6 chips. This would reduce BOM of the card, but will again lower its performance in games/scenes where 8GB of memory is needed, but memory bandwidth would remain the same.

AMD could sell either of such boards to OEMs or on select markets as a Radeon RX 6800 LE or a Radeon RX 6700 LE, depending on the level of performance. Based on the UserBenchmark results, the card in question performs worse than the RX 6800 and better than the RX 6700 XT, which makes an RX 6800 LE more likely. There's a $100 price gap between those two cards as well, not that suggested etail pricing (SEP) means much these days.

As with all such leaks and rumors, sprinkle liberally with salt. It could be a prototype, a fake, or a future product. Without sufficient supply, just about any GPU with a reasonable price would be welcomed by gamers. We asked AMD for comment, but in general the response on unannounced cards is "no comment."

AMD this week issued a teaser post in Twitter that pre-announces formal launch of the company's Radeon Pro graphics card based on the RDNA2 architecture on June 8. While the company did not officially disclose specifications of the Radeon Pro W6800, an unknown leaker disclosed a Geekbench 5 entry early on Friday June 4. As this is a leak the information should be taken with a grain of salt.

AMD's upcoming workstation-grade Radeon Pro W6800 reportedly carries AMD's Navi 21 graphics processor in its full configuration with 5120 stream processors as well as 32GB of GDDR6 memory connected to the GPU using a 256-bit bus, according to previous leaks and a Geekbench 5 database entry. So far, AMD has not offered an RDNA2-powered graphics card with 32GB of memory onboard, so this workstation-grade product will be the first one in the family to feature 32GB of GDDR6 SDRAM. 

The maximum GPU frequency was reportedly set to 2,554 MHz, though whether this was final or not is unknown. AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics board has an official Game Clock frequency of 2,250 MHz, but its actual maximum clockspeed is much higher. Typically ProViz cards are clocked lower than their gaming counterparts, but RDNA2 cards have proven very capable of high clocks.

AMD itself confirmed that the Radeon Pro W6800 graphics card supports up to six 4Kp60 monitors (or three 5Kp60 or one 8Kp60 monitors) using six mini-DisplayPort 1.4 connectors as well as AMD's Eyefinity technology, which will be another unique feature of the product. 

The board uses a blower-type cooler, which is common for workstation and datacenter cards as it ensures longevity. Speaking of datacenters, it should be noted that AMD's Big Navi GPU supports GPU virtualization (including SR-IOV), so the upcoming board could be used in datacenters to power multiple remote workstations. 

As far as OpenCL performance of the Radeon Pro W6800 is concerned, the card scores 137,230 points in Geekbench 5, which is in line with that of the Radeon RX 6800. Geekbench 5 isn't a very good benchmark since its results vary greatly, because the tests are too short for a GPU to set itself to a stable frequency.  

AMD will officially unveil its Radeon Pro W6800 32GB GDDR6 graphics card on June 8, so before that date any information about the product should be taken with a grain of salt.

AMD introduced its new Radeon RX 6000M-series laptop graphics at Computex, during a keynote by AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. The new mobile graphics lineup is made up of the top-end AMD Radeon RX 6800M, a mid-range RX 6700M and the entry level RX 6600M. For now at least, the GPUs are being paired in systems from laptop vendors with AMD's Ryzen processors for what the company calls "AMD Advantage."

These are the first laptop GPUs from AMD that use its RDNA 2 architecture, with Infinity Cache for higher memory bandwidth, low power consumption (AMD claims near 0 watts at idle) and high frequencies even when the system is running at low power. The company is claiming up to 1.5 times performance over last-gen RDNA graphics and up to 43% lower power consumption. 

The most powerful of the new bunch is the AMD Radeon RX 6800M, which will be available starting June 1 in the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition. It has 40 compute units and ray accelerators, along with a 2,300 MHz game clock, 12GB of GDDR6 memory and a 96MB cache. It will also be compatible with AMD SmartShift and Smart Access Memory. 

AMD compared the ROG Strix G15 with the RX 6800M and a Ryzen 9 5900HX to a 2019 MSI Raider GE63 with a 9th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and an RTX 2070, claiming up to 1.4 times more frames per second at 1440p max settings in Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077, 1.5 times the performance in Dirt 5 and 1.7x more frames while playing Resident Evil: Village.

In closer comparisons, to an RTX 3070 (8GB) and RTX 3080 (8GB), AMD claimed its flagship GPU was typically the top performer - within a frame or so - in several of those games, as well as Borderlands 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, though it's unclear which settings and resolutions were used for these tests.

Unlike Nvidia, AMD isn't aiming for 4K gaming. The most powerful of the cards, the RX 6800M, aims for a power target of 145W and above and is designed for 1440p. 

The middle-tier AMD Radeon RX 6700M is designed for 1440p or 1080p gaming, depending on the title. It has 36 compute units with a 2,300 MHz game clock, 10GB of GDDR6 RAM and an 80MB infinity cache, as well as the same support for SmartShift and SAM. AMD says these will ship in laptops "soon.’ It also said that the GPU will allow for 100 fps gaming at 1440p and high settings in "popular games," though didn't specify which games it was referring to. 

The RX 6600M sits at the bottom of the stack for gaming at 1080p. AMD compared it to an RTX 3060 (6GB) on 1080p max settings, and found that it led in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3 and Dirt 5. It was five frames behind in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War in AMD’s tests, and there was a one-frame difference playing Cyberpunk 2077. Like the RX 6800M, the 6600M will start shipping on June 1. 

AMD Advantage Laptops 

AMD is now referring to laptops with both AMD processors and graphics as offering the "AMD Advantage." The company says these designs should offer great performance because of power sharing between the CPU and GPU. 

AMD says its technologies can achieve up to 11% better performance in Borderlands 3, 10% in Wolfenstein Young Blood, 7% in Cyberpunk 2077 and 6% in Godfall. 

Additionally, the company says AMD Advantage laptops will only have "premium" displays — either IPS or OLED, but no VA or TN panels. They should hit or surpass 300 nits of brightness, hit 144 Hz or higher and use AMD FreeSync. 

Each laptop should come with a PCIe NVMe Gen 3 SSD, keep the WASD keys below 40 degrees Celsius while gaming and allow for ten hours of video on battery. (AMD tested this with local video, not streaming.) 

The first of these laptops is the Asus ROG Strix G15, with up to a Ryzen 9 5900HX and Radeon RX 6800M, a 15-inch display (either FHD at 300 Hz or WQHD at 165 Hz) with FreeSync Premium, liquid metal for cooling both the CPU and GPU along with a vapor chamber. It will launch in mid-June. 

The HP Omen 16 will also come with a 165 Hz display with up ao a Ryzen 9 5900Hx and AMD Radeon RX 6600M for 1080p gaming. It will launch sune on JD.com, then become available worldwide. 

In June, we should see more releases from HP, Asus, MSI and Lenovo. 

AMD launched its RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000-graphics cards in early November, so it's about time for the company to use the latest Big Navi GPU for its Radeon Pro graphics cards aimed at CAD/CAM and DCC professionals. Indeed, the first benchmark score of AMD's yet-to-be-announced Radeon Pro W6800 with 32GB of memory got published recently. 

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 32GB (1002 73A3, 1002 0E1E) scored an 'outstanding' result in UserBenchmark, hitting 146% of the average effective GPU speed. When compared to other graphics cards, 146% is between Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Super (138%) and GeForce RTX 3070 (152%). Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT scores between 152% and 171%. 

It's hard to make guesses about specifications for AMD's upcoming Radeon Pro W6800 32GB graphics card based on one benchmark score, so we'll refrain from doing so. Meanwhile, it looks like the Radeon Pro W6800 32GB will offer compute performance comparable to that of the Radeon RX 6800 XT. Still, since it will have more memory onboard, it will certainly provide higher performance in high resolutions when compared to the gaming adapter. 

Professional graphics cards tend to adopt the latest architectures a bit later than consumer boards as developers need to certify their drivers with developers of professional applications, something that takes time. The leak of a Radeon Pro W6800 benchmark result indicates that AMD is getting closer to release its RDNA2-based cards for CAD, CAM, and DCC users. 

Since the UserBenchmark is a general benchmark designed for casual users, it does not really put heavy loads on GPUs, so an 'outstanding' result for the Radeon Pro W6800 32GB is not surprising. Unfortunately, UserBenchmark gives absolutely no idea about performance of the graphics card in professional applications.

A Redditor has shared some interesting photographs of an OEM Radeon RX 6800 XT. The Big Navi graphics card reportedly hails from Dell's camp and was pulled from an Alienware gaming system.

When you first lay your eyes on Dell's Radeon RX 6800 XT, the Radeon VII might be the first thing that comes to mind. While not exactly identical, the design does remind us of the former Vega 20 graphics card. Admittedly, Dell's rendition of the Radeon RX 6800 XT isn't as extravagant as Lenovo's design, which features an even more rectangular shroud with flashy RGB illumination.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT from Dell conforms to a dual-slot design with a sturdy triple-fan cooling system. The PCB comes in an old-school green color but does feature a black backplate. Green PCBs should be cheaper than black PCBs, which could explain Dell's decision. Besides, this OEM Radeon RX 6800 XT may reside inside a case with no side panel window, so the green PCB shouldn't be a big deal. Other than the Radeon logo, the graphics card lacks any other signs of marketing.

The Redditor didn't share the specifications for this particular OEM model so we're uncertain if it sticks to AMD's reference specifications. The Navi 21-based graphics card still leverages two 8-pin PCIe power connectors so it should retain the 300W TDP rating. According to the Redditor, the graphics card's cooling solution performs well, and memory temperatures are supposedly very good.

When it comes to the display output design, Dell's version does defer from the reference specification. The graphics card offers one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, meaning Dell scrapped the USB Type-C port in favor of an extra DisplayPort 1.4 output. It's a great choice since not many consumers will have a use for the USB Type-C port. An additional DisplayPort 1.4 output, however, will allow you to connect an extra display to the graphics card.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT from the Reddit thread is an OEM model so it's unlikely you'll find it on the market unless someone extracts the graphics card to flip it on eBay. The average price on eBay for a Radeon RX 6800 XT is around $1,516, which is 133.6% higher than its $649 MSRP. It's definitely a tempting thought.

Last year, AMD finally released a family of graphics processors that can compete against Nvidia's high-end offerings in terms of performance. Unfortunately, AMD could not meet demand for new GPUs. But apparently there is light at the end of the tunnel as AMD is ramping up production.

"We introduced our Radeon 6700 XT desktop CPU with leadership 1440p gaming performance in March, and are on track for the first notebooks featuring our leading edge mobile RDNA 2 architecture to launch later this quarter," said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, during the company's latest earnings call. "We expect Radeon 6000 series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production." 

Increasing GPU supply is not a particularly easy task. AMD's manufacturing partner TSMC operates at a nearly 100% load. Furthermore, production cycle of a modern process is around three months long, so a chip AMD orders today may not be shipped until sometime this summer.

"We see good customer ordering patterns and strong backlog," said Su. "Then, we have also seen that the supply chain has been tight overall for the semiconductor industry. And we’ve been working very closely with our supply chain partners. So, we also have good visibility to additional supply as we go throughout the year."

AMD's graphics revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 increased by "a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year and sequentially" due to the success of its Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs. 

Sadly for AMD, all graphics cards today are sold at prices that are dramatically higher than their MSRPs, so increasing its sales might be a difficult task since even graphics boards meant to be inexpensive are priced unreasonably high due to demand amidst component shortages.

Apple is on track to transit most of its new PCs to system-on-chips (SoCs) with its own graphics processing units (GPUs) in the coming months, but before this happens, it appears that the company will use AMD's latest RDNA2-based high-end graphics cards with Macs. Recently Apple added support for the Radeon RX 6800/6900 graphics cards to MacOS. 

Apple lists compatibility with AMD's Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT among the MacOS Big Sur 11.4 Beta features. Meanwhile, the documents don't say which Macs now support AMD's latest graphics boards.

Being a notebook-centric PC maker, Apple offers only one PC that can accommodate a standalone graphics card, the Mac Pro. Right now, these workstations come equipped with Intel's Xeon W 'Cascade Lake' CPUs with up to 28 cores as well as AMD's Radeon Pro graphics cards based on the GCN 4.0/Polaris, GCN 5.1/Vega, and RDNA architectures. Apple uses are proprietary MPX modules with Mac Pro, and not the typical add-in-boards we're used to. The system can still house an off-the-shelf graphics card, though. 

It is unclear whether Apple plans to change its policy and begin equipping its Mac Pro with non-professional graphics cards in a standard FHHL form-factor, or if the company just added RDNA2 support to allow users to upgrade the Mac graphics subsystem to play games. After all, it is possible to equip a modern MacBook Pro notebook with a graphics card using an eGFX box with a Thunderbolt 3 interface. 

It is unlikely that Apple will equip its workstation with a graphics card that is not certified by the developers of professional applications, so RDNA2 support is likely aimed at gamers. Meanwhile, the depicted card is not necessarily a Radeon RX, but rather a yet-unannounced Radeon Pro powered by the RDNA2 architecture. 

In any case, Apple's upcoming macOS Big Sur 11.4 will support AMD's latest Radeon RX 6800/6900 graphics cards, which is good news for gamers.

AMD this week made select capabilities of its FidelityFX package available to Microsoft Xbox Series X|S developers. For Xbox Series X|S, AMD makes available FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, and ray-traced shadow Denoiser technologies, which are already supported by numerous PC games. 

AMD's FidelityFX is a collection of technologies that can greatly enhance visual quality of games or improve their performance without noticeable degradation of image quality. AMD has introduced eight FidelityFX technologies.

• Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS)
• Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO)
• Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
• Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR)
• Ray-traced shadow Denoiser
• AMD's Luminance Preserving Mapper for HDR-supporting FreeSync Premium Pro monitors
• Single Pass Downsampler (SPD)
• Parallel Sort (optimized version of the radix sort algorithm)

So far, game developers have implemented support for CAS, CACAO, and SPD on PCs, but eventually AMD expects developers to adopt more technologies from the package. One of the most anticipated FidelityFX technologies is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), a rival for Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Unfortunately, this technology is currently not supported either on PC or Xbox X|S. 

Making ingredients from the FidelityFX package available on Microsoft's latest game consoles has a lot of rationale for AMD. Firstly, the consoles come in two configurations and it is easier for developers to make sure everything works on them as they do not have to test over a dozen of different RDNA/RDNA2-based graphics cards that are used by gamers. This is barely important for those 40 games that already support CAS (as well as CACAO and SPD) on Windows PCs, but for those titles that yet have to support CAS, variable shading, and ray-traced shadow denoiser supporting them on consoles first makes quite a lot of sense. 

Secondly, at around 4.5 million consoles sold to date, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S have a larger installed base that AMD's entire RDNA2 lineup, so game developers are more inclined to use the collection of FidelityFX technologies (well, three of them at this point) for the new consoles rather than for the latest graphics cards. Of course, it would make even more sense for AMD to get its FidelityFX to the latest Xbox Series X|S and to PlayStation 5 (i.e., to over 11.5 million systems) to popularize the package, but right now the collection seems to be a more PC centric.  

Earlier AMD said that it was going to support arguably the most anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution technology available on all RDNA/RDNA2 platforms, which includes PCs running AMD's Radeon RX 5000 and Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S, and Sony's PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, the company has not disclosed when it plans to roll out its FSR.

According to a leak reported at VideoCardz, at 6am PST AMD plans to release a special black edition of its Radeon RX 6800 XT. 

