AMD Radeon RX 6800 Review 2021

Along with AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, we are happy to welcome all new AMD Radeon RX 6800 – a new addition to the AMD GPU family. Nvidia GPUs have been dominating the market since ages with their top-notch graphics cards. This, however, serves as an alternate option to Nvidia’s GPUs.

Well, the thing is that the last-gen cards offered by AMD like RX 5700, Radeon VII or the Radeon RX 5700 XT couldn’t even come close to Nvidia’s GPUs – in terms of performance. Now, AMD Radeon RX 6800 is here with the premium features like Ray Tracing (RT) and all, hence, the red team can now fairly compete with Nvidia – it might also outperform the RTX 3070. But, let’s try not to get too excited.

We just really wanted AMD to hold its traditional low price. Sadly, the Red team is asking for about 80 bucks more at a final price tag of $579 for the AMD Radeon RX 6800, next to the RTX 3070 499 bucks. It costs 10 percent more for around 5-15 percent more output. It’s already a reasonably priced high-end product, and a positive indication of more good things to come from AMD.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 – Price & Availability

Going up for the aftermarket board partner designs, AMD has released the Radeon RX 6800 with a price tag of $549 to $579 bucks. In competition to this GPU, we have the Green team’s GeForce RTX 3070 – coming with VRAM which is half of what AMD is offering but then again the price is lower too – it will end up costing you less than $499 bucks.

If you still would like to go up while being loyal to AMD, we have the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT for you – but, of course, it will cost you more; around 649 bucks. At this price, the Red team gives a fair competition to Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080.

But we do expect the results to get much better over time as the drivers evolve. These two graphics cards are easily designed to offer outstanding 4K gaming performance. The lower-priced graphics card by AMD, though, is by far the best-buy option for the overwhelming majority, since the RX 6800 XT is much more expensive than RX 6800.

Let’s Talk about Features and Chipset

Based on the AMD’s rDNA 2 design – AMD Radeon RX 6800 has the same tech which is used in the new-gen gaming consoles like the PS-5 and Xbox Series X. So, if we critically look at it, it doesn’t matter much right now – but it most certainly will – in this decade. Because this architecture has the potential to impact the optimization of the new and upcoming PC games of the next generation.

It is necessary, though, for this reason, to bear in mind that both PS4 and Xbox One have used AMD graphics, which didn’t significantly improve the optimization for games in PC over the last decade.

The first generation of RDNA has two massive variations in comparison to the current one, although interestingly – both have been designed using the same method of 7 nm (nanometer).

The first variation is the presence of the infinity cache. This is essentially a global GPU cache that increases video memory bandwidth. This renders GDDR6 much better than GDDR6X and consumes less electricity on the 256-bit bus. This increases the bandwidth theoretically 2.4 times per watt over the GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus.

Then, of course, Ray Accelerators have been used by the red team, one in every of the 60 computing devices. As far as the overall ray tracing output is concerned – let us tell you this – the Radeon RX 6800 is slightly slower than the RTX 3070 in Metro Exodus, with Ray Tracing enabled and DLSS disabled. DLSS – an exclusive technology for Nvidia that AMD doesn’t have as of right now. So if you turn the DLSS on – the performance gap widens.

Besides these two variations – the rest of the architecture is very close between AMD and Nvidia. There are 64 Stream Processors for each computes unit, with a total of 3,840 for the Radeon RX 6800. However, we have noticed how AMD has worked tirelessly to increase productivity and they are still trying to increase the frequency.

Also, it is a bit unclear how AMD sets the frequency on their graphics cards, but in fact, it is very beneficial. You will see two frequencies, the Game Clock and the Boost Clock if you look at the spec sheet. The Boost Clock is just the maximum frequency – used mainly in the quick bursting workloads. The Game Clock, however, is around where AMD relies most of the time on a graphics card: this is where the magic happens.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 is equipped with a 1.815MHz Game Clock and a 2.105MHz Boost Clock. Yet we witnessed clock speeds over the Boost Clock during our evaluation, which were maintained quite smoothly.

AMD’s optimization testified to the fact that the GPU was able to double its size – from 251mm2 and 10.3 billion transistors for the 5700 XT to 519mm2 and 26.8 billion transistors for the RX 6800 – while the board’s capacity just rose from 225W to 250W. AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU also increased its clock speeds. And during our tests, our energy consumption peaked at 213W, meaning that future driver upgrades and aftermarket board designs will provide more scope for increased performance.

However, the temperatures have largely gone lower – thanks to the latest cooler architecture. Temperatures seem to have averaged at 75C during our tests, with a GPU temperature of just 88C. It is important to note that the initial reading is the main thing that you should be focused on when looking at your GPUs temperatures. AMD has advised us that during regular gameplay, these new GPUs are supposed to go up to 110C and that it is normal and comes under the spec sheet figures – it won’t trigger any problems. And yes, don’t worry, your graphics card isn’t going to melt if you see these high figures.

AMD offers its Ryzen 6000-class processors with 2 ways to improve their performance: Rage Mode and Smart Access Memory. The former is not accessible on the Radeon RX 6800 mysteriously, however, it increases the power cap and the game time, giving your gameplay a slight advantage.