AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT review

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT review – Final judgment: It’s been a long time since AMD challenged Nvidia in the upscale segment. Particularly, in the graphics cards market sector. Although it is a decent effort, the performance is not good enough to replace Nvidia. Mainly, in the field of recent DX12 PC games.

Advantages:

• Ray tracing maintenance
• A proper challenge for Nvidia in the high-end segment
• High results in performance on DX11
• Well-working cooling system

Disadvantages:

• Not able to replace Nvidia in the high-power sector
• Incredibly bad tracing performance
• Video card design of lower-level

An important thing happened with the release of this GPU. The company has come back to the upscale segment of the graphics card market. And among many opponents, AMD decided to compete with Nvidia’s creation, namely, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. It was done by releasing a card with modern features and a 4K gaming capacity. Its performance absolutely matches the RTX 3080. In certain games, it even outperforms the Nvidia product, though it fails in others.

Other than that, the given card comes with an appealing price of $649. It allows users to save money while having a decent option to play in 4K. After all, the company created an interesting alternative to Nvidia’s best warrior.

It has always been fairly easy to choose a good GPU for 4K gaming purposes. Even when this feature first appeared on the scene. However, more thrifty gamers will definitely prefer buying the RX 6800 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT  – Price options

The card went on sale on the 18th of November, 2021. The announced price was $649 (which remains the same up to this day). The price tag goes slightly higher on OEM-partner GPUs. This is just a little bit cheaper than $699 for RTX 3080.

Since we’re into the competition in this price category, let’s take the previous RX 6800. This younger model works slightly slower. However, it costs $579. According to that, the price is 12% higher while the card is 5-10% faster.

There’s something wrong with this math, isn’t it?

Therefore, we find it hard to recommend the 6800 XT model from an economic perspective. On the other hand, it could be happening due to the following reason. This new model simply intends to increase the value of the RX 6800. That’s what was going on with the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT in 2019.

Today you can buy AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT gaming graphics card on Amazon for $925

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Graphics Card Design

The given card is one of the most efficient ones among recent AMD GPUs. So the company needed to improve the cooling system. The fan from RX 5700 XT is not enough for a card of such caliber. That’s why the creators decided to implement a 2.5 slot triple fan.

Thanks to that option the temperature stays acceptable, even at default settings. Meanwhile, using MSI Afterburner provides even better thermal regulation by adjusting the fan settings.

And then we have the RX 6800 with a broad choice of ports. A USB-C, an HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPorts cover an average modern monitor nowadays. We appreciate AMD didn’t follow the Nvidia example of abandoning USB-C. There are also 8-pin power outputs on the back of the card.

The review item is, without exaggeration, a high-quality gaming card. It has a black and red design on the side with the company’s logo in white. The letters are also highlighted in red. That’s the part you will mostly see once you install it.

A silverish band encompasses the front side. There are three fans around it, each decorated with the “R” logo. The silver line becomes wider on the back panel. At the same time, the backside remains exposed to the view. It definitely looks “premium”, but, ultimately, it’s not essential.

For some people, the card’s design might look a bit archaic. Especially, considering the fact that gaming aesthetics in black-and-red tones were outdated back in 2021. PC panels are usually made of tempered glass these days. In such a manner, this item will inevitably remind you of 2005. It might become an obstacle for those who’d like to show off their gaming attributes. Anyway, everything depends on your preferences. Most people probably won’t even pay attention to such details.

Graphics Card Features – Desktop Specs

The RDNA 2 architecture serves as a base for the review item. This graphics technology applies a 7-nanometer manufacturing process as a platform. Instead of reducing the chip size, the company invested in fresh features and efficiency growth. Altogether, it makes the new device way more productive than its predecessors.

One of the most notable features is Infinity Cache. This plays a key role when you consider that 6800 XT has 16GB of GDDR6. Meanwhile, RTX 3080 and 3090 use GDDR6X.

In fact, Infinity Cache is 128MB of global storage. It’s 3.25 times faster than the result from GDDR6 memory running on 256 bit. This is according to AMD. In such a manner, data is being transferred to the card from this large 16GB memory pool.