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black edition graphics board is based on the Navi 21 GPU featuring 4608 stream processors, 288 texture units (TUs), and 128 render output units (ROPs) that is paired with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. As the name suggests, the Midnight Black edition is supposed to be all black, so expect it to look different from AMD's usual Radeon RX 6800 XT reference design.  

There is a catch about AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black though: it will be available only from AMD.com to members of the AMD Red Team community for a limited time and while supplies last. The product will be available starting from 6am PST/9am EST April 7, 2021. 

"Based on community feedback and popular demand, we have created a select quantity of AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black graphics cards featuring the same great performance of the widely popular AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT," a statement by AMD published by VideoCardz reads. "This is an exclusive advance notice to members of the AMD Red Team community and this offer has limited availability, while supplies last." 

At this point it is unclear whether the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black will cost $649, like other reference design RX 6800 XT boards, or will cost more since it is an exclusive product. Furthermore, it is unknown how many of such graphics cards will be made available.

Asus is apparently preparing what could be the ultimate AMD gaming laptop. According to a CPU-Z posting, the new iteration of the ROG Strix G15 will arrive with a lethal combination of AMD's Ryzen 9 5900HX (Cezanne) processor and Radeon RX 6800M graphics cards.

The unreleased laptop (via Tum_Apisak) sports the G513QY model number. Unless Asus is working on a new gaming laptop, the G513 corresponds to the brand's ROG Strix G15 G513, which was previously only available with discrete graphics options from Nvidia.

For starters, the G513QY will be based on the flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX processor. Asus already offers the ROG Strix G15 with the aforementioned processor, though. The octa-core Zen 3 chip features a 3.3 GHz base clock and a 4.6 GHz boost clock. However, the Ryzen 9 5900HX supports overclocking and a cTDP up to 54W, so there is enough wiggle room for overclocking.

In terms of discrete graphics, the G513QY will rely on the forthcoming Radeon RX 6800M, which is the mobile version of the Radeon RX 6800. AMD hasn't officially announced the mobile RDNA 2 (Big Navi) graphics cards yet, so the specifications are unknown. However, the CPU-Z submission points to the Radeon RX 6800M having up to 12GB of GDDR6 memory, only 4GB less than the desktop counterpart.

Having an AMD processor and graphics card in the same device obviously brings benefits. The fusion will enable the G513QY to leverage AMD's SmartShift technology that balances the power between the processor and graphics card according to the workload. AMD touts a performance boost of up to 14% with SmartShift enabled. The technology debuted with Dell's G5 15 SE, so it's good to see other vendors going all-in with AMD.

The Radeon RX 6800M will logically be the bell cow of the mobile RDNA 2 army. Assuming that AMD will replace every mobile RDNA 1 part with a RDNA 2equivalent, we could be seeing up to three more SKUs, such as the Radeon RX 6700M, RX 6600M and maybe even a RX 6500M. AMD hasn't given any clues when it will unleash its mobile RDNA 2 offerings so there’s nothing left to do but wait.

PowerColor has lifted the curtains on the brand's Liquid Devil Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT. The new graphics cards arrive with a full-cover EKWB designed waterblock and are ready to be integrated into your custom watercooling system.

The Liquid Devil Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT jump out of the same mold. Both offerings measure 266 x 162 x 42mm while only requiring two slots from your case. PowerColor has outfitted the RDNA 2 graphics cards with a 14+2-phase power delivery subsystem to unleash Big Navi's full potential without any compromises. 

Both of the cards come with 16GB GDDR6 of memory but their clock speeds differ, with the RX 6900 XT offering a 2,135 MHz game clock, and 2,365 MHz boost and the 6800 XT coming in at a slightly slower 2,110 MHz and 2,360 MHz respectively. Powercolor has also implemented high polymer capacitors into the card that can deal with over 400W of power. Naturally, the EKWB waterblock plays an important role in cooling the graphics cards.

The waterblock features a nickel-plated copper baseplate that effectively transfers the heat away from the GPU. It features a full-cover design that covers all the important components inside the graphics card, such as the GPU, memory and PWM. The waterblock is partially made from acrylic so it also offers some RGB flair. A matching aluminum backplate rounds out the design.

The perks of putting a graphics card under liquid cooling include performance and silence. In regards to performance, Liquid Devil models are up to 6% and 5% faster than AMD's reference specification.

Since not everyone wants to go all out on performance, PowerColor added a handy switch on the graphics card to switch between the vBIOS profiles. Both the Liquid Devil Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT come with two operational modes: Unleash for the utmost performance and OC for stable overclocked performance.

The graphics cards require three 8-pin PCIe power connectors to function correctly. PowerColor recommends a power supply that has a minimum capacity of 900W to feed these monsters. As for display outputs, both offer one HDMI 2.1 port and two DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and the USB Type-C port.

The Liquid Devil Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT will be available starting March 15, but PowerColor didn't reveal their pricing.

Lenovo (via HXL) has teased the Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT Legion Edition graphics cards on the company's Weibo account. The graphics cards are likely an exclusive for Lenovo's Savior Blade 7000P 2021 gaming PCs, though.

It's unknown if Lenovo manufactures the Legion graphics cards itself or the company relies on a third-party OEM. Aesthetically, the Radeon RX 6800 XT Legion Edition looks awfully familiar, like a dolled-up Radeon VII. The rectangular shroud makes a comeback with the characteristic "R" logo with red illumination in the corner. To give the design a new twist, Lenovo opted for a black exterior and some RGB lighting.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT Legion Edition looks a tad bigger than AMD's reference edition, however, so it should still take up three PCI slots inside your case. The triple-fan cooling setup remains untouched, but the backplate has been customized to Lenovo's Legion branding.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT Legion Edition draws power from two standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Other than that, we don't know the graphics card's other specifications.

Lenovo has given its Savior Blade 7000P gaming systems a much-needed upgrade to AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 (codename Vermeer) processors. Therefore, the Radeon RX 6800 XT Legion Edition will be able to leverage the Smart Access Memory (SAM) feature, which essentially allows the processor and graphics card to tap into each other's memory. This results in a nice boost in gaming performance.

The graphics card shortage is affecting both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, and it doesn't look like the situation will improve anytime soon. Lenovo's Savior Blade 7000P 2021 could provide consumers an option to gain access to a high-end graphics card, even if it's just in China.

MSI this week officially launched its top-of-the-range AMD-based graphics card, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio 16G, which it showcased first in late December. The board uses a custom design and comes with a massive cooling system in a bid to maximize its overclocking potential. To feed the beast, its owner will need a PSU that will deliver it up to 300W of power to the board. 

MSI's Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio lineup includes two models: the RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio 16G and the RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio 16G. Both cards use the same printed circuit board (PCB) design featuring a 16-phase voltage regulating module (VRM) as well as a massive 2.7-wide Tri Frozr 2 cooling system with six heat pipes that interconnect several aluminum heatsinks, three Torx 4.0 fans, and has a backplate. Both cards require three eight-pin power connectors and have four display outputs (three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and one HDMI 2.1 port).

The non-X version of the boards features a game core clock of 2,015 MHz and a boost clock of up to 2,250 MHz. The maxed-out X version comes with a game frequency of 2105 MHz as well as a boost clock of up to 2,340 MHz, which makes it, on paper, one of the fastest air-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card available. 

Like other MSI's Gaming series graphics cards, Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio are designed with overclocking in mind. To that end, they will need a spacious PC chassis as well as a powerful PSU to feed the product with enough juice.

MSI says that its Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio lineup will be available starting early February worldwide. Given today's situation with availability of GPUs and add-in-cards, MSI does not disclose MSRPs of its new product family as real-world prices will depend on actual supply.

AMD launched the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 on November 23, 2020. The first of the new RDNA2 architecture graphics cards had plenty to offer, ranking near the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and earning a place on our list of the best graphics cards. AMD does particularly well with games that don't support ray tracing. In such cases, there are quite a few games where the 6800 XT leads the (theoretically) more expensive RTX 3080, though enabling ray tracing or DLSS quickly turns the tables. The biggest problem, as we've seen with all of the recent GPU launches, is actually finding one in stock. Now we're looking at three third-party custom cards, from ASRock, Asus, and Sapphire, to see what they bring to the table.

The core features and RDNA2 architecture are all unchanged, so the main differences between the cards will be in clock speeds, cooler designs, and aesthetics. There are also a few third-party add-ons, in the way of software, that might sway your purchasing decision. But let's be real: Finding any of these cards in stock can be an exercise in futility, and with the recent surge in cryptocurrency mining, it could be months before supply is anywhere close to matching demand. In other words, if you want an RX 6800 XT as soon as possible, the brand and model of card will be far less of a consideration than whatever you can actually lay your grubby little mitts on.

The good news is that performance across all of the tested RX 6800 XT cards is very close. At factory stock settings, the speediest of the cards we've tested is only 2-3 percent faster than the reference RX 6800 XT. Between the three custom cards, the performance deltas are even smaller, to the point of being effectively non-existent. But that doesn't mean the cards are all equal, as the cooling designs and other elements come into play. Here's a quick overview of the specs before we get into the individual card analysis and benchmark results. 

Let's first address the elephant in the room: The pricing is either fantasy land or, in the case of actual 'street' pricing, egregious. Theoretically, the Sapphire Nitro+ initially launched at $769, but of course, it was sold out — just like every other GPU. Newegg currently lists it at $999, and it’s still out of stock. The Asus Strix LC is a similar story, with a launch price of $899 but a current Asus store price of $1,080, and it's also sold out. ASRock gave a launch price of $829, but retail prices are much higher than that, and naturally, the reference AMD RX 6800 XT can't be had for anything close to $649.

Beyond price, the only difference in specs is the TDP. Sapphire lists 350W, while Asus and ASRock don't give any value. We put in 350W with a question mark based on our testing. All three AIB cards have the same 2360 MHz Boost Clock, which they can exceed in some cases. That's where the cooling solutions come into play.

That's it for the introduction. Let's get to the individual cards, and we'll dig into the finer points of each one, including any extra features that can help it stand out. We're going to dispense with actual scores on these cards, mostly because they all feel like ghost launches. Yes, they technically went on sale, but both pricing and availability are so limited that we don't know where they'll really land. They're all more or less equal, depending on your wants and needs.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

ASRock's Taichi brand is generally used for the company’s top-of-the-line products, and the RX 6800 XT Taichi is no exception. It's big and bold, with one of the largest coolers we've seen on a third party card, plus a copious amount of bling. Meanwhile, performance is as you'd expect: right in line with the other top-tier solutions from competing cards.

The 6800 XT Taichi is a massive card, dwarfing the reference model 6800 XT and tipping the scales at 1.75kg (3.85 pounds). ASRock actually lists the weight at 1815g, but my scale disagreed by about 65g. The dimensions are 330x140x56mm, and the cooler occupies 2.8-slots, which in today's single GPU market isn't much of a problem. The Taichi is also one of the longest cards we've seen — 13 inches long — so you'll definitely need a spacious case if you want this card to fit.

For a while, most high-end GPUs tried to stay close to a 2-slot thickness so that you could add a second (or even third) card for CrossFire or SLI, but multi-GPU support in games has seriously declined in recent years, so it's now less of a consideration. The most common use case for multi-GPU these days is cryptocurrency mining, but since coin miners just build custom mining chassis with PCIe extension cables, size isn't much of a factor there either. That means manufacturers are more willing to create cards that effectively block off the two expansion slots adjacent to the GPU.

ASRock's Taichi brand is generally used for the top-of-the-line products from the company, and the RX 6800 XT Taichi is no exception. It's big and bold, with one of the largest coolers we've seen on a third party card, plus a copious amount of bling. Performance meanwhile is as you'd expect: right in line with the other top-tier solutions from competing cards.

The 6800 XT Taichi is a massive card, dwarfing the reference model 6800 XT and tipping the scales at 1.75kg (3.85 pounds). ASRock actually lists the weight at 1815g, but my scale disagreed by about 65g. The dimensions are 330x140x56mm and the cooler occupies 2.8-slots, which in today's single GPU market isn't much of a problem. The Taichi is also one of the longest cards we've seen — 13 inches long — so you'll definitely need a spacious case if you want this card to fit.

For a while, most high-end GPUs tried to stay close to a 2-slot thickness so that you could add a second (or even third) card for CrossFire or SLI, but multi-GPU support in games has seriously declined in recent years and so it's now less of a consideration. The most common use case for multi-GPU these days is cryptocurrency mining, but sice coin miners just build custom mining chassis with PCIe extension cables, size isn't much of a factor there either. That means manufacturers are more willing to create cards that effectively block off the two expansion slots adjacent to the GPU.

ASRock provides plenty of RGB lighting, with the center fan lighting up along with the top Taichi logo and the surrounding light strip, and there's another Taichi icon on the back of the card as a final RGB option. I sort of wish the company had gone whole hog and used RGB on the other two fans, but that would make for a very bright card. Also of note is that in a traditional PC case, the 'front' fans on the graphics card will often end up facing the bottom of the case. That means you won't even see the fans unless you use a case that supports a vertically mounted GPU (which would also need to be able to handle a triple slot thickness, or you'd obstruct the fan intakes).

There are some Taichi elements that haven't been updated to match the competitive landscape, and here I'm looking specifically at the fans. Most of the latest generation RTX 30-series and RX 6000-series GPUs now have fans with an integrated 'barrier rim' around the outside of the fan blades. This ring helps improve static pressure and airflow, improving cooling capabilities while potentially reducing fan noise. Meanwhile, ASRock has traditional fan blades like what we've seen for many years. It's a small thing, but we'd like to see the latest technology utilized on a premium card.

ASRock doesn't specify a TDP for the Taichi, though it does recommend a PSU wattage of 800W or more. The card also requires three 8-pin PEG power connectors, which in theory can deliver 450W of power, giving the card a peak power delivery of 525W when combined with the 75W of the x16 PCIe slot. (It didn't come close to hitting that mark, though maybe an adventurous overclocker with LN2 could do so.) In our testing, the Taichi used a bit less power than the other custom cards. It averaged 332W in Metro Exodus (still 10 percent more than the reference 6800 XT) and 352W in FurMark. Overclocking pushed power use up to 344W in Metro and 400W in FurMark. That means there's still potential for higher overclocks, but we generally seem to hit a similar limit with all of the 6800 XT cards of around 2.5GHz.

Digging into the overclocking specifics, for now, we're still somewhat restricted in what utilities we can use on RX 6000 cards, as MSI Afterburner doesn't fully support the new GPUs yet. AMD's own Radeon Software seems the best option, and we used it to increase the power limit by 15 percent, set the GPU to a maximum clock of 2580 MHz, and bumped the GDDR6 speed up by 150 MHz (to 17.2 Gbps). Combined with a more aggressive fan curve, we reached a stable OC where clocks in Metro Exodus averaged 2529 MHz, compared to 2391 MHz at factory stock settings. That's a 6 percent increase in GPU clocks and 7.5 percent on VRAM clocks, which improved performance in our test suite by 4-5 percent overall. 

ASRock offers its Tweak software for tuning, which is sufficient for modest overclocking but doesn't really do much more than AMD's own Radeon Settings. You can see the default power limits (289W, or 317W in OC mode), but that's just for the GPU power — the VRAM, VRMs, and other components will also use power. Ultimately, we didn't see much reason to install the custom ASRock Tweak software, since the core functionality is already present with AMD's drivers.

