GPU

Although apparently slower than both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 by 19% and 4%, the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (apparently a reference design board was used in the tests) is around 13% faster than the RX 6800 XT and no less than 35% faster than the RX 6800. However, it seems like the retail version will be faster.

The RTX 3060 Ti is only the start of the RTX 3060 family, according to NVIDIA. Announced via a blog post, NVIDIA is expected to bring at least the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 mobile to market from early next year. The company has also published its official benchmark results for the RTX 3060 Ti, which compares the cards against the RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2080 SUPER.

NVIDIA has announced the first GPU in the RTX 3060 family, the RTX 3060 Ti for US$399. The RTX 3060 Ti effectively replaces the RTX 2060 Super but is slated to offer more performance than the RTX 2080 Super at lower power draws. The RTX 3060 Ti will be available as a Founders Edition card from NVIDIA and as custom AiB cards from December 2 worldwide.

The release of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is right around the corner, and the upcoming GA104 is already flexing its muscles in CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan benchmarks. The RTX 3060 Ti comfortably beats out the RTX 2080 SUPER across the three tests and is a match for the AMD Radeon RX 6800. The RTX 3060 Ti is not far off the RTX 3070, either.

A set of AIB BIOSes accessed by Igorslab indicate that board partner Radeon RX 6700 XT could leverage the 7nm process to hit significantly higher clocks than existing Big Navi cards, meaning near-3 GHz overclocks on air cooling could become a reality.

AMD is struggling to fulfill orders for the new Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 desktop graphics cards. A leaked delivery situation form that allegedly comes from the Danish retailer Proshop details the dire straits Team Red appears to be in terms of delivering the RX 6800 XT and RX 6000. Just 0.47% of customers can expect to receive a Navi 21 card.

CD Projekt Red is running a competition for a single customised RTX 3080, but the regional restriction leaves us hoping that competitions for a similar design might be run in other markets.

The 12-pin power connector may have been removed from the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. The card remains out of stock in most countries, but NVIDIA has tweeted a marketing photo clearly showing the card with the conventional 8-pin connector.

Select X470 and B450 motherboards from ASRock and Gigabyte are already getting beta BIOS versions supporting the Ryzen 5000 CPUs with SAM function. MSI and Asus are also offering unofficial BIOS updates for testers. However, these are not stable versions by any means, so users are advised to wait for the official AGESA V2 1.1.0.0 BIOS releasing in January.

All those scalpers we have been hearing about may actually turn out to be crypto miners hoarding the new RTX 3000 cards for Ethereum mining farms. Analysts somehow discovered that Nvidia has already sold $175 million worth of RTX 3000 cards and most of these sales were made directly to crypto miners.

The XFX Speedster MERC319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT BLACK features a dual-BIOS design with overclocked speeds of up to 1925 MHz (base clock), 2110 MHz (game clock), and 2360 MHz (boost speed), all alongside 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Sadly, this new graphics card is not in stock yet, but it should become available soon.

Early 3DMark results for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti have made their way online, a week before its expected announcement. The results show NVIDIA's upcoming budget Ampere card offering 88% of the performance of the RTX 3070 at an expected 79% of the price.

There is a possibility of Apple enabling eGPU support via Thunderbolt 3 in M1-powered Macs with a future update to macOS 11. At the moment, eGPUs seem to be recognized by macOS 11 Big Sur, but they don't seem to provide any hardware acceleration due to lack of driver support.

The first Radeon RX 6900 XT from a board partner is here and is by ASRock. The card is merely a reference AMD design by another name though, with no ASRock branding or customisations to speak of. Custom RX 6900 XT cards should arrive after December 8, if there are any.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been benchmarked in Ashes of the Singularity on the Crazy_1080p and Crazy_4K presets. Inevitably, people have been drawing comparisons between the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD's latest cards, and it does not lok good for NVIDIA's upcoming budget offering. The Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the RTX 3060 Ti across both presets, and by quite a margin.

AMD may have an answer to the RTX 3060 Ti, along with other budget cards from NVIDIA. Apparently, AMD is gearing to release the RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT, which will both use its Navi 22 GPUs. The cards will have 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM too and may arrive as early as January 2021.

Gigabyte has finally taken the lid off its new AORUS Gaming Boxes, confirming that they will feature NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. While both high-end Ampere GPUs will be held back by the performance limitations of Thunderbolt 3, the new AORUS Gaming Boxes are the first eGPUs with water cooling.

