AMD Unveils Radeon RX 6800 Series Graphics Cards, its Fastest Graphics Card Ever

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards are official. AMD unveiled three new graphics cards to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3000 series namely the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT.

These graphics cards use AMD’s RDNA 2 gaming architecture, which includes improved energy efficiency, better performance, and AMD Infinity Cache – which AMD said offers up to 2.4-times greater bandwidth-per-watt compared to the previous-generation RDNA architecture.

“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 general manager of AMD’s graphics business unit Scott Herkelman.

“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.”

Radeon RX 6800 XT

The Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card will compete with Nvidia’s powerful RTX 3080 and will come with 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

It has a 2GHz game clock that is boostable to 2.2GHz, and also offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

The 6800 XT will use 300W of power and it is recommended by AMD that it is paired with a PSU that provides at least 750W.

In its launch presentation, AMD showed that the RX 6800 XT is comparable to the Nvidia RTX 3080 across a number of popular games including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Doom Eternal, Gears of War 5, and Resident Evil 3.

The graphics card also comes with the following gaming technologies:

• DirectX 12 Ultimate
• AMD FidelityFX
• Radeon Image Sharpening
• Radeon Software Performance Tuning Presets
• AMD FreeSync
• Radeon Anti-lag
• Radeon Boost

Other new graphics cards

AMD also unveiled two other graphics cards – a more affordable Radeon RX 6800, and the top-of-the-range Radeon RX 6900 XT.

The RX 6800 has a lower clock speed than the RX 6800XT but sports the same 16GB of VRAM.

AMD compared it to the Nvidia 2080 Ti and claimed that it can match or beat this graphics card across a number of games.

The RX 6800 is priced at $579, making it much cheaper than the 2080 Ti.

However, it is worth noting that Nvidia’s RTX 3070 is a replacement for the 2080 Ti, and is priced significantly more affordably than the RX 6800 at $499.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT is an incredibly powerful graphics card that is competing with Nvidia’s RTX 3090 by virtue of being the most powerful graphics card in the RX 6000 range.

It uses 80 compute units and offers 23.04 TFLOPS of peak single-precision performance, while notably costing $999 – which is significantly cheaper than the $1,499 RTX 3090.

The specifications of these three graphics cards can be viewed below.