Technically, the ASRock Taichi ended up as the slowest of the three custom cards, but that's very much splitting hairs. It’s within 0.5 percent of the other two cards at stock, and it's within 1.5 percent of the faster Asus card when overclocked. Performance when overclocked is also basically tied with the stock RX 6900 XT. It's also up to 2 percent faster than the reference 6800 XT.

Frankly, performance and even pricing are sort of a non-issue for now, as none of the cards are readily available for purchase. If you want a 6800 XT and can find the Taichi in stock somewhere, and you're willing to pay $900 or more for it, be our guest. Our general advice is to wait for supply to improve and hopefully for prices to end up closer to MSRP. With the recent tariffs on graphics cards further impacting pricing, however, it could be a long and painful wait.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

Asus has traditionally stayed away from the AIO graphics card market, but that changes with the ROG Strix LC. Not only does it come with an AIO (all-in-one) liquid cooler, but it includes a relatively large 240mm radiator. Some people will love that option, but it comes at a higher price and can be cumbersome to install — for someone like me that swaps GPUs regularly, AIO cards are more trouble than they're worth.

The external radiator adds a lot of bulk to the package, with the card plus radiator weighing in at 2166g. That's about as much as the RTX 3090 Founders Edition, but the good news is the x16 motherboard slot only has to deal with a 1340g card, with the rest of the bulk secured to the PC chassis. Thanks to the large radiator, the Strix LC can also get by with a traditional 2-slot thickness and a single blower fan on the main card, and the blower doesn't really have to work that hard.

The main graphics card measures 277x131x43.6mm, but the radiator is an additional 276x120x51.7mm. Make sure your case has a good mounting location before taking the plunge. If you're also using a 240mm or larger AIO for CPU cooling, speaking from experience, you'll definitely want to verify both coolers will fit properly before buying.

The ROG Strix line is known for being Asus's top offering, and the Strix LC takes that one step further. Besides the RGB lighting on the graphics card, the two radiator fans also have RGB lighting. The above photos don't really show the RGB properly, but if you have a reasonably dark room and the radiator mounted in a case, there's plenty of RGB to go around. As with many other graphics cards, however, the RGB on the front of the card will end up facing the bottom of your PC in most builds, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Asus lists a relatively tame PSU requirement of 750W, which is technically sufficient based on our testing, but we recommend at least 850W. Actually, with most of the high-end graphics cards, you can make a legitimate argument for 1000W power supplies. PSUs often hit peak efficiency with a load of around 50 percent, and in a high-end PC build, that means the entire PC will consume close to 500W (depending on CPU and other factors) while gaming. If you do plan on using a lower wattage PSU, make sure it's a high-quality offering because the Asus card can hit power draws of over 400W when overclocked.

The big selling point with the Strix LC is, of course, the liquid cooling, and what that does for thermals. Despite having a similar power use and clock speed relative to the other two cards, thermals are far lower even with a modest fan speed. At stock, the Asus card has an excellent temperature of just 53C in FurMark, and that didn't change with our overclocked settings (though fan speeds did have to go up). Temps and fan speeds are even better when playing games, which are generally not as demanding as FurMark when it comes to power. Overall, the Asus card runs 15-20C cooler than the other two custom cards, with the same level of performance, and it delivers a bit more headroom for overclocking.

Speaking of overclocking, you can use Asus's GPU Tweak II (and GPU Tweak III) software suite in addition to the built-in Radeon Software options. By default, like many of Asus's graphics cards, the 6800 XT ROG Strix LC will run at 'gaming' clocks, and you need to install GPU Tweak II and select the OC profile to unlock the full potential. We did this for our testing, though the difference between 'gaming' and 'OC' modes is pretty minimal.

Is the Strix LC worth the price, though? Originally released with a $900 MSRP, Asus is one of several companies that has recently increased prices due to US tariffs and other factors. The Strix LC 6800 XT now shows a price of $1,080 at the Asus store, and it's still out of stock. It's hard to recommend spending that much money on a GPU that has a nominal price of $650, but then again, that nominal price is nowhere to be found. Maybe we'll eventually see RX 6800 XT cards selling at $700 or less, but for now, they're more commonly in the $1,000+ range. By the time supply improves, we might have other GPUs that represent a better overall value. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

The Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+ is perhaps the most traditional of the three custom cards we're looking at today. It's not quite as large and certainly not as heavy as the ASRock card, but the cooling still gets the job done and the card runs cool and quiet. It's actually lighter than AMD's reference card, despite being slightly larger physically. The Nitro+ measures 310x134x55.3mm, so it's a bit shorter than the ASRock card but still occupies 2.7 slots. However, it only weighs 1232g, over 500g less than the ASRock, and 350g less than the AMD reference design. (AMD's card measures 267x120x49mm and weighs 1500g, if you're wondering.)

Sapphire often has three different models of each GPU. The base model is the Pulse, the Nitro+ is a step up and offers a higher factory overclock and more RGB lighting, and sometimes a Nitro+ SE kicks things up another notch. The top GPUs may also get a Toxic variant, which boasts the highest overclocks and pulls out all the stops, often with extreme pricing. Due to the limited quantity of Navi 21 GPUs currently available, Sapphire doesn't have a Pulse 6800 XT right now, or a Toxic. Maybe those will come in the future, but currently all of Sapphire's 6800 XT cards are from the Nitro+ line.

The main difference between the Nitro+ we're looking at and the Nitro+ SE is that the SE has RGB fans. If you want extra bling, the SE might be what you're after. Our take is that Sapphire actually has a smarter RGB setup than many other GPUs, as the fans typically face the bottom of the PC case and aren't even visible. The Nitro+ has all of its lighting on the 'top' of the card (which would face the side of your PC case, right where the window would be) and also puts an RGB icon on the back of the card (which would face upward in your typical case). There's a light strip on the top along with the Sapphire logo, and while it's not quite as in-your-face as other cards, it gets the job done.

Sapphire is also the only company to specify a higher 350W TDP on its Nitro+, though all three custom cards use similar amounts of power in practice. No surprise there, since they're all rated at 2360 MHz boost clocks (and can often exceed that speed in games). Sapphire also recommends an 850W power supply. With a pair of 8-pin power connectors, plus the PCIe slot, the Nitro+ has access to 375W of power and uses nearly all of it. Overclocking does push the card beyond 375W, but the extra power comes from the 8-pin PEG rather than the x16 slot, which is good. Even overclocked, the highest PCIe slot power we measured for the Nitro+ was only 45W. Sapphire also has new fans with an integrated rim to improve static pressure, and the thermals and noise levels are very good.

One extra that Sapphire offers is its TriXX software suite, which now has a new trick that's perhaps work checking out. TriXX Boost leverages AMD's own RIS (Radeon Image Sharpening) and supports upscaling of content. In most games (specifically, games that don't detect your monitor's native resolution and then internally scale from that), TriXX Boost lets you create a custom resolution that will then get scaled to the normal native resolution, and the sharpening helps to avoid the normal blurriness.

How does it perform? At 4K, upscaling from 85 percent resolution (3264x1836) to 4K, we measured performance that was anywhere from 20 to 30 percent higher than native. Did it look worse? Using screenshots and comparing, sure, there was a slight loss in fidelity, but it’s not something you'd really notice in motion. 20-30 percent higher fps, though? Yeah, that was very noticeable. It's perhaps not as sophisticated as Nvidia's DLSS technology, but it's worth considering for relatively minor upscaling of around 10-15 percent.

Interestingly, because of TriXX Boost, Sapphire specifically discourages end-user overclocking and doesn't support it via TriXX. You can check the fans and tweak the lighting, but overclocking requires some other utility. Considering overclocking can void your warranty and cause instability in pursuit of usually 5 percent more performance, toying with resolution scaling generally delivers far more noticeable performance improvements.

Thanks to the traditional design, Sapphire officially has the lowest price of the custom cards we've looked at so far. Whether it will remain at $770, or jump to a higher price segment (we're seeing a 'suggested' price of $1000 at Newegg right now), however, isn't clear. Is the Sapphire Nitro+ 6800 XT a good value? That depends on actual prices. For now, good luck finding one in stock. In fact, supply of AMD's Big Navi chips appears to be even worse than Nvidia's Ampere GPUs, which is why the retailers are charging extra. If you can find the Sapphire Nitro+ at a more reasonable price, we have no qualms recommending it. At $1,000 or more, though, we'd suggest biding your time. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

We’ll shift away from the specific cards for the next several pages and look at gaming performance and other test results. We've tested all of the RX 6800 XT GPUs using AMD's most recent 20.12.1 drivers, and we'll include a few other GPUs as reference points in the charts. Our standard test bed hardware is listed to the right, and it includes a stock clocked (4.7 GHz all-core) Core i9-9900K processor with overclocked DDR4-3600 CL16 memory.

While our CPU reviews focus on performance with the CPUs at full stock, meaning DDR4-2666 memory on the 9900K, my take is that enthusiasts will at least enable the memory XMP profile, and DDR4-3600 kits are readily available. We looked at performance scaling with similar memory kits (all running at DDR4-3600) with Core i9-10900K and Ryzen 9 5900X, and while there are instances where the newer CPUs do better — particularly at 1080p — in general the top three current CPUs are all within spitting distance of each other.

Our testing for the RX 6800 XT cards will use our expanded test suite from recent reviews, which includes the same nine games that we've used for the past year, plus four newer releases. We've tested all of the games at 'ultra' settings (or whatever the highest preset is called — or in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, we set all of the advanced settings to the minimum option and then set the basic settings to maximum).

Only two of the games we've tested have ray tracing enabled, and one of those (Dirt 5) is an AMD-promoted game using a still-in-beta DXR patch. We didn’t enable DLSS on any of the games, though it can boost performance quite a bit, especially at 4K. We also want to note that our testing suite is decidedly slanted toward AMD right now, with half of the games as AMD-promoted titles, and two of the newer additions (Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Dirt 5) relatively strongly favoring AMD. If you want to view the larger picture of how the various GPUs stack up, we recommend looking at the full set of results, including DXR testing that we've done in other articles, including the RX 6800 XT and 6800 launch review. Since we're mostly focused on the custom 6800 XT cards here, any inherent bias in our game selection is less of a factor.

We'll start with 1080p results and then move up to 1440p and 4K on the following pages, and wrap up with power and thermal testing. We have both stock and overclocked results for the four RX 6800 XT cards in the charts as well, which generally clump together. We'll focus our commentary on the main results, with the individual gaming charts as background detail.

Given the mix of games and APIs used, it's not too surprising that the top four GPUs (RTX 3090, RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 3080) end up relatively close in performance. The overclocked 6800 XT cards end up tying the 3090 and 6900 XT, but we're also hitting CPU bottlenecks in many of the games. While you can make the argument that 1080p is still the most popular resolution, and it's also the only place where you can get 240 Hz and 360 Hz displays right now, the latter is really only beneficial for a few select esports games. Out of the 13 games we tested, only Strange Brigade (which isn't exactly a popular game) breaks 240 fps at 1080p, and five of the games don't even get above 144 fps at the settings we've used.

As far as the four 6800 XT cards go, the results are pretty close to margin of error differences. The Asus Strix LC does take first place at both stock and overclocked settings, and the AMD reference card does take fourth place, but in general, you wouldn't be able to tell the cards apart when actually playing games.

Looking at the individual games, there's a bit of variability in some instances, like The Division 2, but nothing that gives us any real indication that any of the custom cards are clearly superior. Aesthetics, availability, features, and pricing are going to be much greater factors than pure performance. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

We still feel like 1440p gaming is the sweet spot for most people. Reasonably high frame rates are possible on quite a few GPUs, high refresh rate displays with adaptive sync technology can be had for under $300, and even 144Hz IPS and VA panels are commonplace. In our 1080p testing, we noted that a lot of games couldn't break 144 fps even at the lower resolution, but G-Sync and FreeSync make that less of a concern. CPU bottlenecks also become less of a factor at the higher resolution. Which doesn't actually change the overall standings much. 

At stock settings, the three custom 6800 XT cards are within 0.2 fps of each other, emphasizing once again how little difference there is among cards with the same GPU. The reference card does fall a bit off the pace, largely because it's using less power we'd wager, though even with our overclocked settings it can't quite close the gap. Interestingly, despite having three 8-pin PEG connectors and a large cooler, the ASRock card doesn't do any better than the Sapphire card — actually, it's a bit worse. It could be the luck of the draw, or just variance between benchmark runs, but our results consistently put the ASRock a bit below the other two AIB cards.

In the larger scheme of things, the overclocked 6800 XT cards continue to basically match the reference 6900 XT. The RTX 3090 starts to pull away from the other GPUs a bit, now that CPU bottlenecks are reduced, while the 6800 XT still leads the RTX 3080. It will be interesting to see what happens if Nvidia actually does release a 20GB 3080 (or 3080 Ti) card in the future, though the pricing on such a GPU would be higher than the current 3080. Well, theoretical 3080 prices, since most cards are selling for quite a bit more than MSRP and supplies are still very limited.

There's a bit more variation in performance this time, but nothing particularly noteworthy. The Sapphire Nitro+ takes the top spot in both stock and overclocked modes in several games, but most of the results are within 1-2 percent of each other at most (among the 6800 XT custom cards).

Looking at frame rates, even at stock clocks all of the games run at well over 60 fps, often into the 100+ fps range. Only a few break 144 fps, but again, that's why G-Sync and FreeSync are useful. There's one exception, naturally: Watch Dogs Legion with ray tracing enabled is a beast to run, as are most DXR games without DLSS. The 6800 XT can only manage high-30s performance, and it's worth mentioning that the DXR reflections on AMD and Nvidia still aren't the same. Check out the extra images in the gallery below to see what we're talking about.

The above are with the latest patches in place, and we're still getting a lot of differences between AMD and Nvidia DXR (DirectX Raytracing) quality. It's only used for reflections in Watch Dogs Legion, but you can see the differences in puddles, shiny metal surfaces, and various windows. It's as though AMD has greatly reduced the range of testing for ray triangle intersections, which could improve performance but at the cost of image quality.

Whether you want or need ray tracing is debatable, but with consoles now supporting the tech, we expect to see additional DXR games. Will they also support DLSS, or AMD's upcoming FidelityFX Super Resolution? And will they be 'dumbed down' for the console GPUs? Those are good questions, and considering the RX 6800 is faster than the Xbox Series X, we suspect limited RT effects on console games will be more common than more robust implementations like we've seen in Cyberpunk 2077. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

The next-gen consoles are supposed to tackle 4K gaming, but there's 4K gaming and then there's 4K gaming. 4K via upscaling and ray tracing effects targeting 30 fps is most likely what we'll see from the PS5 and XSX. 4K native at 60 fps, even without ray tracing, is going to be more difficult, even on high-end PC hardware. 

The good news is that many games easily reach 60+ fps at 4K on the RX 6800 XT cards, along with other extreme performance GPUs. The custom AIB models all end up around 2 percent faster than the reference 6800 XT at stock, which isn't actually that great considering they also use about 10 percent more power. Overclocking pushes the cards into 370W and higher territory, again for relatively minor performance improvements.

It's important to remember the mix of games and settings used when looking at this overall chart as well. If we toss out the newer games that strongly favor one GPU brand, like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, and Watch Dogs Legion, the relative performance can shift around quite a bit. But we figure we at least capture a relatively large cross-section of the overall market with 13 games. The 3080 ends up just slightly ahead of the 6800 XT cards at stock, mostly thanks to its significant advantage in WDL. Do you need DXR to make a game fun? Absolutely not. However, it's also disingenuous to suggest that DXR doesn't matter at all; it's just going to take longer to get to the point where DXR and RT become the norm rather than an option for extreme hardware. 

