AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT Preview
Introduction
AMD have, to borrow a bit of sporting parlance, solved CPUs. The Ryzen range came out of the doors as excellent and the next versions only refined and enhanced them until we reach a stage with the Ryzen 5000 series where they are a match for anything the opposition can bring to the table.
We don’t think we’d be giving away any secrets to say that their Radeon range of GPUs has been left somewhat in the shadow of its challenger though, particularly as so much of the AMD R&D department has been laser focussed upon getting their Processors to their class-leading position. Both of the major consoles now have AMD chips beating at their heart – the PS5 and Series X – so we know that AMD have got a lot of aces up their sleeve in the graphics world too. With the RDNA 2 architecture we have a few new graphics cards coming under the Radeon umbrella, and the first of these to cross the OC3D office are the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.
Both cards have a significant redesign when compared to even the Radeon VII, and with Ray Tracing … sorry Ray Accelerators .. built on to the card they have the potential to be everything we’d expect from a current GPU. You’ll have to wait until Thursday for the full reveal of all the tricks it has available, but in the interim you can enjoy a glance at the specification table and, on the next page, the cards themselves in the flesh.
Technical Specifications
Regular readers will be aware that prior to launch we can hint at things, but can’t usually be explicit about the performance or the potential of the item we’re previewing. We’ve already done our testing of the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, so we know that you won’t be disappointed come Thursday when we can reveal our results, but for now note that AMD have included their own Ray Tracing hardware. It’s more of a solution in keeping with the Nvidia Turing cards, where some processing happens on card and some in the drivers, rather than the Ampere sledgehammer approach, but given how much Ray Tracing is also a feature on the AMD equipped Playstation 5 and XBOX Series X we expect that the software side of things will really get the job done. Unless you believe that Microsoft and Sony will advertise a feature that doesn’t work as well as demonstrated? Either way the RX 6800 is a serious step up on the Radeon cards that have come before.
 | Radeon RX 6800 XT | Radeon RX 6800 |
Architecture | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 |
Manufacturing Process | 7nm | 7nm |
Transistor Count | 26.8 Billion | 26.8 Billion |
Compute Units | 72 | 60 |
Ray Accelerators | 72 | 60 |
Stream Processors | 4608 | 3840 |
Game Clock | Up to 2015 MHz | Up to 1815 MHz |
Boost Clock | Up to 2250 MHz | Up to 2105 MHz |
Single Precision Performance | Up to 20.74 TFLOPS | Up to 16.17 TFLOPS |
Half Precision Performance | Up to 41.47 TFLOPS | Up to 32.33 TFLOPS |
Texture Fill Rate | Up to 648 GT/s | Up to 505.2 GT/s |
ROPs | 128 | 96 |
Peak Pixel Fill Rate | Up to 288 GP/s | Up to 202.1 GP/s |
Infinity Cache | 128 MB | 128 MB |
Memory | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
Memory Bandwidth | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s |
Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit |
Board Power | 300W | 250W |
Now to see them in the flesh..