AMD has taken the lid off their newly announced desktop RDNA 2 graphics cards, the AMD Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT.
The new cards all support AMD Infinity Cache which is a high-performance, last-level data cache. They come with 128 MB of on-die cache aimed at reducing latency and power consumption, according to AMD.
Another feature includes Smart Access Memory. If you’re getting a 5000-series Ryzen CPU, this may be of interest. In effect, if you have a 5000 Series processors, AMD B550 and X570 motherboards, and an RX 6000 Series graphics card, Smart Access Delivery will provide greater access to the high-speed GDDR6 graphics memory, accelerating CPU processing.
Other features include DX12 Ultimate support, DXR (DirectX Ray Tracing), FidelityFX, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Microsoft DirectStorage Support, and more.
Here are the specs for each card:
| Model | Compute Units | GDDR6 | Game Clock12 (MHz) | Boost Clock13 (MHZ) | Memory Interface | Infinity Cache |
| RX 6900 XT | 80 | 16GB | 2015 | Up to 2250 | 256 bit | 128 MB |
| RX 6800 XT | 72 | 16GB | 2015 | Up to 2250 | 256 bit | 128 MB |
| RX 6800 | 60 | 16GB | 1815 | Up to2105 | 256 bit | 128 MB |
AMD is positioning the RX 6800 to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3070/2080 Ti, with the RX 6800 XT positioned to compete agains the RTX 3080. The RX 6900 XT is intended to compete with the RTX 3090.
Release date and pricing is as follows:
- RX 6800 - November 18, $579
- RX 6800 XT - November 18, $649
- RX 6900 XT - December 8, $999
Curiously, AMD did not provide any ray tracing performance figures, nor any machine learning-accelerated reconstruction deep dives. AMD will release a series of videos showcasing various games running on their cards. These videos will release on:
- DIRT® 5– October 29
- Godfall™– November 2
- World of Warcraft®: Shadowlands– November 10
- RiftBreaker™– November 12
- FarCry® 6 – November 17