Individual gaming charts at 4K mostly echo what we've seen already, just with lower frame rates. Every game outside of Watch Dogs Legion easily surpassed 60 fps at 1440p ultra, but there are a few more exceptions at 4K. Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Dirt 5 join WDL in the sub-60 group, though they're both relatively close to 60 fps on the 6800 XT. On the other hand, Watch Dogs isn't even close — it falls below 20 fps on the custom 6800 XT cards we're focusing on. Radeon gamers will definitely need to disable DXR reflections or run at a lower resolution if they want to play that game at acceptable frame rates. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

Wrapping up our performance testing, the power and thermal results are actually more interesting than the raw performance. At least there's more variation between the cards in these areas, though all three custom cards stay reasonably cool and should run fine in any PC large enough to accommodate the hardware.

For these tests, we're using Powenetics software to gather the actual power draw of the graphics cards. GPU-Z is used to collect thermal, clock speed, and fan speed data. We also have an SPL meter that we set up 15cm from the side of the cards to capture noise. However, we don't have an anechoic chamber or anything particularly fancy. External noise (e.g., from traffic) means we have to simply eyeball the meter rather than logging data and generating a chart. We test all of these metrics using Metro Exodus, set to loop five times, and FurMark running at 1600x900 in stress test mode.

Let's quickly talk about the noise levels first. Recent changes to my office mean the new setup isn't identical to the old one, but the noise floor (when traffic isn't driving by) is now 34 dB. The SPL meter is kept close to the GPUs in order to isolate the noise from the card and not pick up as much fan noise from the CPU cooler, though differences in card design can be a factor. All of the latest GPUs support 0 dB fan technology, which means idle noise levels are all the same: 34 dB. Literally any other noise, like typing or someone walking around, registers at much higher levels than that, so it's pretty quiet.

Under load, the GPUs start to show their differences. For example, the Asus has two large 120mm fans on the radiator that move quite a bit of air, while the third fan on the card itself is basically silent. Asus ended up being the loudest of the three GPUs in the gaming test, measuring 45.6 dB peak and generally hovering in the 43-45 dB range, but the actual fan noise tends to be lower and, to my ears at least, not as noticeable as smaller fans. ASRock peaked at 44.5 dB in gaming, again with a range of around 41-44 dB. Sapphire showed the most variation, running as quiet as 37 dB but peaking at 42.1 dB.

Results under FurMark are more consistent, but the cards deal with the extreme power draw in different ways. As a result, ASRock was the loudest card in FurMark, peaking at 45.6 dB and basically staying in the 45+ dB range. Asus came in second at 44.1 dB, while the Sapphire card was the quietest of the three and only ran at 39.5 dB. Again, we didn't make charts because it's just the three cards, but none of the cards are particularly loud. Pay attention to the actual GPU clocks and thermals below when looking at noise levels, however, as all of these metrics are interrelated.

As mentioned earlier, the three custom AIB cards all have higher power use than the reference 6800 XT. In the Metro test, the ASRock uses the least power at around 332W, 30W more than the reference model. The Asus card uses 341W, though it has a pump and two larger fans on the radiator that undoubtedly use more power than the three smaller fans used on the other two cards. The Sapphire card ends up with the highest power use of 344W, which is as much as some of the other cards use even when overclocked. Overclocking isn't even that bad when you consider that performance improves by 4-7 percent (in Metro), while power use increases 1-6 percent. (Except for the reference card, which used 13 percent more power.)

FurMark takes power use to even higher values, ranging from 352W for the ASRock to 358W on the Asus and Sapphire cards. Overclocking pushes the three cards into the 400W and higher range, again with Sapphire using the most power of the 6800 XT models.

At factory stock settings, all of the RX 6800 XT cards meet or exceed the official boost clock, though in-game clocks will vary by game. In Metro, the custom cards reach 2386-2394 MHz average clocks, with overclocking pushing all three cards into the 2500 MHz and higher range. FurMark is a different story, with the GPUs reigning in clocks in order to keep thermals and power use in check, but 2.1GHz while running FurMark is still quite impressive, and overclocking takes that up to around 2.25GHz. 

Temperatures have a direct correlation with fan speed and noise, so they can't be considered on their own. As noted earlier, the Asus card had the highest noise levels, and while the fan speeds are quite low, two large 120mm fans still move a lot of air and can create more noise and turbulence than three 90mm fans. Still, the Asus runs over 15C cooler than the other custom cards in Metro, and over 17C cooler in FurMark, all while hitting similar clocks. Somewhat surprisingly, the Sapphire card has lower fan speeds than the ASRock but tends to be just as loud while running a bit hotter. Still, 72-75C isn't particularly high for a high-end GPU playing a demanding game.

You can also see how the significant ramp in fan speed to help with overclocking affects things. Temperatures are actually lower than stock, but that's because overclocking puts enough of a strain on the GPU that we didn't want to risk instability in pursuit of lower noise levels. If you want low thermals with a decent overclock, the Asus liquid cooler ends up being far superior to traditional air cooling.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

The performance, features, power, and aesthetics for these RX 6800 XT cards doesn't do much good if you can't actually buy the product, unfortunately. That's where we find ourselves right now. Theoretically, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a good product, particularly if you're not as concerned about ray tracing performance. It's also theoretically slightly less expensive than the competing GeForce RTX 3080. In practice, however, it's all for naught.

As bad as the supply is on GeForce RTX 30-series cards, it might be even worse on AMD's alternatives. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how many of any of the cards are actually being shipped and sold, though, and both feel like ghost products right now. Tell someone you actually saw any of the latest GPUs in stock and they're liable to put you away. Which makes reviewing these cards a bit weird, but such is the way of the tech world right now.

The problem is that it's not just one thing causing the shortages. COVID plays a big role, and that impacted worldwide shipping as well. More people working and schooling from home, or just wanting to play games, means more demand. And in the case of the AMD RX 6800 XT, AMD uses TSMC's N7 process, which is in high demand from other companies as well. In the latest TSMC news, you can see that TSMC only does about 55-60 thousand wafers per month. How many of those go to Apple and Nvidia, and how many are for AMD? And of the AMD wafers, there will be Zen 3 CPUs, PS5 and XSX console APUs, and RDNA2 GPUs.

Suppose AMD gets one-third of TSMC's N7 production. That's perhaps 20K wafers. However, the PS5 and XSX consoles probably use up 75 percent of the allotment, meaning only 5K wafers for GPUs and CPUs. And right now, the Zen 3 CPUs are more lucrative (smaller chips means more per wafer, and higher profit margins). It's entirely possible that AMD is only doing a few thousand (or less) Navi 21 wafers per month. With a 520mm square die size, that's at best around 100 GPUs per wafer. Even that might be optimistic, as based on what we've seen it seems like less than 100K RX 6800 XT cards exist. Or maybe demand is simply so much higher than the supply that even with hundreds of thousands of cards, it wouldn't be enough.

If you want an RX 6800 XT and can find one of these cards in stock at a price you're willing to pay, have at it. The same applies to most of the other recent GPU launches. What everyone really wants to know is when these cards will be readily available at anything close to the launch price of $650-$700. Sadly, we don't know. Maybe in a few months, but we heard multiple companies at CES 2021 suggest that graphics card shortages are likely to continue until June at least. And if Bitcoin and Ethereum prices stay high, that would only make the situation worse, plus tariffs are also impacting prices in the United States.

It's annoying, and that's putting it nicely. In July, I wrote that it was a terrible time to buy a graphics card and updated that article after the new cards launched and immediately sold out. In retrospect, if you bought a previous-gen RTX 20-series or RX 5700-series GPU at MSRP or below right before the new cards launched, that was a smart buy. An even better buy would have been purchasing an RTX 20-series card back in 2018 because you'd then have over two years of enjoyment from it, and you could probably still sell it at close to the original price.

The winner of the current GPU battle will be whichever company can produce the most GPUs first and ship them at reasonable prices, with features, performance, and all the other aspects being secondary concerns. If we take the RX 5700 XT and the RTX 2060 Super as $400 graphics cards for our baseline, the RX 6800 XT is around 75 percent faster than the 5700 XT and 90 percent faster than the 2060 Super. That means we could reasonably accept prices of $700-$800. Anything more than that and we recommend waiting and searching for a better deal.

We know for certain that, just as the 2017 GPU shortages eventually came to an end, the current shortages will also pass into history at some point. Hopefully, that happens sooner rather than later.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

Unlike many of its peers, MSI didn't give an early glimpse of its custom-designed AMD Radeon RX 6800/6900-series graphics cards well ahead of release, instead only showcasing its reference boards. That doesn't mean the company had no plans to release appropriate products, though. In fact, MSI is prepping a range of its Gaming series Big Navi-powered solutions with quite an impressive design. There's a catch, though: due to the short supply of AMD's Navi 21 GPUs, MSI will only offer custom Gaming series cards for now.

Hours before Christmas eve, MSI finally showcased its custom Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT Gaming X Trio graphics cards on its YouTube channel (via VideoCardz). The company didn't demonstrate its top-of-the-range AMD offering, the MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio, but implied the card is still in the works. That's not particularly surprising because all Navi 21-based graphics cards can use very similar printed circuit board (PCB) designs, making it easy to develop a product family.

MSI's Radeon RX 6800-series Gaming X Trio graphics cards use an extremely oversized PCB design featuring a 16-phase VRM and two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors. Given the 16-phase VRM, MSI's Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT graphics boards are long and tall, which is why they will require a spacious chassis. 

MSI's representative said the company hadn't finalized the PCB design for the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio. Still, considering that it is showcasing an image of a Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio board with three power connectors on its website, we can make some assumptions about where MSI is going with its AMD-based flagship. 

In a bid to maximize the performance of its custom Big Navi graphics cards, MSI naturally equipped them with rather massive 2.7-wide cooling systems. The coolers comprise several aluminum heatsinks 'interconnected' using six copper heat pipes that directly contact the GPU. Traditionally for Big Navi-based products, MSI's Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT Gaming X Trio graphics cards feature three fans, some of which will stop under light loads. Obviously, there is a backplate and a special holder that prevents the card from bending.

As far as display outputs are concerned, MSI equipped the boards with three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and one HDMI 2.1 port.  

Like other CPU makers these days, MSI didn't announce MSRPs for its products, as actual pricing will depend on supply and demand. There's another thing to point out, too: If MSI does not begin volume production of its Gaming X Trio-series Radeon RX 6000-series products in January for whatever reason (e.g., not enough GPUs or other components), it will not begin until after the Chinese New Year, which is on February 12. As a result, the new boards might not arrive until March, over two months from now.         

Asus enabled the Resizable BAR feature on its Z490 motherboards not so long ago, and Japanese media outlet ASCII has already published some encouraging results that will make any Intel owner smile.

Resizable BAR (Base Address Register), which can boost throughput between a CPU and a GPU to improve performance, isn't some type of alien technology from another universe. In fact, the feature has been part of the PCIe specification since Revision 2.0. Still, it has gone under everyone's radar until AMD brought it up in the mold of the chipmaker's Smart Access Memory (SAM), with the caveat that it would only work if you paired a Radeon 6000 series GPU with a Ryzen 5000 CPU and X570 motherboard. The Red Team certainly spearheaded the adoption of Resizable BAR, and now Intel and Nvidia are working to bring the technology to their corresponding products.

ASCII's testbed included a Core i9-10900K (Comet Lake-S) processor, Asus ROG Maximus XII Extreme on the latest 1002 firmware, and a Radeon RX 6800 XT (Big Navi) graphics card. Enabling the Resizable BAR feature was easy and only required enabling the "Above 4G Decoding" and "Re-Size BAR Support" options in the motherboard's BIOS. ASCII performed its tests across four modern titles: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Forza Horizon 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. The publication used the highest image quality for each game at a 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Resizable Bar On Intel Z490 Benchmarks

On Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Resizable BAR improved the minimum and average frame rates by 12.8% and 14.2%, respectively. In Forza Horizon 4, we're looking at 20.3% higher minimum and 19.4% average frame rates at 1920 x 1080, and 17% better minimum and 15.9% average frame rates at 2560 x 1440.

As for Red Dead Redemption 2, activating Resizable Bar netted improved minimum and average frame rates up to 181.6% and 7.8%, respectively. The explanation behind the massive improvement in minimum frame rates is that the game's benchmark tends to suffer from dips during the run. However, Resizable Bar seems to resolve that issue, which explains the improved values.

The overall takeaway from ASCII's testing is that Resizable BAR has a significant impact on gaming performance in titles that support the feature. As noted, not every game engine benefits from Resizable BAR. For example, Resizable BAR has a negligible effect on average frame rates in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, although it did improve minimum frame rates by 11.8%.

In the midst of all the impressive numbers, we have to bear in mind that the 1002 firmware from Asus is currently in the beta stage, and the performance uplift with Resizable BAR enabled is evidently visible. It'll be very interesting to see whether the final firmware improves performance even further.

It's no secret that availability of the best graphics cards has been dismal. New cards from both AMD and Nvidia have been nearly impossible to find. European tech retailer Proshop has been sharing its stock numbers since Nvidia's 30-series cards launched. It recently shared new figures showing availability for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT still isn't looking good. 

Of course, this is just the supply of a single vendor. However, it does give us a good perspective on the GPU shortage and what suppliers are dealing with.

The amount of stock Proshop has received of the RX 6800/RX 6800 XT is hilariously small -- so much so it  almost makes Nvidia's Ampere shortage look good. Proshop has only received 100 RX 6800 cards, and they're all from Powercolor. It's also expecting eight Asus RX 6800 TUF OCs and five Asus RX 6800 Strix OCs. That's a measly 113 cards, compared to the 2,213 cards the Proshop reportedly ordered from all the AIB partners.

RX 6800 XT stock for Proshop is even worse. The retailer only received 25 PowerColor RX 6800XT cards. Regarding the aftermarket models, just six Asus RX 6800XT Strix LC OC and three Asus RX 6800XT TUF OC cards are incoming. That equates to 34 RX 6800 XTs. The retailer ordered 1,909.

Meanwhile, Proshop has updated its stock on Nvidia 30-series supply as well. While not great, it's vastly superior to that of AMD's stock currently.

This is really unfortunate for buyers. AMD hinted several times that it was going to "learn from Nvidia's mistakes" and have more volume than the competition. But it's clear that stock issues remain. Hopefully, AMD will fulfill its promise to fix its supply shortages by the end of December, but our hopes aren't high.

AMD's RDNA2 architecture has been full of surprises, especially in its ability to hit astronomically high core frequencies compared to the Nvidia competition. But, it appears we haven't seen the best of what RDNA 2 can offer. Patrick from Twitter has tweeted that the RX 6900 XT can hit 3 GHz (if cooling isn't a bottleneck) before running into artificial limiters. Similarly, IgorsLAB shared specifications in BIOS for the yet unannounced RX 6700 XT, showcasing its official limit of 2950Mhz on the core clock.

Note that these numbers are highly theoretical and way above what these GPUs do at stock settings. Both the Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT have rated boost clocks of 2,250 MHz. So, unless you're using liquid nitrogen or other crazy cooling methods, it's unlikely that you would hit or be able to exceed the reported 2.8-GHz limit on the 6800 XT, 3-GHz limit on the 6900 XT and 2.95-GHz limit on the 6700 XT.

It makes sense that the RX 6900 XT would have the highest frequency limit, as it is the highest tiered GPU in AMD's lineup and presumably has the best silicon as well. But what's really interesting is that the RX 6700 XT is alleged to have a maximum clock of 2950 MHz while the the RX 6800 XT maxes out at 2.8 GHz. This indicates that the 6700 XT could be great for overclocking.

