Wednesday, October 28th 2020

AMD Announces the Radeon RX 6000 Series: Performance that Restores Competitiveness

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Oct 28th, 2020 13:08 Updated: Oct 28th, 2020 13:33 Discuss (394 Comments)

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today unveiled the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards, delivering powerhouse performance, incredibly life-like visuals, and must-have features that set a new standard for enthusiast-class PC gaming experiences. Representing the forefront of extreme engineering and design, the highly anticipated AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series includes the AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards, as well as the new flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT - the fastest AMD gaming graphics card ever developed.

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards are built upon groundbreaking AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture, a new foundation for next-generation consoles, PCs, laptops and mobile devices, designed to deliver the optimal combination of performance and power efficiency. AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture provides up to 2X higher performance in select titles with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card compared to the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card built on AMD RDNA architecture, and up to 54 percent more performance-per-watt when comparing the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card to the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card using the same 7 nm process technology.

AMD RDNA 2 offers a number of innovations, including applying advanced power saving techniques to high-performance compute units to improve energy efficiency by up to 30 percent per cycle per compute unit, and leveraging high-speed design methodologies to provide up to a 30 percent frequency boost at the same power level. It also includes new AMD Infinity Cache technology that offers up to 2.4X greater bandwidth-per-watt compared to GDDR6-only AMD RDNA -based architectural designs.

"Today's announcement is the culmination of years of R&D focused on bringing the best of AMD Radeon graphics to the enthusiast and ultra-enthusiast gaming markets, and represents a major evolution in PC gaming," said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. "The new AMD Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT graphics cards deliver world class 4K and 1440p performance in major AAA titles, new levels of immersion with breathtaking life-like visuals, and must-have features that provide the ultimate gaming experiences. I can't wait for gamers to get these incredible new graphics cards in their hands."

Powerhouse Performance, Vivid Visuals & Incredible Gaming Experiences
AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards support high-bandwidth PCIe 4.0 technology and feature 16 GB of GDDR6 memory to power the most demanding 4K workloads today and in the future. Key features and capabilities include:

Powerhouse Performance

AMD Infinity Cache - A high-performance, last-level data cache suitable for 4K and 1440p gaming with the highest level of detail enabled. 128 MB of on-die cache dramatically reduces latency and power consumption, delivering higher overall gaming performance than traditional architectural designs.
AMD Smart Access Memory - An exclusive feature of systems with AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors, AMD B550 and X570 motherboards and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards. It gives AMD Ryzen processors greater access to the high-speed GDDR6 graphics memory, accelerating CPU processing and providing up to a 13-percent performance increase on a AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card in Forza Horizon 4 at 4K when combined with the new Rage Mode one-click overclocking setting.9,10
Built for Standard Chassis - With a length of 267 mm and 2x8 standard 8-pin power connectors, and designed to operate with existing enthusiast-class 650 W-750 W power supplies, gamers can easily upgrade their existing large to small form factor PCs without additional cost.

True to Life, High-Fidelity Visuals

DirectX 12 Ultimate Support - Provides a powerful blend of raytracing, compute, and rasterized effects, such as DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and Variable Rate Shading, to elevate games to a new level of realism.
DirectX Raytracing (DXR) - Adding a high performance, fixed-function Ray Accelerator engine to each compute unit, AMD RDNA 2-based graphics cards are optimized to deliver real-time lighting, shadow and reflection realism with DXR. When paired with AMD FidelityFX, which enables hybrid rendering, developers can combine rasterized and ray-traced effects to ensure an optimal combination of image quality and performance.
AMD FidelityFX - An open-source toolkit for game developers available on AMD GPUOpen. It features a collection of lighting, shadow and reflection effects that make it easier for developers to add high-quality post-process effects that make games look beautiful while offering the optimal balance of visual fidelity and performance.
Variable Rate Shading (VRS) - Dynamically reduces the shading rate for different areas of a frame that do not require a high level of visual detail, delivering higher levels of overall performance with little to no perceptible change in image quality.

Elevated Gaming Experience

Microsoft DirectStorage Support - Future support for the DirectStorage API enables lightning-fast load times and high-quality textures by eliminating storage API-related bottlenecks and limiting CPU involvement.
Radeon Software Performance Tuning Presets - Simple one-click presets in Radeon Software help gamers easily extract the most from their graphics card. The presets include the new Rage Mode stable over clocking setting that takes advantage of extra available headroom to deliver higher gaming performance.
Radeon Anti-Lag - Significantly decreases input-to-display response times and offers a competitive edge in gameplay.

