AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 cards pose a serious challenge to...

Man, AMD is on the move. Just a few years ago, the company seemed destined to get relatively dark in areas dominated by Intel and Nvidia. Now in 2020, the company is able to trade hits with its heavyweight competitors in two different markets. Case in point: The company today unveiled the Radeon RX 6000 series, which is a real challenge, especially in terms of price, for Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards – and potentially saves money.

This is no small matter when you consider that AMD is behind the previous generation and that the new cards from Nvidia are one of the biggest generational leaps of all time. However, if AMD’s performance metrics are to be believed, the RX 6800 ($ 579), 6800 XT ($ 649), and 6900 XT ($ 999) offer real competition to the RTX 3070 ($ 500), 3080 ($ 700) and 3090 ($ 1,500). , respectively. The RX 6900 XT in particular looks like a fantastic deal.

AMD claims that its new RDNA 2 technology offers up to twice the performance of the previous generation while using roughly the same power (and less than the Nvidia equivalents). This is despite the fact that the company uses the same 7 nanometer transistor size as its previous cards.

One source of improvement is what is known as the “infinity cache,” essentially 128MB on-die cache to reduce latency in GPU processing. The company doesn’t give out many more details on how it makes these profits, but hey, we’re going to take them over.

Ray tracing has been an important part of Nvidia’s graphics push in recent years. Therefore, the new cards support accelerated DirectX ray tracing on every processing unit for up to ten times faster performance compared to software-based ray tracing. The cards also support AMD’s FidelityFX, an open source toolkit that allows developers to easily add high quality lighting effects.

For example, with variable rate shading, designers can spend less processing resources on areas of the image that are not as important, while a noise reduction agent should provide cleaner lighting with ray tracing. It also has something called “Super Resolution,” which appears to be the company’s analog for Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology.

AMD also has a more subtle advantage: its technology is used in the PS5 and Xbox series. This should give the company a head start in cross-platform titles.

Here are some slides AMD provided to compare its cards to Nvidia’s. It’s likely that AMD picked games where the cards were more powerful, but seeing the cards go from head to toe is impressive. Here is the RX 6800 versus the RTX 2080 Ti, which roughly corresponds to the RTX 3070:

The RX 6800 XT is compared to the RTX 3080. In this table, AMD also shows the so-called “Smart Access Memory”, a proprietary technology with which computers with the latest Ryzen processors can directly access the GPU memory:

And finally here the RX 6900 compared to the RTX 3090:

It’s the first time in a long time that Team Red has had flagship graphics cards that are on par with Nvidia – and apparently use less power too.

The proof lies in the pudding, however, so we’ll learn more as soon as the cards can be rated by independent users and publications. The RX 6800 and 6800 XT will be available on November 18th, while the 6900 XT will be available on December 8th.

If you have 25 minutes to kill, you can check out AMD’s full announcement below:

For more news and reviews on equipment, gadgets and hardware, see Plugged on
Twitter and flipboard.

Published on October 29, 2020 – 02:13 UTC