ASUS has registered multiple Radeon RX 6900 SKUs with the EEC in Russia, raising the possibility of AMD announcing a cheaper alternative to the RX 6900 XT. The RX 6900 has been listed seven times, all with 16 GB of VRAM. If it is an error, then the listing should mean that ASUS is planning to release plenty of RX 6900 XT SKUs, at the very least.

NVIDIA's next-generation mobile GPUs will be arriving from January 2021 and with AMD Ryzen 5000H series APUs, according to a new report. Apparently, NVIDIA has targeted a starting price of US$999 for RTX 3060-powered laptops and US$1,299 for RTX 3070 ones. Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 laptops will start at US$1,999. Intel Tiger Lake-H laptops with NVIDIA GPUs will be available, too.

AMD's 7nm Big Navi architecture continues to impress with strong overclock scaling. Overclocker Takukuo managed to push the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT to a remarkable 2.8 GHz under LN2, just 10 percent short of the world record for GPU clock speeds.

A board partner has revealed almost all the specifications of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is supposedly due for release on December 2. The card will offer 4,864 CUDA cores on NVIDIA's GA104-200-A1 GPU, along with 8 GB of VRAM and a 448 GB/s memory bandwidth. The RTX 3060 Ti is expected to launch for US$399.

The release of the RTX 3060 Ti is believed to be a few weeks away, but the card has already been benchmarked on Geekbench. The upcoming Ampere card averaged a score of 326,396 in OpenCL, putting it 10% behind the RTX 3070. Geekbench has seemingly confirmed several of the specifications of the RTX 3060 Ti, too.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition has made a photographic debut in a handful of images that show the Ampere graphics card from the front and rear, and even the Nvidia-branded packaging makes an appearance. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, which is expected to launch on December 2, looks identical to the RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

AMD's Scott Herkelman hinted that the company is working to offer an open implementation of super-sampling in partnership with Intel and NVIDIA that works across PCs and consoles unlike NVIDIA's proprietary DLSS. He also said that ray tracing performance of current Radeon RX 6000 cards will improve with time. Further, Frank Azor added that AMD will look into the possibility of enabling Smart Memory Access with non-500-series chipsets as well.

Priced at US$1,999.99, EVGA's flagship product GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN Hybrid targets extreme overclockers and it should be accompanied by the Hydro Copper variant as well, which doesn't have a price yet. The list of features includes a triple-BIOS design with pre-configured OC and LN2 profiles, PROBEIT support, and much more.

Nvidia reported nice growth figures in its Q3 2020 earnings call, but things might not look that good for Q4. Team Green is now estimating that the RTX 3000 supply shortages could continue well into 2021, and this problem may also impact AMD with its newly launched RX 6800 / XT cards.

AMD now holds the 3DMark Fire Strike world record, and with its second-fastest graphics card to boot. Impressively, the Radeon RX 6800 XT took the crown from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with a reference cooler.

The RX 6800 GPU particularly efficient when it comes to undervolting, as its TGP can be reduced by 45 W down to 183 W. These figures are already laptop-friendly if we look at Nvidia's RTX 2080 Super mobility GPUs, so we can expect to see an RX 6800M GPU with 150-180W TGPs that matches the performance of a desktop-grade RTX 2080 Ti soon.

AMD is back in the game with the latest RX 6800 / XT cards. Does it steal the performance crown? Not quite, but we still haven't seen what the RX 6900 XT has to offer. Nevertheless, the new AMD cards appear to be priced correctly, and we reckon the RX 6800 could end up as the preferred solution for the majority of gamers.

Just as expected, the Red Devil video card takes it way above and beyond the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT design. PowerColor's custom card features a triple-fan design, dual-BIOS, a 14+2 phase VRM with DrMOS, high polymer capacitors, and two 8-pin PCI-E connectors. It should hit the market in a week or two.

AMD's been very tight-lipped about ray-tracing capabilities on its Big Navi cards. However, AMD announced it'll be releasing the Hangar 21 demo video on November 19th, showcasing a whole range of DX 12 Ultimate effects. While benchmarks have indicated relatively modest ray-tracing capabilities on Big Navi, the demo will be a good indicator of what we could expect from upcoming console releases.

Most of the previous rumors regarding the ray tracing performance of the Navi 21 GPUs are now confirmed directly via an official slide leaked ahead of the review NDAs. Yes, the RX 6800 XT appears to be slower than the RTX 3080 in select 1440p titles with DXR effects on Ultra, but it also appears to beat the RTX 2080 Ti. However, the situation should get better once AMD launches its own version of DLSS.