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Product Family

Robust Gaming Ecosystem and Partnerships
In the coming weeks, AMD will release a series of videos from its ISV partners showcasing the incredible gaming experiences enabled by AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards in some of this year's most anticipated games. These videos can be viewed on the AMD website.

DIRT 5 - October 29
Godfall - November 2
World of Warcraft : Shadowlands - November 10
RiftBreaker - November 12
FarCry 6 - November 17

Pricing and Availability

AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards are expected to be available from global etailers/retailers and on AMD.com beginning November 18, 2020, for $579 USD SEP and $649 USD SEP, respectively. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is expected to be available December 8, 2020, for $999 USD SEP.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards are also expected to be available from AMD board partners, including ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE and XFX, beginning in November 2020.

The complete AMD slide deck follows.

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394 Comments on AMD Announces the Radeon RX 6000 Series: Performance that Restores Competitiveness

#126

ValenOne

Imsochoboaccording to DF they didn't really do an apple to apples comparison.

They took a guess.

It's better than the straight-out RX 6900 XT being RTX 2060 claim.

Since RT is memory bandwidth extensive with a small memory storage footprint (i.e. BVH is a search engine for geometry data), a very fast 128 MB Infinity cache matched RT workload which is missing in RDNA 2 based game consoles.

Game console's RDNA 2 RT cores without a high speed 128 MB Infinity cache acted like AMD's gen 1 HW RT cores.

#127

Unregistered

Lmao .. no one has ever argued who has the most competent driver development team and for good reason .. but you seem to be the exception .. good luck with convincing the entire gaming community .. you have my support in your quest.

#128

Camm

BasilixLmao .. no one has ever argued who has the most competent driver development team and for good reason .. but you seem to be the exception .. good luck with convincing the entire gaming community .. you have my support in your quest.

Why is it on every product launch we get newly joined members whose only job seems to be to astroturf for the competition. Does one's head in.

#129

Unregistered

CammWhy is it on every product launch we get newly joined members whose only job seems to be to astroturf for the competition. Does one's head in.

.... And yet another snowflake who resorts to shaming and safe spaces to aid their argument .. lmao

#130

ValenOne

CammWhy is it on every product launch we get newly joined members whose only job seems to be to astroturf for the competition. Does one's head in.

Poster like Basilix continues NVIDIA's near monoply in discrete GPUs.

#131

TechLurker

Speculation for what exactly is AMD's reason for the higher price of the 6800 vs the 3070 has been interesting to read in the past couple of hours.

Some speculated that the ~80 dollar difference was "feature tax", SAM + RAGE Mode allowing it to eke ahead of a 3070; assuming an All-AMD 5000/500/6000 ecosystem. GamersNexus' pinned YT post seemed to think similar; that the ability to use RAGE Mode + SAM was the reasoning behind the increase (not that they agreed or disagreed with it).

But others speculated that it was really to push people towards the 6800 XT ("well, if I'm going to fork out $580; may as well just fork out a bit more and get the 6800 XT instead for an extra $70"); same reason the 6900XT is also still priced a lot higher despite no likely way to squeeze in a "6850 XT" or "6900" (non-XT) between the 6800 XT and 6900 XT.

And still others speculate it was simply so they could make some extra $$$ before dropping the price when the replacement 3070 Ti/S comes out, suddenly wiping out any reason to buy an upcoming 3060 Ti/S or plain 3070 when you can have 2080Ti/3070 performance for cheaper.

And last one I've seen echoed a few times; the price was simply a placeholder, since they didn't yet know how much the 3070 would sell for at the time of filming the show, and could match or lower the price closer to release.

#132

ValenOne

BasilixLmao .. no one has ever argued who has the most competent driver development team and for good reason .. but you seem to be the exception .. good luck with convincing the entire gaming community .. you have my support in your quest.

Higher clock speed reduces the workload on driver teams i.e. shifting towards serial performance from very wide parallelism. It's the same idea since G8X's high clock speed.

#133

Mescalamba

They can announce whatever they want, until hard data proves its capable of competition I take it as that its not.

In GPU case, AMD is lately just all talk and no results.

