AMD announces the Radeon RX 6800 XT gaming GPU and claims a win against Nvidia's RTX 3080

AMD just dropped the Radeon RX 6000 top-of-the line gaming GPUs official info and it looks like the rumors regarding the expected performance proved to be almost spot on. Of course, the first model presented was the RX 6800XT which is designed to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3080, but AMD also presented the RX 6800 and the RX 6900 XT models. However, we will only focus on the first model here, and, from what we can see, AMD can claim a win in this price range.

The RX 6800 XT comes with 72 compute units, 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and the core gets a 2015 MHz game clock plus a 2250 MHz boost clock, plus there also is the Infinity Cache with 128 MB. AMD cites a 300 W TPB, so quite close to Nvidia’s 320 W TPB on the RTX 3080. The info provided by the RedGamingTech channel on Youtube regarding the number of games in which the AMD card is winning appears to have been accurate, and now we also have the exact name of the games. Note that the differences are quite insignificant overall.

As far as 4K tests are concerned, the RX 6800 XT records higher framerates in Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Forza Horizon and Gears of War 5. Furthermore, it is on par in Doom Eternal and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but loses in games like The Division 2, Resident Evil 3 and Wolfenstein Young Blood. When it comes to 1440p, the RX 6800 XT wins in all games except for The Division 2 and Resident Evil 3.

Now, there are a couple of new features that the rumors have not mentioned: Rage Mode overclocking and Smart Access Memory. These GPUs can work in tandem with the Zen 3 CPUs to deliver additional performance boosts of up to 13% in games like Forza Horizon 4. We have not heard anything about the ports, still, so we are not sure if the HDMI connector features full 2.1 specs.

AMD also expanded the FidelityFX engine with support for ray tracing and variable rate shading and updated the list of effects to work hand in hand with RT. The list of FidelityFX-compatible games already includes 35 titles. Unfortunately, Team Red did not show any ray tracing metrics, most likely because the drivers are not finalized, so we will have to wait a bit for reviews to find out if the RX 6800 XT is really on par with the RTX 2080 Ti in this department. Rumor has it that AMD will add support for something similar to DLSS in a few months.

These models are scheduled to start selling on November 18 for $50 less than the RTX 3080, so $649 MSRP. We expect to see some faster AIB variants that can boost to 2.5 GHz and cost a bit more, as well, and, hopefully, there will be no supply issues.

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