Thoughts on AMD's 'Big Navi' 6000 series GPU's....

 

AMD recently announced the new Radeon RX 6000 'Big Navi' GPU series, these are my thoughts and takes on the bold new moves from one of the biggest underdogs of the industry.

So, let's get into it! Big Navi has been in development for years and rumors have swirled alongside it, the hype has been real with many waiting to see AMD make their move against Nvidia.  AMD made that move, the new GPU's themselves are powered by RDNA 2, the same technology inside the GPU's of the Xbox Series X, Series S, and PS5.  The RDNA 2 architecture is built on a 7nm node and improves on the 50% efficiency gains achieved by RDNA 1, efficiency is key to improving performance and AMD knows it.  Their promising 2x performance gains over the previous generation at 4K as seen with the graphic below.

Image credit: AMD

So, it's time to look at the 6000 series starting with the Radeon RX 6900 XT. With 5,120 stream processors, 80 compute units, and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM the 6900 is a beast of a graphics card. It increases performance-per-watt by 65% and it supports Microsoft's DirectX 12 Ultimate, this means support for ray tracing, variable rate shading and mesh shaders. Ray tracing is an added benefit of the RDNA 2 as seen on all the next-gen consoles, Nvidia has been the only one to have ray tracing for the better part of 2 years, ray tracing has its benefits and drawbacks but I'm glad to see it finally come to other graphics card.  

The RX 6900XT can go up to 4K at 6FPS, I do want to note that I can't find the exact max frame rate, I could only find 4K at 60FPS so that'll have to do. The RX 6900XT is priced at $999 while the RTX 3090 is priced at $1499, this allows the RX 6900XT to undercut the RTX 3090 and as we'll see later how the RX 6900XT competes with Nvidia. AMD continues to stay true to its price-to-performance ratio that has helped AMD to make name for itself in the midrange and can now begin to breakout in the high-end.

 

Image credit: AMD

So, let’s talk about the 6800XT and the 6800, although not as powerful as the 6900 they still pack a punch.  The RX 6800XT is the mid-tier GPU coming in at $649 with 16GB GDDR6 of RAM, 72 computer units, and 4,608 stream processors the RX 6800XT is a powerhouse that can stand up to the RTX 3080.  The last one is the RX 6800, this is the lowest end of the 6000 series with 60 compute units, 3,840 processors, and is priced at $579.

Image credit: AMD

Now that we've talked about the 6000 series it's time to address the biggest question on everyone's mind, can the 6000 series compete with the 3000 series from Nvidia. This is where the huge generational leap for Big Navi comes in, AMD has finally managed to be competitive with Nvidia and in some cases, beat them. 

 

So, let's look at the 6900XT, the 6900 goes neck and neck with the RTX 3090, staying competitive in all games and even beating the 3090 in some games.  We see this same storyline with the RX 6800XT, staying competitive with the RTX 3080 and even beating it in certain games.   It even manages to do it with a lower TDP than the 3080; TDP being "thermal design power" and with the score being 300 for the 6900 and the 6800 VS the 320 demanded from the RTX 3080. The RX 6800 is the only outlier being compared to the RTX 2080Ti and not the RTX 3070, real world tests remain to be seen so I'll go off what AMD showed us. The RX 6800 consistently beat the RTX 2080Ti, the 2080Ti being the best of the last generation, in every game.

Image credit: AMD

This is a huge milestone for AMD, for years they were exiled to niche markets such as the Mac line from Apple, this was evident in the 5000 series where they mainly focused on price-to-power ratio. The 6000 series is a return to the high-end, Nvidia has dominated the space for too long and AMD is finally fighting back. The 6000 series is very similar to revival AMD saw with the Ryzen 4000 series where they beat Intel in Laptops, AMD is beating Nvidia in GPU's.  AMD has given incentive to the Game developers to optimize for Radeon, they've given Adobe a reason to optimize premier pro and aftereffects.  The 6000 series is real progress from AMD if they can keep this up this up Nvidia might have a real competitor to deal with. One thing is for sure, Big Navi just made Nvidia sweat.

 

 

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