IgorsLAB dug into the RX 6700 XT's BIOS a bit more and discovered that the board partner BIOSes (AIB partners unknown) feature much higher power limits and higher core voltage than the reference RX 6800. BIOS 1 (which Igor thinks is for the reference spec) is targeted at around 186W for TGP (total graphics power). For the 2nd BIOS (Igor thinks is for a high trim model) that TGP goes up to 211W. And core voltages for the RX 6700 XT are supposedly higher than the RX 6800, whose reference spec allows just 203W for TGP.

If this is true, and the RX 6700 XT cards ship around these specifications, we could see the highest factory overclocked RDNA2 chips on the market. The 40 CUs on the RX 6700 XT would potentially be fed with more juice, allowing higher frequencies on air, and only having 40 CUs means it's much easier to cool vs. 60 CUs like on the RX 6800.

After the huge fail that was the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT launch just a week ago, Hardware Unboxed reports that AMD has assured them that its partner cards for the RX 6800XT will ship in the next four to eight weeks, and even better, all of them should sell at their associated MSRPs.

This is potentially good news for RX 6800XT buyers. The RDNA2 launch for both the RX 6800XT and RX 6800 was an absolute disaster, and worse than the Nvidia RTX 3080 launch because it appears there were even fewer RX 6000-series cards available on day one than Nvidia's Ampere. 

It's good to see that AMD will step up to try to get the situation under control, but the proof will be in the shipping units. It's best to take AMD's word with a grain of salt. Demand for the latest generation of graphics cards has been absolutely enormous, and prices have been super inflated by the pandemic, making any new GPU purchase impossible for most buyers.

Even if AMD and its AIB partners deliver, there's still a huge chance all the stock will be eaten alive by remaining customers who haven't had a chance to purchase a new GPU. 

Hopefully everything goes to plan, and you all can grab a shiny new RX 6800 XT by late December 2020 or January of next year.

If you have no choice but to buy a new graphics card right now, be sure to check out our Best Cyber Monday Graphics Card Deals to see what remaining graphics cards are still good for your money. The selection is slim and doesn't include any newer models, but that's the unfortunate state of the industry right now. 

An RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3080 20GB graphics card might be on the horizon. Hkepc has reported that a RTX 3080 Ti might be in the works for Nvidia, with reportedly a GA102-250-KD-A1 GPU core and a 320-bit memory bus with 20GB of GDDR6X. All with a potential release of January 2021 at $999.99. 

We also learned today that MSI has copyrighted "GeForce RTX 3080 20GB" badging for several of its graphics card lineups, indicating Nvidia might also be working on a high capacity VRAM variant of the RTX 3080, which is currently one of the best graphics cards. 

However, it's possible that MSI copyrighted this name just in case Nvidia makes an RTX 3080 20GB.

So it seems that Nvidia may be working on both an RTX 3080 Ti and a RTX 3080 20GB, or just a RTX 3080 Ti. We won't know unless the vendor makes an official announcement.

Would an RTX 3080 20GB make sense from Nvidia's perspective? Sort of. A 20GB RTX 3080 would expand the card's longevity, particularly if you plan on gaming at high resolutions and playing the latest AAA titles.

A 20GB RTX 3080 would also serve as a good content creation GPU, where VRAM capacity is just as important as GPU horsepower. 

One problem, though is cost. GDDR6X is already more expensive than GDDR6, and with 20GB of it, the 3080 20GB would for likely cost much more than an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and too close to any RTX 3080 Ti.

On the other hand, n RTX 3080 Ti at $999.99 with the same fully unlocked GA102 core as the RTX 3090 could be appealing. If Hkepc is correct about the 3080 Ti's specs, it'd be a real competitor to the RX 6900 XT. The 3080 Ti will reportedly have more VRAM, RT accelerated cores, tensor cores and Nvidia's NVENC ASIC for capturing high-quality gameplay with near-zero performance loss, which the 6900 XT lacks. However, based on the unconfirmed Nvidia specs, the RX 6900 XT may have the upper-hand in power efficiency. 

Yesterday marks the day that the custom AIB RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT cards were  revealed (our unboxing of the Sapphire RX 6800XT Nitro+ here), and Gigabyte is joining the fray with its own Aorus Master series alongside the more mainstream Gaming OC line. 

Of course, the star of the show today is the Aorus Master RX 6800 XT, which comes packing a massive triple-slot, triple-fan cooler and is absolutely smothered with RGB. The cooler comes with a backplate, and most notably, a small LCD screen on the side of the GPU for displaying GIFs, custom images, texts, or monitoring the GPU temperature.

The RX 6800 Aorus Master comes with the same design philosophy, with both cards also featuring elaborate VRM circuitry fed by a pair of 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Default, both cards come with three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1 port, but the RX 6800XT Aorus Master also comes in a variant that swaps one of the DisplayPort outputs for a Type-C jack.

Normally, the Aorus Master line features Gigabyte's highest-clocked GPUs, but at this time, the company hasn't revealed clock speeds yet. 

Don't Need the Bling? Go Gaming OC

If the extravagant designs of the Aorus Master line doesn't appeal to you, or you just don't want to spend top dollar on a card, Gigabyte also has the more approachable Gaming OC line of cards. These skip the majority of the RGB, lighting up only the Gigabyte logo and a line underneath on the side of the card. They do still come with great board designs, dual-bios, and triple-fan coolers, so they should still be a solid improvement over the reference cards without driving the price up too much.

Clock speeds for the RX 6800 Gaming OC are rated to boost up to 2155 MHz (reference is 2105 MHz), with typical game clocks at 1925 MHz over the reference 1815 MHz. The RX 6800 XT Gaming OC model bumps those figures up to 2285 MHz boost (reference 2250 MHz) and the game clock up to 2045 MHz, where reference sits at 2015 MHz.

All of these cards should offer excellent 1440p and 4K performance, competing with the Best Graphics cards. 

No word on pricing or availability, but at this time, we wouldn't get your hopes up for any great deals.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 (Big Navi) are two of the best graphics cards that money can buy right now and rank at the top of our GPU benchmarks. However, the custom models are where the real performance is really at. AMD's partners have launched their personalized iterations today, which are available for purchase at different retailers around the country.

It goes without saying that there is a vast offering of Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 graphics cards on the market now. We've put together a roundup of models whose specifications are available, for those of you who want to know which vendor offers the fastest graphics cards. The graphics cards are ranked them according to their rated clock speeds without taking into consideration their aesthetics, cooling solution or pricing.

It is undoubtedly difficult to find these cards in stock. For your best chance, see our article on how and where to buy a Radeon RX 6800 XT or RX 6800.

Fastest Radeon RX 6800 XT On The Market

The top Radeon RX 6800 XT models come with a 2,110 MHz game clock and 2,350 MHz boost clock. The ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X, Asus Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming, Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT SE and Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT stand out from the crowd.

At $769.99, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is the least expensive one out of the four. The special edition of Sapphire's model retails for $829.99, while the ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X and Asus Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming cost $829.99 and $899.99, respectively.

Fastest Radeon RX 6800 On The Market

With the Radeon RX 6800, the list of speediest models jumps up to seven, which is good since consumers have more options to choose from. The candidates share the same clock speeds, promising a 1,980 MHz game clock and 2,190 MHz boost clock.

Admittedly, retailers haven't listed the majority of the custom Radeon RX 6800 models. Out of the list of seven models, the ASRock Radeon RX 6800 Phantom Gaming D and the Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6800 seem to be the most affordable at $679.99.

If you had hopes of getting a shiny new RDNA 2 graphics card from AMD this upcoming Black Friday, you'll likely be very disappointed. Even though AMD's launch for third-party custom Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards officially occurred today, every single tech store has sold out its entire stock in both aftermarket and reference flavors. That isn't surprising, as some retailers didn't even have stock to begin with. 

Both graphics card manufacturers and some stores have gone to Twitter to share the problems with the RX 6000 series volume. Simply put, just like the Ampere shortages, AMD and its partners are unable to manufacturer enough graphics cards to meet demand.

Most of the recent product launches have been plagued by bots, but that doesn't seem to be the cause of the shortage this time around. In fact, Microcenter says it had zero cards for the launch today. 

If stores order, say, 50,000 units, they are lucky to get a few hundred on shelves in time for the holiday season. Suffice it to say, we probably won't see major volume for the Radeon series until 2021, much like Nvidia said about its own cards.

So what should you do as a gamer? Right now is perhaps one of the worst times to build a system, so if you're a DIYer we would highly recommend you wait until next year to build a new workstation/gaming machine when stock goes back to normal and prices are not over-inflated. 

But, if you're a gamer and desperate to grab anything to get your game on, check out our Black Friday deal guides here, which can help you get together a gaming machine. If you don't mind going with entry-level graphics like an RX 5500 XT, those are still a solid option for a "gaming-capable PC."

It really is a terrible time to build a gaming computer, especially if you were considering purchasing an RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT. If you really need something to game on now, be prepared to make some sacrifices.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 officially launched one week ago, joining the best graphics cards and GPU benchmarks hierarchy lists. Today marks the arrival of third-party add-in board (AIB) partner cards. Sort of. Much like Nvidia's RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070, as well as AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, all of the RX 6800 series cards are sold out. But we received Sapphire's Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ just yesterday, and we're working on running it through our test suite for a full review. Until then, here's the quick unboxing and look at what Sapphire has to offer.

The card itself is quite large, basically matching the longest cards we normally see. It measures 310 x 134.3 x 55.3 mm (12.2 x 5.3 x 2.17 inches), so you'll need plenty of clearance in your case. It's a 2.7-slot design as well, blocking the two adjacent expansion slots on your motherboard.    

What's interesting is that the card actually isn't all that heavy, relatively speaking. It checks in at 1237g, which is less than AMD's reference card, as well as the RTX 3080 Founders Edition.

Sapphire changes up plenty of other aspects of the card design as well. It has three DisplayPort and one HDMI 2.1 outputs, with no USB-C connector. Most people will be happier with this configuration, we think, though it's always good to have other options. The rear IO panel also has plenty of ventilation ports, though with the fins on the heatsink running parallel to the IO bracket, we're not sure how much heat will actually exhaust out the back of the card.

Sapphire says the new design ends up running quieter while delivering better cooling compared to its previous designs. That's probably thanks once again to the new fan design with an integrated rim, though there are notches in the Sapphire fan. The benefit of the improved cooling is that Sapphire can increase the boost clock on the RX 6800 XT to 2360 MHz, with a 350W TBP (Total Board Power). Interestingly, MSI Afterburner and Asus GPU Tweak II both report the boost clock as 2409 MHz on our sample, but then neither utility has been updated for the RX 6800 series.

Compared to the reference 6800 XT, you can easily see how much larger the Sapphire card is. The reference card measures 268 x 107 x 50 mm, so Sapphire's model is about 4cm longer and 2.5cm taller, and just a bit thicker. The reference card also weighs 1505g, so the Nitro+ is 268g lighter. That means less stress on your PCIe slot, though we've seen GPUs in the 1.5kg range for several years at least (e.g., Zotac's Amp! Extreme line).

But you're probably most interested in how the card performs. Unfortunately, that's several days worth of testing, which means we won't have a full review until next week. Until then, we can offer this glimpse of performance courtesy of 3DMark.

That's a bit faster than the reference 6800 XT, as you'd expect considering the difference in TDP and boost clocks. For example, in Port Royal, the reference card scored 9106 in graphics, while the Nitro+ got 9329. But the GPU clocks are more interesting than the score.

The minimum GPU clock during the test sequence on the Sapphire card was 2287 MHz, with a peak clock of 2415 MHz. The reference card ran at 2210-2349 MHz. In general, at 'factory stock' settings, you'll get an extra 100 MHz or so of performance. We'll be looking to see if we can push the card a bit further in our full review.

Of course, the big story remains the continuing GPU shortages. Many were hoping AMD would do better than Nvidia, but it sounds like stock of the AIB partner cards is even worse than we saw with Ampere. As we noted in our RX 6800 XT review, that's not really surprising. Given a choice between producing more Ryzen 5000 CPU cores (80mm square per compute die) and more Navi 21 GPU cores (519mm square), AMD makes far more money off the CPUs and can produce more of them. Unless TSMC can start producing more wafers for all of its partners, the shortages could continue for many more months.

Following PowerColor's official announcement of the Red Devil Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, VideoCardz has shared renders of what we can expect from the vendor's Red Dragon series.

In regards to hierarchy, PowerColor's Red Dragon-branded graphics cards are a notch below the Red Devil. Therefore, the offerings typically come with a more modest design and a factory overclock. As the renders show, the Red Dragon Radeon RX 6800 XT features less flamboyant aesthetics. There are zero traces of RGB lighting on the shroud, which will surely appease consumers that loathe having a Christmas tree inside their PCs.

Given Big Navi's considerable power requirements, the Red Dragon series will still lean on a triple-fan cooling solution to remain cool. The small cooling fan in the center is in the company of two larger cooling fans - one on each side. 

For the moment, the Red Dragon Radeon RX 6800 XT's dimensions are unknown, but it looks just as long as the Red Devil iteration. While the latter occupies up to three PCI slots, the Red Dragon seems to adhere to a 2.5-slot design. The difference in thickness owes to the fact that the Red Dragon doesn't come with an aggressive factory overclock compared to the Red Devil, and therefore, it can get away with a smaller cooler.

The Red Dragon Radeon RX 6800 XT also appears to come with a metal backplate and a dual-BIOS switch. In addition to the PCIe slot, the graphics card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

The display outputs on the Red Dragon Radeon RX 6800 XT differ from AMD's reference design and the Red Devil. The latter two provide one HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, and a single USB Type-C port. On the Red Dragon, PowerColor decided to dispose of the USB Type-C port in favor of another DisplayPort 1.4 output, bringing the total to three.

AMD's partners have the green light to launch their custom models tomorrow, so we'll likely see both the Red Devil and Red Dragon invade the hardware shelves. We can only hope that the supply is better than the disappointment with the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 reference edition.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 have arrived, joining the ranks of the best graphics cards and making some headway into the top positions in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Nvidia has had a virtual stranglehold on the GPU market for cards priced $500 or more, going back to at least the GTX 700-series in 2013. That's left AMD to mostly compete in the high-end, mid-range, and budget GPU markets. "No longer!" says Team Red. 

Big Navi, aka Navi 21, aka RDNA2, has arrived, bringing some impressive performance gains. AMD also finally joins the ray tracing fray, both with its PC desktop graphics cards and the next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. How do AMD's latest GPUs stack up to the competition, and could this be AMD's GPU equivalent of the Ryzen debut of 2017? That's what we're here to find out.

We've previously discussed many aspects of today's launch, including details of the RDNA2 architecture, the GPU specifications, features, and more. Now, it's time to take all the theoretical aspects and lay some rubber on the track. If you want to know more about the finer details of RDNA2, we'll cover that as well. If you're just here for the benchmarks, skip down a few screens because, hell yeah, do we have some benchmarks. We've got our standard testbed using an 'ancient' Core i9-9900K CPU, but we wanted something a bit more for the fastest graphics cards on the planet. We've added more benchmarks on both Core i9-10900K and Ryzen 9 5900X. With the arrival of Ryzen 5000, running AMD GPUs with AMD CPUs finally means no compromises.