Combining GDDR6 memory with a fast cache leads to 2.4 times more bandwidth per watt. Without this approach, AMD would have to deal with a big gap. It could become a result of ignoring GDDR6X technology on the opponent’s flagships.

Beam gas pedals compatible with the DirectX 12 Ultimate are another detail in the architecture. There are 72 processing units here and each of them has a pedal on it. It allows the card to process ray tracing in real-time with satisfying refresh rates. Later we’ll examine the efficiency of ray tracing for the GPUs. However, there are some expectations concerning performance improvement as new AMD drivers come. The situation was similar with 1st-generation RTX graphics units by Nvidia.

Except for these tools, all compute units (CUs) are arranged just as on the original RDNA cards. Each of them has 64 stream processors. In total, it brings us 4608 CUs on the model. Obviously, since the amount of processors doesn’t reduce, we see a larger chip of 519mm2. It contains 26.8 billion transistors.

Fast clock speeds complement this enlarged block. The model allows frequencies of 2015 MHz. It also offers a potential boost of up to 2250 MHz. Now, what’s the difference between gaming frequencies and Boost Clock? The first term means the numbers you see while playing games. The second one boosts frequencies during short-term workloads.

Of course, power consumption grows along with the increasing clock speeds and chip area. The model’s target is 300 watts. However, we haven’t managed to witness more than 294 watts. In addition, during the gaming tests, the MSI Afterburner showed 230-250 watts. By that, you can tell that the GPU has great overclocking potential.

The new VGA BIOS release promises to help upgrade the 6800 XT’s performance. It can definitely show the RTX 3080 who’s the winner. But at the moment of release, it doesn’t look so good.

Well, it means that the thermal balance remains fine. As we tested it, the temperature reached +78 degrees Celsius at max. This is only a bit higher than on the RX 6800.

The highest point was 114 degrees Celsius, indicating the hottest part of the block. It’s just a bit higher than the number claimed by AMD. The company stated 110 degrees in the performance limits. Also, no trotting was noted. But be ready to see really high values while watching the temperature.

There’s one thing about this card we find particularly interesting. Essentially, it’s an upgraded graphics chip version derived from PS5 and Xbox Series X. Theoretically, game optimization will be an easier process when switching from console to PC. The benefits are easy to spot in Far Cry 5 or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. They don’t belong to the next-generation games, mainly equipped to work on AMD hardware. It’s a clear demonstration of how the optimization process can ultimately affect performance.

AMD added two extra features for the RX 6800 series. They are immensely helpful when it comes to performance gains. Rage Mode and SAM (Smart Access Memory) doesn’t just contribute to performance boost. They go beyond any expectations.

In fact, Rage Mode is an overclocking option sanctioned by AMD. For that reason, it doesn’t affect your warranty. However, you might see a warning message coming out when enabling the program. It says that changing settings happens at your own risk. But it’s not a problem. Your warranty will be fine, as long as you deal with the software by AMD.

We had worse results after running Range Mode in the 3DMark tests. Although, it was all within the margin of error.

The experience was totally different with SAM. As AMD claimed, the technology is able to bring a boost of up to 10%. On the other hand, in order to activate the feature, you’ll need to visit BIOS. Not even to mention recent motherboards and processors. It will be necessary to turn off CSM which often means complete Windows 10 reinstallation. It’s an inevitable step in case your version is not compatible with UEFI. After that, you can activate Above 4G Decoding and Re-Size in advanced settings.

As you can see, it’s a pretty troublesome process. For that reason, we don’t recommend accessing it, unless you’re a technically advanced user. Neither did we test SAM ourselves. But we’ll examine this feature anyway.

Concerning software support, things haven’t changed a lot on part of AMD. It still offers the same Radeon Boost and Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) features. The first option is really helpful for those who prefer dynamic shooters. In such games, the fast motion might cause background thinning, which increases the refresh rate. SAM reduces this unpleasant characteristic.

But currently, AMD has no decent response to DLSS, RTX I/O, or Nvidia Broadcast. It seems like the DLSS ray tracing support will remain a highly important option. Especially when developers learn to gain benefits from Xbox Series X and PS5 SSDs.

