Review Round-up Radeon RX 6800 (XT): AMD closes the gap
The Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT are available to buy from today, if you can get hold of one. Availability is extremely limited. So that you can sweeten the waiting time by reading how fast the card will be, I have summarised some reviews for you here.
2020 is the year of AMD. With the Ryzen 5000 and now Radeon 6000, Team Red is catching up with Intel and Nvidia. Unfortunately, 2020 is also the year of poor availability of PC hardware. I have not yet been able to get my hands on a Radeon RX 6800 or 6800 XT for testing. That's why I have to provide you with the data from other reviewers for the time being.
The cards
The Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 are based on the 7 nm Navi 21 RDNA2 silicon. This offers 80 per cent more computing units compared to the RX 5700 XT. Each of these RDNA2 compute units also has ray tracing hardware and AMD doubles the amount of memory to 16 GB, although the memory bus is still 256 bits.
The RDNA2 graphics architecture is not only found on graphics cards in the Radeon RX 6000 series, but also the GPUs in next-generation games consoles. Big Navi consists of a massive 519.8 mm² die with 26.8 billion transistors, which puts it roughly in the same league as NVIDIA's 8 nm GA102 with 28.3 billion transistors on a 628.4 mm² die. The numbers suggest a lot of power.
This is what the trade press says
According to Techpowerup, AMD has made the unthinkable possible: With Big Navi, Team Red is catching up with Nvidia with the RTX 30 series. The Radeon RX 6800 XT is almost twice as fast as the Radeon RX 5700 XT. This is an enormous increase in performance compared to the previous generation. The card also compares very favourably with Nvidia: the RX 6800 XT is only 6 per cent behind the RTX 3080 and 16 per cent behind the RTX 3090.
When ray tracing is activated, however, AMD is behind. Nevertheless, the result is respectable. The 6800 XT is roughly on a par with the RTX 2080 Ti in ray tracing. However, AMD has an ace up its sleeve for future titles: As the new consoles also support ray tracing, developers would align the titles to the corresponding hardware from AMD.
Computerbase writes that the Radeon RX 6800 delivers 7 to 9 per cent more FPS in Ultra HD compared to the GeForce RTX 3070. In WQHD, it is 3 to 6 per cent. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is also behind. Compared to its bigger sister, the 6800 is 17 per cent slower. The card beats its predecessor, the 5700 XT, by almost 90 per cent.
Golem writes that the app performance is poor. This is primarily due to the lack of software support, where Nvidia dominates with the CUDA interface. However, AMD is once again a competitor for Nvidia in classic rasterisation games.
Finally, Igor'sLab writes that the technical implementation of the Radeon cards in the reference design is very good. The power consumption of the Radeon cards is more convincing than that of Nvidia. The cooling performance and noise development are also very good, whereby the RX 6800 XT is even better. Igor describes the RX 6800 as a buying tip because the card currently has no rival.
As soon as I get my hands on one, I'll do my own benchmarks. The easiest way to make sure you don't miss out is to follow my author profile and you'll receive an email as soon as the test is online. <p
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