Update: We've added additional results to the CPU scaling charts. This review was originally published on November 18, 2020, but we'll continue to update related details as needed.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series: Specifications and Architecture 

Let's start with a quick look at the specifications, which have been mostly known for at least a month. We've also included the previous generation RX 5700 XT as a reference point. 

When AMD fans started talking about "Big Navi" as far back as last year, this is pretty much what they hoped to see. AMD has just about doubled down on every important aspect of its architecture, plus adding in a huge amount of L3 cache and Ray Accelerators to handle ray tracing ray/triangle intersection calculations. Clock speeds are also higher, and — spoiler alert! — the 6800 series cards actually exceed the Game Clock and can even go past the Boost Clock in some cases. Memory capacity has doubled, ROPs have doubled, TFLOPS has more than doubled, and the die size is also more than double.

Support for ray tracing is probably the most visible new feature, but RDNA2 also supports Variable Rate Shading (VRS), mesh shaders, and everything else that's part of the DirectX 12 Ultimate spec. There are other tweaks to the architecture, like support for 8K AV1 decode and 8K HEVC encode. But a lot of the underlying changes don't show up as an easily digestible number.

For example, AMD says it reworked much of the architecture to focus on a high speed design. That's where the greater than 2GHz clocks come from, but those aren't just fantasy numbers. Playing around with overclocking a bit — and the software to do this is still missing, so we had to stick with AMD's built-in overclocking tools — we actually hit clocks of over 2.5GHz. Yeah. I saw the supposed leaks before the launch claiming 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz and thought, "There's no way." I was wrong.

AMD's cache hierarchy is arguably one of the biggest changes. Besides a shared 1MB L1 cache for each cluster of 20 dual-CUs, there's a 4MB L2 cache and a whopping 128MB L3 cache that AMD calls the Infinity Cache. It also ties into the Infinity Fabric, but fundamentally, it helps optimize memory access latency and improve the effective bandwidth. Thanks to the 128MB cache, the framebuffer mostly ends up being cached, which drastically cuts down memory access. AMD says the effective bandwidth of the GDDR6 memory ends up being 119 percent higher than what the raw bandwidth would suggest.

The large cache also helps to reduce power consumption, which all ties into AMD's targeted 50 percent performance per Watt improvements. This doesn't mean power requirements stayed the same — RX 6800 has a slightly higher TBP (Total Board Power) than the RX 5700 XT, and the 6800 XT and upcoming 6900 XT are back at 300W (like the Vega 64). However, AMD still comes in at a lower power level than Nvidia's competing GPUs, which is a bit of a change of pace from previous generation architectures.

It's not entirely clear how AMD's Ray Accelerators stack up against Nvidia's RT cores. Much like Nvidia, AMD is putting one Ray Accelerator into each CU. (It seems we're missing an acronym. Should we call the ray accelerators RA? The sun god, casting down rays! Sorry, been up all night, getting a bit loopy here...) The thing is, Nvidia is on its second-gen RT cores that are supposed to be around 1.7X as fast as its first-gen RT cores. AMD's Ray Accelerators are supposedly 10 times as fast as doing the RT calculations via shader hardware, which is similar to what Nvidia said with its Turing RT cores. In practice, it looks as though Nvidia will maintain a lead in ray tracing performance.

That doesn't even get into the whole DLSS and Tensor core discussion. AMD's RDNA2 chips can do FP16 via shaders, but they're still a far cry from the computational throughput of Tensor cores. That may or may not matter, as perhaps the FP16 throughput is enough for real-time inference to do something akin to DLSS. AMD has talked about FidelityFX Super Resolution, which it's working on with Microsoft, but it's not available yet, and of course, no games are shipping with it yet either. Meanwhile, DLSS is in a couple of dozen games now, and it's also in Unreal Engine, which means uptake of DLSS could explode over the coming year.

Anyway, that's enough of the architectural talk for now. Let's meet the actual cards.

Meet the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 Reference Cards 

We've already posted an unboxing of the RX 6800 cards, which you can see in the above video. The design is pretty traditional, building on previous cards like the Radeon VII. There's no blower this round, which is probably for the best if you're worried about noise levels. Otherwise, you get a similar industrial design and aesthetic with both the reference 6800 and 6800 XT. The only real change is that the 6800 XT has a fatter heatsink and weighs 115g more, which helps it cope with the higher TBP.

Both cards are triple fan designs, using custom 77mm fans that have an integrated rim. We saw the same style of fan on many of the RTX 30-series GPUs, and it looks like the engineers have discovered a better way to direct airflow. Both cards have a Radeon logo that lights up in red, but it looks like the 6800 XT might have an RGB logo — it's not exposed in software yet, but maybe that will come.

Otherwise, you get dual 8-pin PEG power connections, which might seem a bit overkill on the 6800 — it's a 250W card, after all, why should it need the potential for up to 375W of power? But we'll get into the power stuff later. If you're into collecting hardware boxes, the 6800 XT box is also larger and a bit nicer, but there's no real benefit otherwise.

The one potential concern with AMD's reference design is the video ports. There are two DisplayPort outputs, a single HDMI 2.1 connector, and a USB Type-C port. It's possible to use four displays with the cards, but the most popular gaming displays still use DisplayPort, and very few options exist for the Type-C connector. There also aren't any HDMI 2.1 monitors that I'm aware of, unless you want to use a TV for your monitor. But those will eventually come. Anyway, if you want a different port selection, keep an eye on the third party cards, as I'm sure they'll cover other configurations.

And now, on to the benchmarks.

Radeon RX 6800 Series Test Systems 

It seems AMD is having a microprocessor renaissance of sorts right now. First, it has Zen 3 coming out and basically demolishing Intel in every meaningful way in the CPU realm. Sure, Intel can compete on a per-core basis … but only up to 10-core chips without moving into HEDT territory. The new RX 6800 cards might just be the equivalent of AMD's Ryzen CPU launch. This time, AMD isn't making any apologies. It intends to go up against Nvidia's best. And of course, if we're going to test the best GPUs, maybe we ought to look at the best CPUs as well?

For this launch, we have three test systems. First is our old and reliable Core i9-9900K setup, which we still use as the baseline and for power testing. We're adding both AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Intel Core i9-10900K builds to flesh things out. In retrospect, trying to do two new testbeds may have been a bit too ambitious, as we have to test each GPU on each testbed. We had to cut a bunch of previous-gen cards from our testing, and the hardware varies a bit among the PCs.

For the AMD build, we've got an MSI X570 Godlike motherboard, which is one of only a handful that supports AMD's new Smart Memory Access technology. Patriot supplied us with two kits of single bank DDR4-4000 memory, which means we have 4x8GB instead of our normal 2x16GB configuration. We also have the Patriot Viper VP4100 2TB SSD holding all of our games. Remember when 1TB used to feel like a huge amount of SSD storage? And then Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) happened, sucking down over 200GB. Which is why we need 2TB drives.

Meanwhile, the Intel LGA1200 PC has an Asus Maximum XII Extreme motherboard, 2x16GB DDR4-3600 HyperX memory, and a 2TB XPG SX8200 Pro SSD. (I'm not sure if it's the old 'fast' version or the revised 'slow' variant, but it shouldn't matter for these GPU tests.) Full specs are in the table below.

Anyway, the slightly slower RAM might be a bit of a handicap on the Intel PCs, but this isn't a CPU review — we just wanted to use the two fastest CPUs, and time constraints and lack of duplicate hardware prevented us from going full apples-to-apples. The internal comparisons among GPUs on each testbed will still be consistent. Frankly, there's not a huge difference between the CPUs when it comes to gaming performance, especially at 1440p and 4K.

Besides the testbeds, I've also got a bunch of additional gaming tests. First is the suite of nine games we've used on recent GPU reviews like the RTX 30-series launch. We've done some 'bonus' tests on each of the Founders Edition reviews, but we're shifting gears this round. We're adding four new/recent games that will be tested on each of the CPU testbeds: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Watch Dogs Legion — and we've enabled DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on Dirt 5 and Watch Dogs Legion.

There are some definite caveats, however. First, the beta DXR support in Dirt 5 doesn't look all that different from the regular mode, and it's an AMD promoted game. Coincidence? Maybe, but it's probably more likely that AMD is working with Codemasters to ensure it runs suitably on the RX 6800 cards. The other problem is probably just a bug, but AMD's RX 6800 cards seem to render the reflections in Watch Dogs Legion with a bit less fidelity.

Besides the above, we have a third suite of ray tracing tests: nine games (or benchmarks of future games) and 3DMark Port Royal. Of note, Wolfenstein Youngblood with ray tracing (which uses Nvidia's pre-VulkanRT extensions) wouldn't work on the AMD cards, and neither would the Bright Memory Infinite benchmark. Also, Crysis Remastered had some rendering errors with ray tracing enabled (on the nanosuits). Again, that's a known bug.

Radeon RX 6800 Gaming Performance

We've retested all of the RTX 30-series cards on our Core i9-9900K testbed … but we didn't have time to retest the RTX 20-series or RX 5700 series GPUs. The system has been updated with the latest 457.30 Nvidia drivers and AMD's pre-launch RX 6800 drivers, as well as Windows 10 20H2 (the October 2020 update to Windows). It looks like the combination of drivers and/or Windows updates may have dropped performance by about 1-2 percent overall, though there are other variables in play. Anyway, the older GPUs are included mostly as a point of reference.

We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra results for each of the games, as well as the combined average of the nine titles. We're going to dispense with the commentary for individual games right now (because of a time crunch), but we'll discuss the overall trends below.

9 Game Average

Borderlands 3

The Division 2

Far Cry 5

Final Fantasy XIV

Forza Horizon 4

Metro Exodus

Red Dead Redemption 2

Shadow Of The TombRaider

Strange Brigade

AMD's new GPUs definitely make a good showing in traditional rasterization games. At 4K, Nvidia's 3080 leads the 6800 XT by three percent, but it's not a clean sweep — AMD comes out on top in Borderlands 3, Far Cry 5, and Forza Horizon 4. Meanwhile, Nvidia gets modest wins in The Division 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the largest lead is in Strange Brigade. But that's only at the highest resolution, where AMD's Infinity Cache may not be quite as effective.

Dropping to 1440p, the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT are effectively tied — again, AMD wins several games, Nvidia wins others, but the average performance is the same. At 1080p, AMD even pulls ahead by two percent overall. Not that we really expect most gamers forking over $650 or $700 or more on a graphics card to stick with a 1080p display, unless it's a 240Hz or 360Hz model.

Flipping over to the vanilla RX 6800 and the RTX 3070, AMD does even better. On average, the RX 6800 leads by 11 percent at 4K ultra, nine percent at 1440p ultra, and seven percent at 1080p ultra. Here the 8GB of GDDR6 memory on the RTX 3070 simply can't keep pace with the 16GB of higher clocked memory — and the Infinity Cache — that AMD brings to the party. The best Nvidia can do is one or two minor wins (e.g., Far Cry 5 at 1080p, where the GPUs are more CPU limited) and slightly higher minimum fps in FFXIV and Strange Brigade.

But as good as the RX 6800 looks against the RTX 3070, we prefer the RX 6800 XT from AMD. It only costs $70 more, which is basically the cost of one game and a fast food lunch. Or put another way, it's 12 percent more money, for 12 percent more performance at 1080p, 14 percent more performance at 1440p, and 16 percent better 4K performance. You also get AMD's Rage Mode pseudo-overclocking (really just increased power limits).

Radeon RX 6800 CPU Scaling and Overclocking

Our traditional gaming suite is due for retirement, but we didn't want to toss it out at the same time as a major GPU launch — it might look suspicious. We didn't have time to do a full suite of CPU scaling tests, but we did run 13 games on the five most recent high-end/extreme GPUs on our three test PCs. Here's the next series of charts, again with commentary below. 

13-Game Average

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Borderlands 3

The Division 2

Dirt 5

Far Cry 5

Final Fantasy XIV

Forza Horizon 4

Horizon Zero Dawn

Metro Exodus

Red Dead Redemption 2

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Strange Brigade

Watch Dogs Legion

These charts are a bit busy, perhaps, with five GPUs and three CPUs each, plus overclocking. Take your time. We won't judge. Nine of the games are from the existing suite, and the trends noted earlier basically continue.

Looking just at the four new games, AMD gets a big win in Assassin's Creed Valhalla (it's an AMD promotional title, so future updates may change the standings). Dirt 5 is also a bit of an odd duck for Nvidia, with the RTX 3090 actually doing quite badly on the Ryzen 9 5900X and Core i9-10900K for some reason. Horizon Zero Dawn ends up favoring Nvidia quite a bit (but not the 3070), and lastly, we have Watch Dogs Legion, which favors Nvidia a bit (more at 4K), but it might have some bugs that are currently helping AMD's performance.

Overall, the 3090 still maintains its (gold-plated) crown, which you'd sort of expect from a $1,500 graphics card that you can't even buy right now. The RX 6800 XT mixes it up with the RTX 3080, coming out slightly ahead overall at 1080p and 1440p but barely trailing at 4K. Meanwhile, the RX 6800 easily outperforms the RTX 3070 across the suite, though a few games and/or lower resolutions do go the other way.

Oddly, my test systems ended up with the Core i9-10900K and even the Core i9-9900K often leading the Ryzen 9 5900X. The 3090 did best with the 5900X at 1080p, but then went to the 10900K at 1440p and both the 9900K and 10900K at 4K. The other GPUs also swap places, though usually the difference between CPU is pretty negligible (and a few results just look a bit buggy).

It may be that the beta BIOS for the MSI X570 board (which enables Smart Memory Access) still needs more tuning, or that the differences in memory came into play. I didn't have time to check performance without enabling the large PCIe BAR feature either. But these are mostly very small differences, and any of the three CPUs tested here are sufficient for gaming.

As for overclocking, it's pretty much what you'd expect. Increase the power limit, GPU core clocks, and GDDR6 clocks and you get more performance. It's not a huge improvement, though. Overall, the RX 6800 XT was 4-6 percent faster when overclocked (the higher results were at 4K). The RX 6800 did slightly better, improving by 6 percent at 1080p and 1440p, and 8 percent at 4K. GPU clocks were also above 2.5GHz for most of the testing of the RX 6800, and it's default lower boost clock gave it a bit more room for improvement.

Radeon RX 6800 Series Ray Tracing Performance 

So far, most of the games haven't had ray tracing enabled. But that's the big new feature for RDNA2 and the Radeon RX 6000 series, so we definitely wanted to look into ray tracing performance more. Here's where things take a turn for the worse because ray tracing is very demanding, and Nvidia has DLSS to help overcome some of the difficulty by doing AI-enhanced upscaling. AMD can't do DLSS since it's Nvidia proprietary tech, which means to do apples-to-apples comparisons, we have to turn off DLSS on the Nvidia cards.

That's not really fair because DLSS 2.0 and later actually look quite nice, particularly when using the Balanced or Quality modes. What's more, native 4K gaming with ray tracing enabled is going to be a stretch for just about any current GPU, including the RTX 3090 — unless you're playing a lighter game like Pumpkin Jack. Anyway, we've looked at ray tracing performance with DLSS in a bunch of these games, and performance improves by anywhere from 20 percent to as much as 80 percent (or more) in some cases. DLSS may not always look better, but a slight drop in visual fidelity for a big boost in framerates is usually hard to pass up.

We'll have to see if AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution can match DLSS in the future, and how many developers make use of it. Considering AMD's RDNA2 GPUs are also in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, we wouldn't count AMD out, but for now, Nvidia has the technology lead. Which brings us to native ray tracing performance.

