Welcome to the Red Team. That’s the message that first greets you when you lift the lid on one of AMD’s new Radeon 6000 series graphics cards, and it’s fitting – after all, AMD’s fans are some of the most die-hard in gaming, and these ‘Big Navi’ GPUs have been anticipated with almost messianic fervour by the community at large. Thankfully, all of that positive, memeable energy has found a worthy target in the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, two of the strongest creations by AMD’s Radeon graphics team in some time.
Before we discuss how well these cards perform in a wide selection of games – and don’t worry, there will be of that – let’s briefly set some expectations. At $580 (£530) and $650 (£600), respectively, the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT slot in above the $500 (£450) RTX 3070 and below the $700 (£650) RTX 3080. That suggests we’ll see an RTX 3070-beating performance out of the RX 6800, while the RX 6800 will do well to draw with the higher-priced Nvidia card. More importantly, it also means that AMD is finally competing at the high end of the graphics market once again, something the company hasn’t done since the ill-fated Radeon 7 almost two years ago – and something it hasn’t done for many more years than that.
AMD’s Big Navi graphics cards are in short supply, but here’s where you’ll be able to pre-order the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT in the UK and US once stock arrives.
As well as much improved out-and-out performance, these Big Navi cards also mark the PC debut of AMD’s RDNA2 architecture, which also forms the basis of both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles. Like those next-gen machines, the RX 6000 series supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, finally ending Nvidia’s RT monopoly, plus a raft of other DirectX 12 Ultimate features like DirectStorage, variable rate shading and mesh shaders that can boost performance in myriad ways. And speaking of performance boosting, AMD’s engineers have also added features like ‘Smart Memory Access’, ‘Rage Mode’ overclocking and an ‘Infinity Cache’ that should all conspire to push these cards to their limits.
From this bewildering description alone you can see that there’s plenty to cover here, so let’s get started with a closer look at each of these cards – how are they built, how does the hardware stack up and how does it tie into the new features on offer here?
1 of 9 Caption Attribution A look at how RX 6800 XT and the smaller RX 6800 compare, plus a closer look at the XT on its own.
While specs sheets can be a bit boring, looking at this one tells you quite a lot this time around. While AMD are operating with the same 7nm TSMC process as the original ‘Little’ Navi design, their new architecture manages to wring out a whole lot more performance. This is driven by substantially higher clock speeds across the board and a larger complement of more individually performant compute units. There’s also dedicated ray tracing hardware backed into each CU, which is ten times faster at calculating ray intersections than a purely software approach – and it’ll be fascinating to see how it compares with Nvidia’s second-generation RT hardware.