AMD's RX 6800 XT card allegedly performs on par with Nvidia's RTX 3080 in Fire Strike Ultra 3DMark tests, but costs closer to an RTX 3070

Earlier this month, AMD revealed some performance metrics for one of the Navi 21 SKUs that will be unveiled next week, and many believed that Team Red presented its best GPU. The performance was more or less on par with the Nvidia RTX 3080, but this week, industry insiders reported that AMD supplied final SKU names along with specs for each of these, and we now suspect that AMD actually showed metrics for the tier immediately below the “biggest” Navi.

According to sources close to Videocardz, the flagship chip of the RDNA2 series is the Navi 21 XTX which will power the Radeon RX 6900 XT cards produced by AMD itself. It will have all 80 CUs, with the core boosting as high as 2.33 GHz, and will also integrate 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit bus. This SKU is intended to take on Nvidia’s RTX 3090.

Now, the tier immediately below is represented by the Navi 21 XT SKU that will power the RX 6800 XT cards. It comes with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM / 256-bit bus, as well, but it only has 72 CUs and the core can boost to 2.25 GHz. This is supposed to be the card presented by AMD in early October, and it looks like its specs were tweaked even further in order to beat the RTX 3080. Industry insider Patrick Schur recently tweeted that the Navi 21 XT SKU is able to score at least 10,000 points in the Fire Strike Ultra 3DMark test, which, again, puts it on par with the RTX 3080 cards.

The real twist here is that the RX 6800XT cards are rumored to be priced closer to Nvidia’s RTX 3070 models. We are still not sure about the performance of the flagship RX 6900XT cards, but, from what we are hearing, it can get very close to the RTX 3090 while having a substantially lower price. Of course, the card has less VRAM and AMD might not have comparable ray tracing performance, but the price gap between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090 can easily be covered by AMD’s flagships. This also applies for the lower tier cards like the RX 6800 or the RX 6700 that should offer on par if not better performance to similar Nvidia SKUs, but with lower price points and even packing more VRAM.

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