10-game DXR Average

3DMark Port Royal

Boundary Benchmark

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War

Control

Crysis Remastered

Dirt 5

Fortnite

Metro Exodus

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

WatchDogs

Well. So much for AMD's comparable performance. AMD's RX 6800 series can definitely hold its own against Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs in traditional rasterization modes. Turn on ray tracing, even without DLSS, and things can get ugly. AMD's RX 6800 XT does tend to come out ahead of the RTX 3070, but then it should — it costs more, and it has twice the VRAM. But again, DLSS (which is supported in seven of the ten games/tests we used) would turn the tables, and even the DLSS quality mode usually improves performance by 20-40 percent (provided the game isn't bottlenecked elsewhere).

Ignoring the often-too-low framerates, overall, the RTX 3080 is nearly 25 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT at 1080p, and that lead only grows at 1440p (26 percent) and 4K (30 percent). The RTX 3090 is another 10-15 percent ahead of the 3080, which is very much out of AMD's reach if you care at all about ray tracing performance — ignoring price, of course.

The RTX 3070 comes out with a 10-15 percent lead over the RX 6800, but individual games can behave quite differently. Take the new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. It supports multiple ray tracing effects, and even the RTX 3070 holds a significant 30 percent lead over the 6800 XT at 1080p and 1440p. Boundary, Control, Crysis Remastered, and (to a lesser extent) Fortnite also have the 3070 leading the AMD cards. But Dirt 5, Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Watch Dogs Legion have the 3070 falling behind the 6800 XT at least, and sometimes the RX 6800 as well.

There is a real question about whether the GPUs are doing the same work, though. We haven't had time to really dig into the image quality, but Watch Dogs Legion for sure doesn't look the same on AMD compared to Nvidia with ray tracing enabled. Check out these comparisons:

Apparently Ubisoft knows about the problem. In a statement to us, it said, "We are aware of the issue and are working to address it in a patch in December." But right now, there's a good chance that AMD's performance in Watch Dogs Legion at least is higher than it should be with ray tracing enabled.

Overall, AMD's ray tracing performance looks more like Nvidia's RTX 20-series GPUs than the new Ampere GPUs, which was sort of what we expected. This is first gen ray tracing for AMD, after all, while Nvidia is on round two. Frankly, looking at games like Fortnite, where ray traced shadows, reflections, global illumination, and ambient occlusion are available, we probably need fourth gen ray tracing hardware before we'll be hitting playable framerates with all the bells and whistles. And we'll likely still need DLSS, or AMD's Super Resolution, to hit acceptable frame rates at 4K.

Radeon RX 6800 Series: Power, Temps, Clocks, and Fans 

We've got our usual collection of power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing using Metro Exodus running at 1440p, and FurMark running at 1600x900 in stress test mode. While Metro is generally indicative of how other games behave, we loop the benchmark five times, and there are dips where the test restarts and the GPU gets to rest for a few seconds. FurMark, on the other hand, is basically a worst-case scenario for power and thermals. We collect the power data using Powenetics software and hardware, which uses GPU-Z to monitor GPU temperatures, clocks, and fan speeds. 

GPU Total Power

AMD basically sticks to the advertised 300W TBP on the 6800 XT with Metro Exodus, and even comes in slightly below the 250W TBP on the RX 6800. Enabling Rage Mode on the 6800 XT obviously changes things, and you can also see our power figures for the manual overclocks. Basically, Big Navi can match RTX 3080 when it comes to power if you relax increase the power limits.

FurMark pushes power on both cards a bit higher, which is pretty typical. If you check the line graphs, you can see our 6800 XT OC starts off at nearly 360W in FurMark before it throttles down a bit and ends up at closer to 350W. There are some transient power spikes that can go a bit higher as well, which we'll discuss more later. 

GPU Core Clocks

Looking at the GPU clocks, AMD is pushing some serious MHz for a change. This is now easily the highest clocked GPU we've ever seen, and when we manually overclocked the RX 6800, we were able to hit a relatively stable 2550 MHz. That's pretty damn impressive, especially considering power use isn't higher than Nvidia's GPUs. Both cards also clear their respective Game Clocks and Boost Clocks, which is a nice change of pace. 

GPU Core Temp

GPU Fan Speed

Temperatures and fan speeds are directly related to each other. Ramp of fan speed — which we did for the overclocked 6800 cards — and you can get lower temperatures, at the cost of noise levels. We're still investigating overclocking as well, as there's a bit of odd behavior so far. The cards will run fine for a while, and then suddenly drop into a weak performance mode where performance might be half the normal level, or even worse. That's probably due to the lack of overclocking support in MSI Afterburner for the time being. By default, though, the cards have a good balance of cooling with noise. We'll get exact SPL readings later (still benchmarking a few other bits), but it's interesting that all of the new GPUs (RTX 30-series and RX 6000) have lower fan speeds than the previous generation. 

We observed some larger-than-expected transient power spikes with the RX 6800 XT, but to be absolutely clear, these transient power spikes shouldn’t be an issue — particularly if you don’t plan on overclocking. However, it is important to keep these peak power measurements in mind when you spec out your power supply.

Transient power spikes are common but are usually of such short duration (in the millisecond range) that our power measurement gear, which records measurements at roughly a 100ms granularity, can’t catch them. Typically you’d need a quality oscilloscope to measure transient power spikes accurately, but we did record several spikes even with our comparatively relaxed polling.

The charts above show total power consumption of the RX 6800XT at stock settings, overclocked, and with Rage Mode enabled. In terms of transient power spikes, we don’t see any issues at all with Metro Exodus, but we see brief peaks during Furmark of 425W with the manually overclocked config, 373W with Rage Mode, and 366W with the stock setup. Again, these peaks were measured within one 100ms polling cycle, which means they could certainly trip a PSU's over power protection if you're running at close to max power delivery.

To drill down on the topic, we split out our power measurements from each power source, which you’ll see above. The RX 6800 XT draws power from the PCIe slot and two eight-pin PCIe connectors (PEG1/PEG2). 

Power consumption over the PCIe slot is well managed during all the tests (as a general rule of thumb, this value shouldn’t exceed 71W, and the 6800 XT is well below that mark). We also didn’t catch any notable transient spikes during our real-world Metro Exodus gaming test at either stock or overclocked settings.

However, during our FurMark test at stock settings, we see a power consumption spike to 206W on one of the PCIe cables for a very brief period (we picked up a single measurement of the spike during each run). After overclocking, we measured a simultaneous spike of 231W on one cable and 206W on the other for a period of one measurement taken at a 100ms polling rate. Naturally, those same spikes are much less pronounced with Rage Mode overclocking, measuring only 210W and 173W. A PCIe cable can easily deliver ~225W safely (even with 18AWG), so these transient power spikes aren’t going to melt connectors, wires, or harm the GPU in any way — they would need to be of much longer duration to have that type of impact.  

But the transient spikes are noteworthy because some CPUs, like the Intel Core i9-9900K and i9-10900K, can consume more than 300W, adding to the total system power draw. If you plan on overclocking, it would be best to factor the RX6800 XT's transient power consumption into the total system power.   

Power spikes of 5-10ms can trip the overcurrent protection (OCP) on some multi-rail power supplies because they tend to have relatively low OCP thresholds. As usual, a PSU with a single 12V rail tends to be the best solution because they have much better OCP mechanisms, and you’re also better off using dedicated PCIe cables for each 8-pin connector.  

Radeon RX 6800 Series: Prioritizing Rasterization Over Ray Tracing 

It's been a long time since AMD had a legitimate contender for the GPU throne. The last time AMD was this close … well, maybe Hawaii (Radeon R9 290X) was competitive in performance at least, while using quite a bit more power. That's sort of been the standard disclaimer for AMD GPUs for quite a few years. Yes, AMD has some fast GPUs, but they tend to use a lot of power. The other alternative was best illustrated by one of the best budget GPUs of the past couple of years: AMD isn't the fastest, but dang, look how cheap the RX 570 is! With the Radeon RX 6800 series, AMD is mostly able to put questions of power and performance behind it. Mostly.

The RX 6800 XT ends up just a bit slower than the RTX 3080 overall in traditional rendering, but it costs less, and it uses a bit less power (unless you kick on Rage Mode, in which case it's a tie). There are enough games where AMD comes out ahead that you can make a legitimate case for AMD having the better card. Plus, 16GB of VRAM is definitely helpful in a few of the games we tested — or at least, 8GB isn't enough in some cases. The RX 6800 does even better against the RTX 3070, generally winning most benchmarks by a decent margin. Of course, it costs more, but if you have to pick between the 6800 and 3070, we'd spend the extra $80.

The problem is, that's a slippery slope. At that point, we'd also spend an extra $70 to go to the RX 6800 XT … and $50 more for the RTX 3080, with its superior ray tracing and support for DLSS, is easy enough to justify. Now we're looking at a $700 graphics card instead of a $500 graphics card, but at least it's a decent jump in performance.

Of course, you can't buy any of the Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs right now. Well, you can, if you get lucky. It's not that Nvidia isn't producing cards; it's just not producing enough cards to satisfy the demand. And, let's be real for a moment: There's not a chance in hell AMD's RX 6800 series are going to do any better. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but these cards are going to sell out. You know, just like every other high-end GPU and CPU launched in the past couple of months. (Update: Yup, every RX 6800 series GPU sold out within minutes.)

What's more, AMD is better off producing more Ryzen 5000 series CPUs than Radeon RX 6000 GPUs. Just look at the chip sizes and other components. A Ryzen 9 5900X has two 80mm square compute die with a 12nm IO die in a relatively compact package, and AMD is currently selling every single one of those CPUs for $550 — or $800 for the 5950X. The Navi 21 GPU, by comparison, is made on the same TSMC N7 wafers, and it uses 519mm square, plus it needs GDDR6 memory, a beefy cooler and fan, and all sorts of other components. And it still only sells for roughly the same price as the 5900X.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't want to buy an RX 6800 card. It's really going to come down to personal opinions on how important ray tracing will become in the coming years. The consoles now support the technology, but even the Xbox Series X can't keep up with an RX 6800, never mind an RTX 3080. Plus, while some games like Control make great use of ray tracing effects, in many other games, the ray tracing could be disabled, and most people wouldn't really miss it. We're still quite a ways off from anything approaching Hollywood levels of fidelity rendered in real time.

In terms of features, Nvidia still comes out ahead. Faster ray tracing, plus DLSS — and whatever else those Tensor cores might be used for in the future — seems like the safer bet long term. But there are still a lot of games forgoing ray tracing effects, or games where ray tracing doesn't make a lot of sense considering how it causes frame rates to plummet. Fortnite in creative mode might be fine for ray tracing, but I can't imagine many competitive players being willing to tank performance just for some eye candy. The same goes for Call of Duty. But then there's Cyberpunk 2077 looming, which could be the killer game that ray tracing hardware needs.

We asked earlier if Big Navi, aka RDNA2, was AMD's Ryzen moment for its GPUs. In a lot of ways, it's exactly that. The first generation Ryzen CPUs brought 8-core CPUs to mainstream platforms, with aggressive prices that Intel had avoided. But the first generation Zen CPUs and motherboards were raw and had some issues, and it wasn't until Zen 2 that AMD really started winning key matchups, and Zen 3 finally has AMD in the lead. Perhaps it's better to say that Navi, in general, is AMD trying to repeat what it did on the CPU side of things.

RX 6800 (Navi 21) is literally a bigger, enhanced version of last year's Navi 10 GPUs. It's up to twice the CUs, twice the memory, and is at least a big step closer to feature parity with Nvidia now. If you can find a Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT in stock any time before 2021, it's definitely worth considering. RX 6800 and Big Navi aren't priced particularly aggressively, but they do slot in nicely just above and below Nvidia's competing RTX 3070 and 3080.

A few days ago, Chinese overclocker Takukou pushed an RX 6800 XT to a blisteringly fast 2.8 Ghz on liquid nitrogen (LN2). Allowing AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT to hit an overall 3dMark Fire Strike score of 48,890 and a graphics score of 61,831. Marking it the fastest GPU in the world for now.

It is remarkable to see how easily AMD's RDNA2 architecture scales with extra cooling, and this is just with the reference RX 6800 XT design on LN2. Hopefully, with more powerful AIB partner cards coming soon, we'll see even higher frequencies, possibly even a 3 Ghz card. Four years ago Nvidia's GTX 1060 managed to break the 3 Ghz barrier under LN2, it would be cool to see the same happen with a GPU from the red team.

And this isn't the fastest card coming from AMD this year, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is coming soon and should overtake the 6800 XT with a world record fire strike score under LN2. The only world record it might struggle with is breaking the 3 Ghz barrier. If Pascal has taught us anything, it's that the mid-range cards with fewer cores can clock the highest, so we'll have to wait and see what AMD's most powerful GPU can do!

Since AMD does not want its add-in-board (AIB) partners to publish actual specifications of their custom Radeon RX 6800-series graphics cards (see our Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT review), but it allows select media to do unpacking videos of these products. XFX was not exactly the first company to start teasing its proprietary Big Navi design, but its Radeon RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 (an interesting name, isn't it?) is among the first one to be examined by video bloggers, including those at VideoCardz.

In a bid to comply with the 'Big Navi' moniker, the XFX Radeon RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 is indeed big. The board comes with a triple-fan, 2.5-wide (which essentially means you need three spare slots to install it) cooling system featuring several heat pipes and a backplate. The middle fan is smaller than the other two, something we have already seen on graphics cards from other makers. In fact, a triple-fan cooling system seems to be a de-factor standard for the Radeon RX 6800-series.

The rather huge cooling system makes the XFX Radeon RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 bigger than previous-generation products from XFX, so customers planning to purchase this card should ensure that they have enough space inside their chassis. Meanwhile, the PCB of the board is shorter than the cooling system. Meanwhile, the card has two 8-pin PCIe auxiliary power connectors, just like reference designs. 

In the I/O department, the XFX Radeon RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 includes two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB Type-C connector. 

Now that we know what the XFX Radeon RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 looks like, we still have to find out the exact clocks of its GPU and memory as well as how much faster this graphics card is when compared to AMD's reference design. The good news is that the wait is almost over as the product is expected to hit the market on November 25, 2020, just several days from now. If you're looking for a Radeon 6000 series card, be sure to check out our story on how and where to buy a Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.

 Meanwhile, the author of the Tech of Tomorrow channel mentioned that the board could cost in the ballpark of $749 (i.e., about $50 more expensive when compared to reference adapters). Whether or not the $50 premium will actually bring significant performance benefits is something that is to be seen, but it definitely buys a very sophisticated cooling system.

 Source: Tech of Tomorrow (via VideoCardz)

AMD's new Radeon RX 6800 XT is a monster of a graphics card already at the GPU's stock frequencies, but when pushed with a heavy overclock, the RX 6800 XT goes to a whole other level, beating the Nvidia RTX 3090 in 3dMark Fire Strike with 47,932 points, making it a world record result.

Keep in mind that the actual card, a reference RX 6800 XT, was not cooled with liquid nitrogen. Instead, it used its own reference air cooler, making the result all that much more remarkable.

Overclocker "LUCKY_NOOB's" managed to push the boost frequency of the 6800 XT to a seriously high 2650MHz, and he paired it with a 5950X clocked at 5.4GHz with liquid nitrogen to make the new score possible. 

Who knows how much further AMD's RDNA2 cards can be pushed on water or LN2. At this rate, we could see the magical 3GHz number being broken on AMD silicon for the first time in GPU history.

