Flipping over to the vanilla RX 6800 and the RTX 3070, AMD does even better. The Radeon RX 6800 XT won't be able to push this CPU to its limit, but at least you know that it'll gladly be paired with a more powerful GPU once you upgrade. The Radeon RX 6800 XT’s 300W power rating is 20W less than the RTX 3080’s. Looking at the GPU clocks, AMD is pushing some serious MHz for a change. RX 6800 (Navi 21) is literally a bigger, enhanced version of last year's Navi 10 GPUs. Meanwhile, the RX 6800 XT mixes it up with the RTX 3080, coming out slightly ahead overall at 1080p and 1440p but barely trailing at 4K. Which brings us to native ray tracing performance. AMD's cache hierarchy is arguably one of the biggest changes. We're still quite a ways off from anything approaching Hollywood levels of fidelity rendered in real time. We've rounded up some of the best … New York, AMD basically sticks to the advertised 300W TBP on the 6800 XT with Metro Exodus, and even comes in slightly below the 250W TBP on the RX 6800. We observed some larger-than-expected transient power spikes with the RX 6800 XT, but to be absolutely clear, these transient power spikes shouldn’t be an issue — particularly if you don’t plan on overclocking. AMD is ready with their newest graphic cards Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT. Besides the above, we have a third suite of ray tracing tests: nine games (or benchmarks of future games) and 3DMark Port Royal. We reviewed the slightly more powerful Core i9-10900K we reviewed favorably, but this Core i9-10850K isn't far behind. Transient power spikes are common but are usually of such short duration (in the millisecond range) that our power measurement gear, which records measurements at roughly a 100ms granularity, can’t catch them. Shop all the best Cyber Monday deals NOW. We've rounded up some of the best CPUs to use with it. The Intel Core i9-10900X is an X-series processor and requires a specific Intel x299 motherboard, but this requirement should be overlooked since it's well worth it. Noise and thermals AMD has just about doubled down on every important aspect of its architecture, plus adding in a huge amount of L3 cache and Ray Accelerators to handle ray tracing ray/triangle intersection calculations. The Radeon RX 6800 sticks to a 2-slot design that should slip easily into most systems, but the Radeon RX 6800 XT expands that to 2.5 slots, hopping on the trend popularized by recent … Here the 8GB of GDDR6 memory on the RTX 3070 simply can't keep pace with the 16GB of higher clocked memory — and the Infinity Cache — that AMD brings to the party. And that was again without DLSS!, enter DLSS and the 2060 super beats the console every time. The Radeon RX 6800 XT is a high-end graphics card by AMD, launched in October 2020. Mostly. There are two DisplayPort outputs, a single HDMI 2.1 connector, and a USB Type-C port. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but these cards are going to sell out. We haven't had time to really dig into the image quality, but Watch Dogs Legion for sure doesn't look the same on AMD compared to Nvidia with ray tracing enabled. We had to cut a bunch of previous-gen cards from our testing, and the hardware varies a bit among the PCs. The interest in the RX 6000 Series is … One model is a reference card, and the other one a custom AIB card from XFX, the XFX Speedster MERC 319. As aforementioned, you likely won't require all that performance, which is where the excellent AMD Ryzen 9 5900X comes into play. The large cache also helps to reduce power consumption, which all ties into AMD's targeted 50 percent performance per Watt improvements. It's really going to come down to personal opinions on how important ray tracing will become in the coming years. By default, though, the cards have a good balance of cooling with noise. It's possible to use four displays with the cards, but the most popular gaming displays still use DisplayPort, and very few options exist for the Type-C connector. It still houses 10 cores and 20 threads, but the TDP rating and clock speeds are a little slower. Windows Central For example, AMD says it reworked much of the architecture to focus on a high speed design. While Metro is generally indicative of how other games behave, we loop the benchmark five times, and there are dips where the test restarts and the GPU gets to rest for a few seconds. Perhaps it's better to say that Navi, in general, is AMD trying to repeat what it did on the CPU side of things. The Ryzen 5 series of processors are yet more affordable than what we've covered already but still come with plenty of cores and threads for you to throw tasks at. This ensures that all modern games will run on Radeon RX 6800 XT. We'll have to see if AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution can match DLSS in the future, and how many developers make use of it. If you want to know more about the finer details of RDNA2, we'll cover that as well. AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Graphics Card -- ORDER CONFIRMED AMD DIRECT NEW. Otherwise, you get a similar industrial design and aesthetic with both the reference 6800 and 6800 XT. It supports multiple ray tracing effects, and even the RTX 3070 holds a significant 30 percent lead over the 6800 XT at 1080p and 1440p. So much for AMD's comparable performance. The Radeon RX 6800 XT isn't AMD's best graphics card, but it does have some considerable firepower for even the most demanding PC games. And we'll likely still need DLSS, or AMD's Super Resolution, to hit acceptable frame rates at 4K. It houses 16 cores and 32 threads, and performance is about as good as those numbers suggest. And, let's be real for a moment: There's not a chance in hell AMD's RX 6800 series are going to do any better. The 3090 did best with the 5900X at 1080p, but then went to the 10900K at 1440p and both the 9900K and 10900K