#134

docnorth

SearingPeople uncritically accept nvidia's claims so much they don't even remember the results after reviews are published. How much faster is the 3080? 19.2 percent. The 3080 is 19.2 percent faster on average vs the 2080 ti at 1440p. The 2080 Ti was bad, it was only 14 percent faster than the 2080 Super. Here is the proof (Ryzen 3950XT results):

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRiUs-djAp9gFiFjGM1S_GTZ7CH1nrDV9GWlTsHWOnvaYLfQoKyBPeLX75qVLrkFuizf8QR6gu8gkgU/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

I don't care about 4k or all the other ways in which nVidia misleads people, I want actual in game fps to increase at 1440p. If that is what AMD delivers (and it looks like their 1440p numbers are incredible) it is a slam dunk. Even the base 6800 might be VERY close to the 3080, yet $120 cheaper (actually $220 cheaper since the FE was never for sale), and with 6GB more VRAM. At 1440p there might only be a 5 percent difference. We'll see.

I didn't even bother to comment about nVidia claims. I'm only referring to TPU results from 23 games, those are available for everyone who wants to read them. BTW 3090, 6900 XT, 3080 and probably 6800 XT make more sense for 4K (or business). I also don't care about 4K, mostly waiting for the mid-range cards, even lower then 3070 and 6800.

#135

InVasMani

So given the bandwidth of the infinity cache...

Let's assume in the future AMD started to use the double capacity G6 chips...

Option 1) x6 2GB chips + x2 4GB chips = 20GB VRAM
Option 2) x4 4GB chips + x4 2GB chips = 24GB VRAM
Option 3) x6 4GB chips + x2 2GB chips = 28GB VRAM
Option 4) x8 4GB chips = 32GB VRAM

It's really fascinating to think about the infinity cache implications combined with APU's and some of the brute force CPU capabilities of like ThreadRipper and Epyc like oh my then to top it off AMD with the Xilinix FPGA is wild things are getting very Skynet/Matrix/Borg quickly you can't put this genie back in the bottle.

#136

zlobby

Sweet! How is the compute performance?

#137

8BitZ80

MescalambaThey can announce whatever they want, until hard data proves its capable of competition I take it as that its not.

In GPU case, AMD is lately just all talk and no results.

Hard data? Does it break your teeth if you bite down on it?

#138

Mike2Fr

BasilixI believe they indicated the 6900 would be an AMD exclusive .. which raises all sorts of concern if true .. given that their past exclusives have been shocking in comparison to AiB partner versions .. maybe they have concerns about their top end card .. so much so that they want to keep control of its functioning .. regardless of reason i cant see any valid argument as to why they wouldnt want AiB partners to extract every last drop from their products by making it available to them

It might be a yield issue. Maybe they can't produce enough of those Gpu's or maybe it is a last minute card and the Aib's did not have enough to produce cards.... Anyhow I am sure that the 6800xt OC version for aib's will be pretty damn close to the 6900xt. For much less.... I hope the 6900xt PCB will be top level and the Gpu's extremely well binned. If not it is going to be hard to justify such a card...

#139

ViperXTR

TechLurkerSpeculation for what exactly is AMD's reason for the higher price of the 6800 vs the 3070 has been interesting to read in the past couple of hours.

Some speculated that the ~80 dollar difference was "feature tax", SAM + RAGE Mode allowing it to eke ahead of a 3070; assuming an All-AMD 5000/500/6000 ecosystem. GamersNexus' pinned YT post seemed to think similar; that the ability to use RAGE Mode + SAM was the reasoning behind the increase (not that they agreed or disagreed with it).

But others speculated that it was really to push people towards the 6800 XT ("well, if I'm going to fork out $580; may as well just fork out a bit more and get the 6800 XT instead for an extra $70"); same reason the 6900XT is also still priced a lot higher despite no likely way to squeeze in a "6850 XT" or "6900" (non-XT) between the 6800 XT and 6900 XT.

And still others speculate it was simply so they could make some extra $$$ before dropping the price when the replacement 3070 Ti/S comes out, suddenly wiping out any reason to buy an upcoming 3060 Ti/S or plain 3070 when you can have 2080Ti/3070 performance for cheaper.

And last one I've seen echoed a few times; the price was simply a placeholder, since they didn't yet know how much the 3070 would sell for at the time of filming the show, and could match or lower the price closer to release.

