AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series with RDNA 2 announced; takes on Nvidia RTX 3000 series

AMD has finally launched its latest generation GPU lineup after teasing the performance at the Ryzen 5000 desktop launch event. We already knew that this lineup will be based on tie new RDNA 2 architecture which is the successor to the RDNA architecture from last year. As noted in the leaks, AMD is calling its latest GPU lineup, the Radeon RX 6000 series. The company launched three GPUs as part of the 6000 series including RX6800, RX 6800XT, and RX 6900XT. We also got to know some technical details around the new lineup including the pricing and availability. Let’s check out everything around the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs here.

AMD Radeon RX 6000 series new features

During the presentation, AMD reiterated that the upcoming next-generation consoles use the same RDNA 2 architecture as the 6000 series. For some context, Sony and Microsoft teamed up with AMD to use RDNA 2 to power their PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles. It is also touting the combination of its Ryzen 5000 series desktop chips and Radeon RX 6000 series as “the ultimate” PC gaming platform”. Digging into the specifics, the company has tuned the compute units to offer better performance at lower power consumption. We also get a new “Infinity Cache” mechanism that claims to offer impressive performance improvements.

The new compute units are more power efficient by 30 percent with a re-balanced pipeline and “redesigned data paths”. The Infinity Cache mechanism improves the bandwidth by 2.17x times at lesser power at the same 256-bit G6. All these improvements result in a 30 percent frequency increase at the same power and the same 7nm process node. AMD also claims that RDNA 2 offers a 54 percent increase in performance per watt metrics as compared to RDNA.

Some of the advanced features include one-click overclocking with ‘Rage Mode’ and ‘AMD Smart Access Memory’. The ‘Smart Access Memory’ feature uses the Ryzen 5000 series desktop chips to offer a slight improvement in gaming performance. We also get lag reduction technology to improve gaming performance. It also outlined that the RX 6000 series is similar to the existing card design. AMD also confirmed that the Radeon RX 6000 series will feature DirectX ray-tracing, variable-rate sharing, mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and DirectStorage API. The company has teamed up with Microsoft to add support for all the DirectX 12 Ultimate features.

Specifications

All three cards feature 16GB GDDR6 video memory with 128MB Infinity cache with a 256-bit memory interface. Compute units-wise RX 6900 XT comes with 80, 6800 XT with 72 and RX 6800 with 60. Other differences are limited to the game clock and boost clock of the GPU variants. Digging deeper, the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT come with a 2015MHZ game clock and up to 2250MHz boost clock. Finally, RX 6800 gets a 1815MHZ game clock and up to 2105MHz boost clock. Beyond this, the company also noted that RDNA 3 is in the design phase.  It will likely use an “advanced node” with 2021 launch.

Taking on Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series; pricing, and availability

AMD also showcased benchmarks where RDNA 2 offered about 2x performance as compared to RDNA 1. As per the teased benchmarks, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT goes up against GeForce RTX 3080, RX 6800 against RTX 2080Ti (and RTX 3070 by extension), and RX 6900XT goes against RTX 3090.

The company has priced the RX 6800 at $579 (around Rs 43,000), RX 6800 XT at $649 (about Rs 48,000) and RX 6900 XT at $999 (about Rs 74,000). The RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT will go on sale on November 18 while the RX 6900 XT will launch on December 8. However, the company did not share any details around the India pricing and launch for the cards.