However, one thing to keep in mind is 3DMark's tessellation has been modified to presumably give the RX 6800 XT more performance, so Lucky's 47,932 score does not qualify on 3DMark's official scoreboards. But it does qualify for HWBOT, hence why it is valid as a world record on that site.

Fortunately, we might see more soon from AMD, the upcoming RX 6900 XT is launching in under three weeks, and hopefully, we'll see new world records broken with that GPU on both HWBOT's and 3DMark's scoreboards.  

With the launch of AMD's highly anticipated RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT today, everyone is chomping at the bit to grab one of AMD's shiny new graphics cards. According to our Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT review, both cards provide impressive performance with speeds that often surpass those of the RTX 3070 and 3080 respectively. 

Since this morning, customers have been rushing to buy their cards before stock runs dry. And run dry it certainly did, as all RX 6000 series cards are out of stock everywhere as of this moment. All that is left are thousands of angry customers.

AMD's subreddit has exploded with anger and disappointment at the issues pertaining to the Radeon shortage. A few people are reporting their local MicroCenters barely had ten to 12 RX 6800s and RX 6800 XT's available for purchase, which if true, is just as bad as the RTX 3080 launch just a few months ago. Many are blaming AMD for the situation and saying it was a paper launch (which technically it wasn't). To make matters worse, the scalpers are back as well, with RX 6800s and 6800 XTs showing up at around $1000-$1500 on eBay. 

This is very unfortunate, especially if you trusted in AMD that it would learn from Nvidia's mistakes and provide enough volume for over 10 minutes. In a Twitter post nearly a month ago, Frank Azor, AMD's Chief Architect, was confident at AMD's ability to provide enough stock on launch day, making future buyers excited. Obviously, things didn't go according to plan so far.

So what should you do as a buyer? In short, this is a bad time to build a high-end gaming PC. If you're desperate to grab a GPU during this holiday season, whether as a present or as an upgrade for your gaming rig, there is a high chance you'll have to settle with a previous generation card from either AMD or Nvidia. However, we're following stock on all the new cards on our articles on how and where to buy an RTX 3080, 3070 and 3090 and how and where to buy a Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT.

Or you can buy a prebuilt already equipped with a RTX 3070, 3080 or 3090. Nvidia themselves have stated they will not have enough sustainable stock (for the DIY market) until January of 2021 at the earliest, and that is still the case today with outlets like Newegg.com being completely out of stock of 3070s, 3080s and 3090s at the time of this writing. It should be expected that AMD will have the same issues with how its RX 6000 launch has been going thus far.

ASRock and PowerColor joined the roster of AMD's graphics card partners in revealing all-new custom-designed coolers for AMD's latest RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs. ASRock has four brand new custom SKUs, while PowerColor is still keeping most of its designs to itself, but the company wasn't afraid to show a sneak peek of its new Red Devil GPU on Twitter.

The new PowerColor Red Devil looks absolutely monstrous for a graphics card – from the rear/front angle of the image, the cooler looks to be nearly 4 slots wide. Hopefully the card will have monstrous cooling potential to go with that size. 

Aesthetically, the card is very different from the previous Red Devil design on the RX 5700 XT. The new Red Devil lacks any sticks and instead opts to go with six red LED strips that start in the middle of the card and go all the way to the back. Unfortunately, that is all we know about this card, but hopefully we'll get the detailed specs soon.  

ASRock has four new custom designs. The Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X 16G OC, and the Radeon RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming D 16G OC cover the 6800XT side of the equation, while Radeon RX 6800 Phantom Gaming D 16G OC and Radeon RX 6800 Challenger Pro 16G OC fill in the RX 6800 side.

ASRock's flagship RX 6800 XT Taichi offers a triple-fan cooler design and measures 2.8 slots thick. Keep in mind it's also quite tall at 140mm, so case compatibility will be something to look out for. The card features a metal shroud and metal backplate, with RGB lighting up the card in the center fan, sides, and a small area on the backplate. The color theme is very neutral and the design language is simple and striking at the same time. That will make it look good in most cases, especially those with metal finishes.

ASRock's RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming really does deserve the name, with very bright colors and a shrouded design that screams "gamer."

The shroud looks to be all metal, similar to the Taichi, but this time you get four brushed aluminum accents flanking all four sides of the card, and in those accents, you get even more accents with several red lines pointing towards the central RGB fan. The backplate also features a black brushed aluminum design accompanied by red accents with the Phantom Gaming and ASRock logos present. This card really stands out – the dark parts of the shroud are highly contrasted by bright red and bright brushed aluminum accents. If you're looking for something bright and blingy, this is the card for you.

The RX 6800 variant of this card is very similar to its bigger brother, with only slight differences to the design that are barely noticeable. The biggest change you'll find with the RX 6800 Phantom Gaming is the PCB and the rear backplate that don't extend all the way to the end of the card. Compare that to the RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming, which does. Ironically the RX 6800's cooler could possibly do its job better than the RX 6800 XT model, simply because the heatsink has all that extra space open in the rear for air to escape.

Finally, we have ASRock's more budget-oriented option, the RX 6800 Challenger Pro. Compared to the other three designs, this one is the most humble, which allows it to blend in well with other computer components.

The shroud features a metal finish along with silver accents, but the silver is rather dark, so it blends well with the dark nature of the metal shroud. For RGB, all you get is a single dash of it in the top where the ASRock and Challenger Pro logos are located. For cooling, you get a triple fan design and a 2.7 slot thick cooler. Similar to the Phantom Gaming, the PCB and backplate doesn't extend all the way to the edge of the cooler. While it does look a little plain (like the Phantom Gaming), you will benefit from having a more efficient cooler that can push air out the rear of the card.

ASRrock's options for the RX 6800/RX 6800 XT look very pleasing. The metal shrouds are a nice touch, giving the cards a more premium look than other designs. ASRock recently posted the cards to its website but hasn't revealed pricing or availability.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT cards launch on November 18. That's just two days before we have to revisit the best graphics cards and GPU benchmark hierarchy topics. Ahead of the official launch, AMD is letting us do an unboxing of the upcoming products. We've gone hands-on, but that also means no performance figures (other than what AMD has already shown). We'll keep this short, as the video and images cover things in more detail.

The vanilla Radeon RX 6800 box is a typical no-frills design. You get some padding, the card, a brief user manual, and that's it. Which is fine, as there's nothing else really required. In contrast, the RX 6800 XT box is larger, with a fold-up flap and red AMD branding with a message basically congratulating you on joining the red team. Either way, you're promised, "uncompromised 4K gaming" and 16GB of memory.

The RX 6800 is the smaller card, in that it's a strict 2-slot design. It has three 77mm custom fans with integrated rims that help to improve static pressure and direct airflow into the radiator fins. Otherwise, it features minimal bling with the Radeon logo that lights up in red. It's quite a hefty card, though, weighing 1389g—basically the same weight as the RTX 3080 Founders Edition (technically, it's 34g heavier than Nvidia's card). It also has dual 8-pin connectors, which means a theoretical power limit of 375W (150W each on the 8-pin, and 75W from the x16 slot). The card isn't likely to get anywhere near that limit, but it certainly has plenty of headroom in the power delivery department.

Probably the most controversial aspect of the card is the port selection. It has two DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.1 connector, and a USB Type-C connector. There may be a few people interested in the last option, but anyone looking at setting up a quad-monitor workspace will likely want to look at alternative cards from AMD's partners. As we noted earlier this year, VirtualLink is basically dead, so VR HMD support for the Type-C connector is iffy at best.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT looks nearly identical to the vanilla card, with two key differences. First, it's bigger—2.5-slots wide, roughly. That also means it weighs more (1504g). The fans remain the same, as does most of the aesthetic and industrial design, but it appears to have an RGB enabled Radeon logo.

The larger size helps accommodate the higher 300W TDP, along with higher specs in general. The GDDR6 memory is the same 16Gbps as the 6800, but this time the Navi 21 GPU has 72 enabled CUs (Compute Units) and 4608 shader cores, compared to the 60 CUs and 3840 shader cores on the vanilla 6800. The 6800 XT also has higher base and boost clocks, though it's not clear how that will pan out in actual games. Previous AMD GPUs have run at speeds pretty close to the advertised Game Clock, but things may have changed with the RDNA2 architecture.

Side by side, you can better appreciate the thicker design on the 6800 XT. It may have problems fitting in some smaller mini-ITX cases, but it will be fine for most PCs. Considering it has 20 percent more CUs and slightly higher GPU clocks for 12 percent more money, we think it's the better option of the two cards.

Of course, that's assuming you can find one in stock come Wednesday. We've been saying this for a couple of months, but all indications are that RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT will follow the same path as the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, RTX 3070, Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 5 5600X. AMD almost certainly produced more Zen 3 CPUs than it will have Radeon RX 6000 series cards, which means you'll need plenty of luck to acquire one this side of 2021.

Check back in a couple of days for the full review. In the meantime, here's everything we know about Big Navi and the RX 6000 series.

Since the keynote for the RDNA2 launch, we have seen the AMD slides of its RX 6800 XT going toe-to-toe with Nvidia's RTX 3080 graphics card in gaming performance which is an impressive feat. However, due to the fact, the performance slides come directly from AMD, we can't be sure if these results are realistic. Fortunately, we've stumbled upon some non-AMD generated performance results in Ashes of the Singularity and Geekbench 5 tweeted by APISAK that should give us some scores for comparison. As these are unverified benchmarks take their results with a pinch of salt until we can carry out our own series of benchmarks.

First off is Ashes of the Singularity, a popular game known for its benchmarking more than its actual gameplay, the 6800 XT was running with a Core i7-8700K at stock frequencies with the "Crazy_1080P" DX12 preset for the benchmark. This is a big win for AMD as the score was 10100 points, which is identical to RTX 3080 scores with the same CPU.

Interestingly, for the Geekbench 5 OpenCL score, the results are quite different, the RX 6800 XT measured a 132605 score in the OpenCL test, while the RTX 3080 comes in at a whopping 178932 points, much higher than that of the 6800 XT. The stark difference in scores is probably because Geekbench 5 is not a gaming-workload. It is not uncommon for cards to behave much differently in games compared to compute-heavy applications.

APISAK also linked a new Geenbench 5 score for the RX 6800, AMD's mid-range competitor to the RTX 3070. In the OpenCL bench, it scored 158820 points. It's not that far off from the RX 6800 XT honestly, and it completely destroys the current RTX 3070 Geekbench 5 open CL score of 132864. This shouldn't come as a complete shock, as the RX 6800 spec-wise should be more powerful than the RTX 3070 and it is more expensive than the 3070 so this result does make sense.

So far, it looks like the RX 6800 XT can definitely match the RTX 3080 in gaming performance from these results. The only area where the 6800 XT falls short is the Geekbench 5 score, where the RTX 3080 takes a massive win. But AMD regains the win back in the mid-range arena with the RX 6800 being 25,956 points higher than the RTX 3070.

Three weeks ago, AMD finally took the wraps off its next-gen RDNA2-based 'Big Navi' graphics cards, and since there have been many leaks about the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT. Today, we caught wind of a particularly interesting rumor, namely that the RX 6800 can overclock to over 2.5 GHz while maintaining reasonable core temperatures. 

The leak in question comes from CapFrameX on Twitter, who shared a screenshot with the interesting results. The GPU on the RX 6800 is shown running at an average clock speed of 2532 MHz with a peak at 2553 MHz, and this is while running at full load.

The temperature noted is averaged at 60 Celsius with the highest figure at just 63 Celsius, which are respectable figures. Power consumption is 208W on average with a peak at 269W -- though note that this is only GPU power consumption. The total board power is likely about 50W more than this due to consumption by the memory and power subsystem.

Stock, AMD says that the RX 6800 will run at 1815 MHz 'Game Clock' and boost up to 2105 MHz, so the above numbers are impressive, to say the least. Given the moderate temperature of 60 Celsius, one could almost be lead to believe that this is stock performance, but it's not. 

This temperature is right about where a liquid-cooled card runs at under a moderate overclock, so we mustn't rule out that as a possibility. There has been much news of liquid cooled Big Navi cards, so it wouldn't come as a surprise.

The launch for the RX 6800 and 6800 XT is scheduled for November 18th, so we'll know more soon. The RX 6800 is AMD's mid-tier card that is set to launch for $579 with the RX 6800 XT landing in at $649.

Following last week's teaser posted on its Twitter page, Sapphire Technology this week officially introduced its Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series graphics cards. As expected, the boards come with rather fancy triple-fan triple-wide cooling systems that promise higher-than-reference clocks out of the box as well as some additional overclocking potential. 

The new family of Sapphire's custom-designed Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series graphics boards consists of three models: the Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800, the Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the Nitro Radeon RX 6800 XT SE. All the graphics cards share the impressive cooling system as well as a custom-designed PCB with an eight-phase VRM (according to a picture published by the manufacturer) that relies on two 8-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, but the SE version also has addressable RGB lighting and a USB-C display output. 

Since Sapphire's Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 printed circuit boards are covered with the company's cooling system, it is unclear to tell the difference between them and AMD's reference designs. At this point, we can only say that the PCBs appear to be about the same length as AMD's own.

Meanwhile, Sapphire's new cooling systems look like they will be remarkable. They are longer, taller and thicker than those designed by AMD. They are also equipped with multiple heat pipes as well as a high-tech-looking backplate. Furthermore, they feature three fans of different sizes: the smallest one is located in the middle, the largest one is located on the rear side, whereas the medium one is on the front side of the board near the exhaust openings.

The oddest part about Sapphire's Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series announcement is that the company does not disclose actual GPU and memory frequencies of its new graphics cards. We have asked Sapphire about specifications of the new products and are awaiting their response.  

All three graphics cards are already listed at Sapphire's website, so expect them to ship in the foreseeable future, but given the fact that the company does not disclose clocks of the upcoming products, it is hard to say when exactly these boards will ship.

Sapphire released a sneak peek of its new exciting RX 6800 XT Pulse just a few days ago. The company has now spilled the beans on almost all product information for its upcoming RX 6800 XT Pulse, including more details on the cards' dimensions and aesthetics.

The card will feature AMD's RX 6800 XT RDNA2 GPU, including 72CUs, 4608 stream processors, and 16GB of GDDR6. Unfortunately, we don't know what clock speeds the card will run at or how much power it will consume right now. For reference, AMD's specifications for its reference RX 6800 XT include boost frequencies of up to 2250Mhz and a game frequency of 2015Mhz. Regarding power consumption, the reference spec tops out at 300W. Going on the history of Sapphire's Pulse GPUs, I would expect this card to have the same reference frequencies, with a factory overclocked variant coming out eventually.

Sapphire has an RX 6800 Pulse model in the works as well; the card's cooler design looks identical to the RX 6800 XT, with the only obvious difference being it's running a different GPU.

For cooling, Sapphire went with a triple-fan design measuring 2.5 slots in thickness. The design looks very functional with a significant amount of heatsink exposed to the naked eye, which is good because air can pass freely out of the card without the shroud needlessly blocking it or forcing the air to change direction. This design also applies to the back of the card, where a lot of the backplate is cut out, primarily at the rear and the top.

Aesthetically, the graphics card is very well balanced – the shroud and backplate feature a matte black finish and red accents in the shape of two lines where the fans are located. There's also red rings on the fans and another line on the backplate, which looks like an MRI machine's display. Sapphire did a good job with its choice of colors; the red is very subtle and should allow this card to fit well in a vast majority of cases and themes.

We don't know what pricing will look like yet, but going on past Sapphire Pulse models, this card should be very competitive with great cooling and good overclocking capabilities for the money.