AMD announces RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 GPUs

AMD started off October with a bang, announcing the new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and now to close out the month, we've got official details on three new Radeon RDNA 2 GPUs – RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800.

All three GPUs are based on AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture, delivering up to 65% more performance per watt compared to the original RDNA 1 architecture while using the same 7nm process. AMD has also been able to squeeze out an additional 30 percent in average clock speeds.

Another interesting feature is Infinity Cache, which allows for more bandwidth while keeping power consumption down. This is a particularly big benefit for 4K gaming, where large amounts of data needs to move through the GPU memory.

In the images above, you'll see some of the gains expected from RDNA 2 GPUs, as well as comparisons to RDNA 1 and Nvidia's RTX 3080. Compared to the RX 5700, an RDNA 2 GPU can offer up to 2.2x more performance at 4K. Moving down to 1440p, the RX 6800 XT is shown trading blows with the Nvidia RTX 3080 while using 20W less power.

If you pair an RX 6000 series GPU with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU and a 500-series motherboard, then you'll get access to more performance. AMD has implemented a new feature called AMD Smart Access Memory, which provides full access to GPU memory between a Ryzen 5000 series CPU and an RDNA 2-based GPU. This in turn provides a performance uplift, one that grows when you activate ‘Rage Mode', AMD's new one-click overclocking tool for CPU and GPU.

Below you can see the announced specs, pricing and release dates for all three new AMD Radeon graphics cards:

GPU	Radeon RX 6900 XT	Radeon RX 6800 XT	Radeon RX 6800
Compute Units	80	72	64
Game Clock	2015 MHz	2015 MHz	1815 MHz
Boost Clock	2250 MHz	2250 MHz	2105 MHz
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Launch pricing (USD)	$999	$649	$579
Release Date	December 8	November 18	November 18

With these new GPUs, AMD is also supporting DirectX Ray-tracing with hardware acceleration, although we don't have much detail on how AMD is tackling this compared to Nvidia. Nor do we have performance results to set expectations for those playing with RT on in supported games. Hopefully independent reviews will be able to clarify that in the weeks to come.

KitGuru Says: What do you all think of AMD's RX 6000 GPU announcement? Are you planning to pick one up before the end of the year? 

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