at 4K. Let's start with a quick look at the specifications, which have been mostly known for at least a month. It seems AMD is having a microprocessor renaissance of sorts right now. You know, just like every other high-end GPU and CPU launched in the past couple of months. We've done some 'bonus' tests on each of the Founders Edition reviews, but we're shifting gears this round. Another great thing AMD did with the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 graphics cards is the board design, with the company making all 3 of the cards at a standard ~10.5 inches or so. We're still investigating overclocking as well, as there's a bit of odd behavior so far. Meanwhile, Nvidia gets modest wins in The Division 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the largest lead is in Strange Brigade. Looks like AMD is really reducing this sampling in an effort to speed up ray tracing. Typically you’d need a quality oscilloscope to measure transient power spikes accurately, but we did record several spikes even with our comparatively relaxed polling. Temperatures and fan speeds are directly related to each other. Im guessing theres still a lot of work to do on the developer side and probably on the driver side. says Team Red. Yesterday Cowcotland reported that AMD RDNA2 reference designs have reached the end of life. A PCIe cable can easily deliver ~225W safely (even with 18AWG), so these transient power spikes aren’t going to melt connectors, wires, or harm the GPU in any way — they would need to be of much longer duration to have that type of impact. Pairing up a good graphics card with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the sure way of creating a powerful gaming rig. Besides the testbeds, I've also got a bunch of additional gaming tests. Full specs are in the table below. If you can find a Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT in stock any time before 2021, it's definitely worth considering. This doesn't mean power requirements stayed the same — RX 6800 has a slightly higher TBP (Total Board Power) than the RX 5700 XT, and the 6800 XT and upcoming 6900 XT are back at 300W (like the Vega 64). I was wrong. But the first generation Zen CPUs and motherboards were raw and had some issues, and it wasn't until Zen 2 that AMD really started winning key matchups, and Zen 3 finally has AMD in the lead. AMD has talked about FidelityFX Super Resolution, which it's working on with Microsoft, but it's not available yet, and of course, no games are shipping with it yet either. Update: We've added additional results to the CPU scaling charts. Just look at the chip sizes and other components. We've got our usual collection of power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing using Metro Exodus running at 1440p, and FurMark running at 1600x900 in stress test mode. It's not a huge improvement, though. I think they reduced the size of the bounding boxes as well to reduce collisions. However, AMD still comes in at a lower power level than Nvidia's competing GPUs, which is a bit of a change of pace from previous generation architectures. Take your time. Thanks to the 128MB cache, the framebuffer mostly ends up being cached, which drastically cuts down memory access. But Dirt 5, Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Watch Dogs Legion have the 3070 falling behind the 6800 XT at least, and sometimes the RX 6800 as well. Horizon Zero Dawn ends up favoring Nvidia quite a bit (but not the 3070), and lastly, we have Watch Dogs Legion, which favors Nvidia a bit (more at 4K), but it might have some bugs that are currently helping AMD's performance. We've retested all of the RTX 30-series cards on our Core i9-9900K testbed … but we didn't have time to retest the RTX 20-series or RX 5700 series GPUs. Or put another way, it's 12 percent more money, for 12 percent more performance at 1080p, 14 percent more performance at 1440p, and 16 percent better 4K performance. The new RX 6800 cards might just be the equivalent of AMD's Ryzen CPU launch. But there are still a lot of games forgoing ray tracing effects, or games where ray tracing doesn't make a lot of sense considering how it causes frame rates to plummet. … FurMark pushes power on both cards a bit higher, which is pretty typical. But that's the big new feature for RDNA2 and the Radeon RX 6000 series, so we definitely wanted to look into ray tracing performance more. Faster ray tracing, plus DLSS — and whatever else those Tensor cores might be used for in the future — seems like the safer bet long term. We collect the power data using Powenetics software and hardware, which uses GPU-Z to monitor GPU temperatures, clocks, and fan speeds. Dropping to 1440p, the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT are effectively tied — again, AMD wins several games, Nvidia wins others, but the average performance is the same. It's not entirely clear how AMD's Ray Accelerators stack up against Nvidia's RT cores. While the base clock … The RX 6800 XT ends up just a bit slower than the RTX 3080 overall in traditional rendering, but it costs less, and it uses a bit less power (unless you kick on Rage Mode, in which case it's a tie). With a Radeon RX 6800 XT, you'll be able to enjoy butter-smooth gaming at 1440p. AMD AMD. