NVIDIA has been the only competitive high-end GPU maker for a long time. Yeah, AMD was lurking in the background, and in the mid-range, you could find great deals on the RX series cards, but it wasn’t quite there yet. In the mid-range, the RX series did compete with NVIDIA, but competing against the 1060 was a very hard task to do, and the RX580, while being a solid card, was basically an overclocked RX480. Competition in the GPU market was severely lacking.
The bottom line is that in the high-end bracket, the VEGA cards just ran way too hot, for way too much, and the RX cards weren’t quite there yet.
Then the 5600 xt and the 5700 xt cards were released. To AMD‘s credit, and according to UserBenchmark, the 5700 xt does beat the 2060 super in sales. AMD was getting there, but it just wasn’t quite there yet. But after the release of these two cards, we knew that something was up. AMD was working, and then the leaks for Big Navi started rolling in.
On October 28, 2020, AMD finally removed the veil on the Big Navi cards. Here is a short summary of the potential game-changer for AMD.
AMD RADEON RX 6800
This is the cheapest of the three cards announced. It’s priced at 579 USD, and features 60 compute units, with 60 Ray Accelerators, and 128 MB of infinity cache. Despite all this, it still features 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, just like its older brother.
AMD RADEON RX 6800XT
This is arguably the most important card in the series. It features 72 compute units, and 72 Ray Accelerators. Of course, AMD seems to think that memory size is gonna be a selling point, which might hold true for you if you’re using 4k monitors. It has 16 gigabytes of GDDR6.
AMD RADEON RX 6900 XT
(NICE)
Top of the line, bleeding edge, and subsequently, the best AMD has to offer. 80 Compute Units, 80 Ray Accelerators 16 gigabytes of memory.
Launching on December 8th, for $999. This is gonna compete head to head with the RTX 3090, but its priced at $500 less. Also, it’s pegged at a 300-watt TDP, which is 50 watts less. The 3090 does have 24 gigabytes of VRAM, but this genuinely seems like a turning point for AMD right now.
Anyways, concluding this barebones summary of the three cards here’s a couple of things to looks out for.
Number 1: Rage mode. Its an overclocking tidbit that AMD included.But this might void warranties. We’re a little in the grey about rage mode, but it was enabled during the presentation, and it’s definitely worth reading up on.
Number 2: Smart Access memory. Well, Smart Access Memory only works with AMD CPU’s, and this does give AMD CPU’s an unfair advantage. Definitely wait for the reviews to roll in.
Here’s some sauce for the guys who’d like to know more:
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