Gigabyte is readying to release new versions of its AORUS Gaming Box eGPU. The company plans to release GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 editions of the AORUS Gaming Box, which will both feature RGB lighting and plenty of connectivity. The RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 will only be capable of communicating with laptops at up to 40 Gbps, though.

The 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 5950X has appeared in a couple of startling benchmark results involving the Vulkan graphics API. The Zen 3 Vermeer processor was teamed up with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 and an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT in two separate Geekbench tests, with both benchmarks producing impressive compute scores.

NVIDIA will be introducing the RTX 3060 Ti in a few weeks, and leaked benchmark results point towards the card offering excellent value for money. Believed to launch for around US$400, the RTX 3060 Ti will supposedly outperform the RTX 2080 SUPER. Inno3D has confirmed the existence of the RTX 3060 Ti ahead of its December 2 launch, too.

AMD has announced what it calls the world's fastest HPC GPU, the Instinct MI100 based on the CDNA architecture. The Instinct MI100 offers up to 11.5 TFLOPs of FP64 compute performance when paired with 2nd gen EPYC processors. The MI100 is slated to offer better performance per dollar compared to the NVIDIA A100 GPU along with support for the new ROCm 4.0 software platform.

A few days ahead of the official launch, several retailers in Australia stated that the stock for both the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT is "pretty terrible" but at least it is also expected for the launch availability of these cards to differ depending on the region. Sadly, the overall situation does not look great.

Some Ashes of the Singularity benchmark comparison results for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 have been posted online. While both the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080 performed capably, the results for the pricey RTX 3090 once again demonstrate that this card is not aimed at the mainstream market for gaming.

Three video cards that were unveiled by Sapphire Tech last week are now up for pre-order on Multitronic's website. The Finnish retailer has the Radeon RX 6800 listed for roughly US$870, while the two RX 6800 XT variants have price tags of US$990 and US$1,020. Sadly, there is no delivery date available yet.

Shortly after the RX 6800 XT surfaced in some leaked benchmarks, the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 6800 does the same. According to a Basemark listing (that seems to have been removed in the meantime), the RX 6800 will feature no less than 16 GB of memory and will be much faster than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070.

We can already imagine the overclocking potential of the upcoming custom RX 6900 XT cards planned for early 2021. If the RX 6800 XT can match the RTX 3090 that easily, Nvidia's rumored RTX 3080 Ti might still not be enough to secure the crown.

We have not even got a chance to explore the limits of the new RX 6000 GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture, and AMD is already planning some impressive performance gains for the upcoming RDNA 3 cards that should release in late 2021. The performance uplift should be facilitated through MCM structures and the jump to 5 nm.

NVIDIA has a plan to rival AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT, and it will come in the form of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Confirmed by HKEPC and Videocardz, the RTX 3080 Ti is thought to be based on a GA102 GPU with 10,496 CUDA cores. Apparently, the RTX 3080 Ti will apparently arrive in January 2021 for US$999, while it will also have 20 GB of GDDR6X VRAM.

Expected by many gamers to perform as good as the RTX 2060 with less power required — and less heat generated, of course — the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 is now rumored to use the GA107-300 graphics chip with 2,304 cores and a TGP value of just 90 Watt. Sadly, it is only expected to arrive in January 2021 and NVIDIA has not confirmed it yet.

MediaTek has launched a new addition to its Dimensity series of mobile processors. This 700 chipset is based on a 7 nanometer process and has 8 cores with a maximum speed of 2.2GHz. It supports LP-DDR4X RAM, UFS 2.2 storage and dual-sim 5G. Therefore, the OEM asserts it is an excellent choice for the "mainstream" phones of the near future.

A new set of purported NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti specifications suggest that it will come with 10,496 CUDA cores like the GeForce RTX 3090. However, its 20GB of GDDR6x VRAM has a memory speed of 19GB/s, putting it closer to the GeForce RTX 3080, along with its 320W TGP. Support for Nvlink appears to have been removed too.

Apparently, the previous rumors saying that the RTX 3060 Ti is expected to launch in mid-November are not true. Chinese site Expreview now claims that the actual launch date is set for December 2. This card is expected to cost US$400, and should be a bit faster than the RTX 2080 Super. A non-Ti version may also be launched later on, depending on what AMD brings to the table in the mid-range sector.

NVIDIA launched the RTX 3000 Founders Edition (FE) series starting at US$499 in the United States. Therefore, Indian flagship GPU fans may not have been impressed to find that the same prices in their market were far above these levels, even without GST. The OEM's division for that country has now fixed this issue, however.