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT impresses in spots with record-breaking results in specific benchmarks, but inconsistent frame rates on several games, and driver-stability issues, keep it from … Yes, Big Navi has been seated on the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. Get instant access to breaking news, in-depth reviews and helpful tips. That doesn't even get into the whole DLSS and Tensor core discussion. That's pretty damn impressive, especially considering power use isn't higher than Nvidia's GPUs. But as good as the RX 6800 looks against the RTX 3070, we prefer the RX 6800 XT from AMD. Overall, the 3090 still maintains its (gold-plated) crown, which you'd sort of expect from a $1,500 graphics card that you can't even buy right now. ... Because MSRP of RTX 3070 is $809 and RX 6800 is $949, which means 680 is $140 more expensive 'officially'. The other GPUs also swap places, though usually the difference between CPU is pretty negligible (and a few results just look a bit buggy). Looking just at the four new games, AMD gets a big win in Assassin's Creed Valhalla (it's an AMD promotional title, so future updates may change the standings). In a statement to us, it said, "We are aware of the issue and are working to address it in a patch in December." Power consumption over the PCIe slot is well managed during all the tests (as a general rule of thumb, this value shouldn’t exceed 71W, and the 6800 XT is well below that mark). While on paper, initial impressions of the performance achieved by the $649 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT might make the card seem like a good deal compared with the $699 RTX 3080 Founders … Boundary, Control, Crysis Remastered, and (to a lesser extent) Fortnite also have the 3070 leading the AMD cards. "No longer!" This is now easily the highest clocked GPU we've ever seen, and when we manually overclocked the RX 6800, we were able to hit a relatively stable 2550 MHz. Both cards have a Radeon logo that lights up in red, but it looks like the 6800 XT might have an RGB logo — it's not exposed in software yet, but maybe that will come. It's a highly capable graphics card that demands an equally capable motherboard. Ramp of fan speed — which we did for the overclocked 6800 cards — and you can get lower temperatures, at the cost of noise levels. The Radeon RX 6800 XT is rated for a 2,015MHz Game Clock—AMD’s term for the expected frequency during gameplay—and boosts all the way up to a ludicrous 2,250MHz in some … As usual, a PSU with a single 12V rail tends to be the best solution because they have much better OCP mechanisms, and you’re also better off using dedicated PCIe cables for each 8-pin connector. RMA There are enough games where AMD comes out ahead that you can make a legitimate case for AMD having the better card. But those will eventually come. There's a lack of light reflections that show up in NVIDIA's RT that fail to show up on AMD's. Sure, Intel can compete on a per-core basis … but only up to 10-core chips without moving into HEDT territory. While this may be a step-down from the Ryzen 9 5950X, we're still going for a Ryzen 9 5900X, which comes with 12 cores and 24 threads. Patriot supplied us with two kits of single bank DDR4-4000 memory, which means we have 4x8GB instead of our normal 2x16GB configuration. Anyway, the slightly slower RAM might be a bit of a handicap on the Intel PCs, but this isn't a CPU review — we just wanted to use the two fastest CPUs, and time constraints and lack of duplicate hardware prevented us from going full apples-to-apples. The consoles now support the technology, but even the Xbox Series X can't keep up with an RX 6800, never mind an RTX 3080. The same goes for the Intel Core i7-10700K, which is almost as good as the i9-10900K sibling. There are other value options, too, if you feel comfortable going for a processor with fewer cores and threads. Of course, you can't buy any of the Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs right now. Compared to last generation’s AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT… Best 4K Gaming Monitors for PC 2020: 144Hz, Curved and More, Best Gaming Monitors 2020: Budget, 144Hz and More, Here's Where Sony and Microsoft Stand on Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds. The best Nvidia can do is one or two minor wins (e.g., Far Cry 5 at 1080p, where the GPUs are more CPU limited) and slightly higher minimum fps in FFXIV and Strange Brigade. Built on the 7 nm process, and based on the Navi 21 graphics processor, in its Navi 21 XT variant, the card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate. The last time AMD was this close … well, maybe Hawaii (Radeon R9 290X) was competitive in performance at least, while using quite a bit more power. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. But it looks pretty impresive compared to the RX 5000 series. (It seems we're missing an acronym. The 10 cores and 20 threads offer plenty of performance for single and multi-core applications, including games. The internal comparisons among GPUs on each testbed will still be consistent. Time for more discounts! With the arrival of Zen 3, running AMD GPUs with AMD CPUs finally means no compromises. AMD's RX 6800 series can definitely hold its own against Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs in traditional rasterization modes. We're adding four new/recent games that will be tested on each of the CPU testbeds: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Watch Dogs Legion — and we've enabled DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on Dirt 5 and Watch Dogs Legion. AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 … If you plan on overclocking, it would be best to factor the RX6800 XT's transient power consumption into the total system power. The RTX 3090 is another 10-15 percent ahead of the 3080, which is very much out of AMD's reach if you care at all about ray tracing performance — ignoring price, of course. That's left AMD to mostly compete in the high-end, mid-range, and budget GPU markets. Anyway, if you want a different port selection, keep an eye on the third party cards, as I'm sure they'll cover other configurations. Plus, while some games like Control make great use of ray tracing effects, in many other games, the ray tracing could be disabled, and most people wouldn't really miss it. First is the suite of nine games we've used on recent GPU reviews like the RTX 30-series launch.