AMD RX 6800 XT Review

1. Introduction2. RDNA 2 Architecture3. AMD RX 6800 XT4. Testing Methodology5. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy6. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing7. Borderlands 38. Control9. Death Stranding10. The Division 211. F1 202012. Far Cry New Dawn13. Gears 514. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint15. Metro Exodus16. Middle Earth: Shadow of War17. Red Dead Redemption 218. Shadow of the Tomb Raider19. Total War Saga: Troy20. Watch Dogs: Legion21. Performance Summary (14 Game Average)22. Cost Per Frame Analysis23. Ray Tracing - Control24. Ray Tracing - Shadow of the Tomb Raider25. Productivity Benchmarks26. Clock Speed27. Temperatures28. Acoustics29. Noise-Normalised Temperatures30. Power Consumption31. Performance Per Watt32. Overclocking33. Closing Thoughts34. View All Pages

After plenty of rumours and leaks, AMD's RX 6000-series graphics cards were officially announced on October 28, and today we are able to present our full reviews of both the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs. This review is firmly focused on the RX 6800 XT, and with its UK MSRP of £599.99, AMD is hoping to strike a significant blow to Nvidia's RTX 3080 that launched in September. We put this RDNA 2-based GPU through its paces and find out just how fast it really is.

After years of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, AMD unveiled the RDNA architecture in July last year, with the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT the first GPUs to launch utilising this new technology, and the 7nm process. As two competitive but decidedly mid-range products, AMD waited for RDNA 2 to do battle in the high end market, with its RX 6800 XT positioned firmly against Nvidia's RTX 3080.

With a US MSRP of $649, AMD has confirmed a UK price-point of £599.99, undercutting the RTX 3080's £649 price-tag. How realistic that pricing is remains to be seen, and AMD will hope it can offer significantly better supply than Nvidia could muster for its RTX 30-series products. Before committing to buy a new AMD GPU however, you need to know if it is any good – so let's dive into the review.

	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 5700 XT	RX 5700
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	251 mm²	251mm²
Ray Accelerators	72	60	n/a	n/a
Compute Units	72	60	40	36
Stream Processors	4608	3840	2560	2304
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 1755MHz	Up to 1625MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 1905MHz	Up to 1725MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s
ROPs	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	n/a	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	250W	225W	185W

While we talk more about the RDNA 2 architecture itself on the next page, here we can take a high-level overview of the Navi 21 GPU that forms the basis of the RX 6800 XT.

Still fabricated on TSMC's 7nm process node, as per the RX 5000-series, Navi 21 sports a much larger GPU die, measuring 519 mm². For the RX 6800 XT, it houses 72 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 Stream Processors each, giving a grand total of 4608 shaders.

Rated clock speed has increased significantly for the RX 6000 series. The RX 6800 XT, for instance, has a rated game clock of 2015MHz and a rated boost clock of up to 2250MHz. To put that into perspective, the RX 5700 XT has a rated game clock of 1755MHz.

AMD has also increased the memory capacity, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory found on every RX 6000 SKU (so far). The memory is clocked at 16Gbps, and operates over a 256-bit memory interface for total bandwidth of 512 GB/s. However, as we will see on the next page, AMD has also implemented a 128MB Infinity Cache on the Navi 21 GPU, to significantly increase effective memory bandwidth without excess power draw.

Speaking of power, the RX 6800 XT has a rated total board power (TBP) of 300W, an increase of 75W versus the RX 5700 XT.

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