No mention of 8gb vs 16gb?

#140

Flanker

When will the NDA of reviews be lifted?

#141

InVasMani

FlankerWhen will the NDA of reviews be lifted?

Krakken NDA to be released...

#142

chodaboy19

When can we see some reviews?

#143

hurakura

BasilixYep .. aligning themselves to Apples reality distortion field ... lmao

Its real when it exists in real hands ... everything else is vapour .. we will know soon enough what the realities are

Well im old enough to know that back in the Geforce 2 days when Nvidias reign was threatened they released Detonator drivers which resulted in a 20-40 percent increase in performance .. the history is there for Nvidia ... sadly its never been there for AMD ... regardless of speculation AMD have never delivered strong driver performance increases .. you can deny reality until it bites you and ive been bitten by AMD's claims often .. thats why im sceptical until its independently tested.

What performance increase by detonator drivers, by cheating in benchmarks? nvidia have been caught doing that many times

#144

Steevo

rhaoulThere are only two actors in the market ... there is a tacit agreement on prices

Kinda like CPUs

#145

TheUn4seen

Again with the marketing fluff. Who cares about corporate PR gibberish? Let your product prove itself in the real world instead of the paper launch designed to create pointless hype.

#146

mtcn77

CammWhy is it on every product launch we get newly joined members whose only job seems to be to astroturf for the competition. Does one's head in.

A little update: there is a difference between astroturf and a flame. I don't do the other, it breaks the rules, but you get to keep your head up since they cannot circumlocute a good astroturf.

hurakuraWhat performance increase by detonator drivers, by cheating in benchmarks? nvidia have been caught doing that many times

Young kids... always straight to the point. Spoils the pleasure.

PS: Samsung 8nm goes brrr...

#147

DeathtoGnomes

MusselsWhat uhh, what titles out there support AMD's ray tracing right now?

Tic-Tac-Toe 3d? :p

I glanced at something that implies that any RT title does, but nothing that there is a standard for RT.

CammWhy is it on every product launch we get newly joined members whose only job seems to be to astroturf for the competition. Does one's head in.

paid schills?

#148

dir_d

TechLurkerSpeculation for what exactly is AMD's reason for the higher price of the 6800 vs the 3070 has been interesting to read in the past couple of hours.

Some speculated that the ~80 dollar difference was "feature tax", SAM + RAGE Mode allowing it to eke ahead of a 3070; assuming an All-AMD 5000/500/6000 ecosystem. GamersNexus' pinned YT post seemed to think similar; that the ability to use RAGE Mode + SAM was the reasoning behind the increase (not that they agreed or disagreed with it).

But others speculated that it was really to push people towards the 6800 XT ("well, if I'm going to fork out $580; may as well just fork out a bit more and get the 6800 XT instead for an extra $70"); same reason the 6900XT is also still priced a lot higher despite no likely way to squeeze in a "6850 XT" or "6900" (non-XT) between the 6800 XT and 6900 XT.

And still others speculate it was simply so they could make some extra $$$ before dropping the price when the replacement 3070 Ti/S comes out, suddenly wiping out any reason to buy an upcoming 3060 Ti/S or plain 3070 when you can have 2080Ti/3070 performance for cheaper.

And last one I've seen echoed a few times; the price was simply a placeholder, since they didn't yet know how much the 3070 would sell for at the time of filming the show, and could match or lower the price closer to release.

Ill add my speculation, they finalized the video before the release of the 3070 and did not know it was going to be released that low. I believe if they hear price feedback the MSRP may drop by Nov 18th.

#149

Space Lynx

Astronaut

It just occurred to me, the 6800XT shroud design has no vents on the side with the I/O... so all that heat is getting shot out the top of the car direct on to the CPU... Nvidia has the better reference design here, the most hot part gets shot outside the case next to the I/O and and the less hot air shot out in the case at the rear of the card... hmm this will be interesting to see CPU temps with this gpu... that seems like a really bad design flaw... the air is literally going to hit the CPU straight as it leaves the card, especially if you use an air cooler and it will just suck that hot air right in before it has a chance to escape.

@TheLostSwede curious your thoughts on this design, am I understanding it wrong?

#150

R0H1T

This is why you buy aftermarket cards, depending on the model not only do you get higher clocks but also (much) better cooling.

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AMD Announces the Radeon RX 6000 Series: Performance that Restores Competitiveness

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