RX 6800 XT Performance – Benchmark

Here are the testing system characteristics:

Things are complicated with this card. Sometimes it easily outperforms the RTX 3080. But most of the time it’s just not able to compete with the Nvidia flagship. And, apparently, in the future, the situation will remain the same.

Nevertheless, there’s one area where the card shows better results than its competitors. We’re talking about DirectX 11 games. Let’s take the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra test as an example. It is a DX11 test created especially to rate performance at 4K-like workloads. Our device gained 12,209 scores versus 11034 scores of RTX 3080. That equals approximately a 10% advantage in performance for the same price.

We can take several games as an example to show this difference. Our card is around 8% faster than RTX 3080 in GTA V at 4K resolution. Similarly, in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey it’s 9% faster. But that’s not all.

The RTX 3080 performs 12% better than our card at 4K with disabled ray tracing. Once you enable the feature, the result increases to 34%. And we’re just talking about ray tracing performance alone, without DLSS. With active DLSS on RTX 3080, you get 65 fps at 4K. This is what we see with ray tracing on. Without this advanced feature, the same GPU gives the result of 47 fps. What can we say about this situation? AMD needs to come up with some serious answers to DLSS. Otherwise, it’s meaningless to compete with Nvidia’s smart scaling ray tracing feature.

This is, obviously, an immense advantage on the market, leaving all the opponents far behind.

The 3DMark Port Royal synthetic testing illustrates the situation very well. This test has a clear emphasis on ray tracing. And AMD absolutely failed here with 8.541 scores versus 11.343 for RTX 3080. This is a 33% difference. Nvidia wins a competition with AMD by a wide margin when ray tracing is involved. It’s always like that. Well, at least, our card can support this feature in 1440p resolution.

It’s a good thing AMD puts some effort into presenting itself in this market section. It’s been a long time since the company released a GPU at this level. So we’re glad to have the industry player back into the segment. Besides, as we remember, AMD didn’t dethrone Intel with the 1st-gen Zen at once either. It took a while.

AMD advanced from the 5700 XT to the 6800 XT within just a year. Apparently, the company is going to push the high-end market at the same speed. In such a case, Nvidia will have to come up with something really interesting. The given card won’t dethrone Nvidia, but it proves AMD is back in the game. We can’t wait to test the next generation of RDNA.

We were so curious that we asked the company. According to it, there will be improved performance from the RX 6800 series. So, let’s wait and see.

Buy the graphics card if:

1. You’re used to playing games on DX11. They are the card’s specialty. Take GTA V or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as an example. In case your game works on this API, you’ll get better functioning;

2. You’re willing to spend some time messing with your BIOS. If it doesn’t seem a big issue, you’ll be rewarded with a 10% better performance. That’s what SAM can do. It’s not the most convenient option. At the same time, there’s nothing bad in doing so.

Don’t buy the graphics card if:

1. You find it important to have ray tracing at 4K. The card allows the feature at 1440p resolution. However, in order to get brilliant graphics at these settings, go to Nvidia products;

2. You enjoy games on DirectX 12. With given drivers, the card seriously lags behind in this area. It’s just the API for the next-generation games;

3. You want Nvidia Broadcast or RTX I/O. Currently, Nvidia has a perfect software suite with a full set of features. Meanwhile, AMD offers several interesting things to boost image quality. But it lacks an efficient next-gen I/O API or some AI-mediated noise reduction technologies. Which is a great opportunity for Nvidia to fill the gap.

Final judgment: total score – 9.5

It’s been a long time since AMD challenged Nvidia in the upscale segment. Particularly, in the graphics cards market sector. Although it is a decent effort, the performance is not good enough to replace Nvidia. Mainly, in the field of recent DX12 PC games.

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Video-review on gaming video card AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT: Gaming, Thermals, Noise, & Smart Access Memory Benchmarks

Gaming Graphics Card AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT gaming graphics card GPU review: choosing a good GPU for 4K gaming is easy. Budget conscious PC gamers will prefer to buy RX 6800 XT

Product SKU: RX 6800 XT

Product Brand: AMD

Product Currency: $

Product Price: 869

Price Valid Until: 2023-05-15

Product In-Stock: InStock

Editor's Rating:
9.5