What's special about the RX 6800 and 6800 XT is what's under the hood: AMD's new 7nm RDNA 2 architecture, its first with support for hardware accelerated ray tracing. As aforementioned, you likely won't require all that performance, which is where the excellent AMD Ryzen 9 5900X comes into play. Announced back in late October , … We've got our standard testbed using an 'ancient' Core i9-9900K CPU, but we wanted something a bit more for the fastest graphics cards on the planet. Learn more. Sure, Intel can compete on a per-core basis … but only up to 10-core chips without moving into HEDT territory. Was it akin to the old reference designs or actually quiet for once. It's been a long time since AMD had a legitimate contender for the GPU throne. Besides the testbeds, I've also got a bunch of additional gaming tests. Turn on ray tracing, even without DLSS, and things can get ugly. But it looks pretty impresive compared to the RX 5000 series. 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. Boundary, Control, Crysis Remastered, and (to a lesser extent) Fortnite also have the 3070 leading the AMD cards. Should you want to try some more demanding games at higher resolutions, it may be worth investing in a better processor. Here's where things take a turn for the worse because ray tracing is very demanding, and Nvidia has DLSS to help overcome some of the difficulty by doing AI-enhanced upscaling. We also have the Patriot Viper VP4100 2TB SSD holding all of our games. 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. Picking up the right CPU for your gaming PC build largely comes down to what you plan on playing. Temperatures and fan speeds are directly related to each other. The 10 cores and 20 threads offer plenty of performance for single and multi-core applications, including games. It's easily a match for the Radeon RX 6800 XT. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 have arrived, joining the ranks of the best graphics cards and making some headway into the top positions in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Again, these peaks were measured within one 100ms polling cycle, which means they could certainly trip a PSU's over power protection if you're running at close to max power delivery. The charts above show total power consumption of the RX 6800XT at stock settings, overclocked, and with Rage Mode enabled. TweakTown tested two Radeon RX 6800 XT GPUs. © The Navi 21 GPU, by comparison, is made on the same TSMC N7 wafers, and it uses 519mm square, plus it needs GDDR6 memory, a beefy cooler and fan, and all sorts of other components. Basically, Big Navi can match RTX 3080 when it comes to power if you relax increase the power limits. Dirt 5 is also a bit of an odd duck for Nvidia, with the RTX 3090 actually doing quite badly on the Ryzen 9 5900X and Core i9-10900K for some reason. Best There are some transient power spikes that can go a bit higher as well, which we'll discuss more later. 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. A Ryzen 9 5900X has two 80mm square compute die with a 12nm IO die in a relatively compact package, and AMD is currently selling every single one of those CPUs for $550 — or $800 for the 5950X. Power spikes of 5-10ms can trip the overcurrent protection (OCP) on some multi-rail power supplies because they tend to have relatively low OCP thresholds. 2020. 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. 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. 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. In these results, AMD isn’t putting its thumb on the scale with Smart Access Memory. It's a little cheaper, has fewer cores, but is more reasonable for gaming (and your budget). Sorry, been up all night, getting a bit loopy here...) The thing is, Nvidia is on its second-gen RT cores that are supposed to be around 1.7X as fast as its first-gen RT cores. We saw the same style of fan on many of the RTX 30-series GPUs, and it looks like the engineers have discovered a better way to direct airflow. Anyway, we've looked at ray tracing performance with DLSS in a bunch of these games, and performance improves by anywhere from 20 percent to as much as 80 percent (or more) in some cases. There are two DisplayPort outputs, a single HDMI 2.1 connector, and a USB Type-C port. It's a highly capable graphics card that demands an equally capable motherboard. 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 … At 1080p, AMD even pulls ahead by two percent overall. 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. This time, AMD isn't making any apologies. PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800. The design is pretty traditional, building on previous cards like the Radeon VII. 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. When AMD fans started talking about "Big Navi" as far back as last year, this is pretty much what they hoped to see. AMD's best GPUs to date are strong in rasterization but fall behind in ray tracing. Pairing up a good graphics card with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the sure way of creating a powerful gaming rig. $1,100.00 + shipping . Looks like AMD is really reducing this sampling in an effort to speed up ray tracing. AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series graphics cards with enhanced RDNA 2 compute units featuring Ray Accelerators are optimized to deliver real-time lighting, shadow, and reflection realism with DirectX … These are the best motherboards you should use with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU. And it still only sells for roughly the same price as the 5900X. Let's start with a quick look at the specifications, which have been mostly known for at least a month. Now, it's time to take all the theoretical aspects and lay some rubber on the track. So, what does the Radeon RX 6800 XT offer that justifies its $70 price increase? 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. Just look at the chip sizes and other components. That's probably due to the lack of overclocking support in MSI Afterburner for the time being. Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (M1) Review: a Shot in the Arm. It's really going to come down to personal opinions on how important ray tracing will become in the coming years. 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. Yes, AMD has some fast GPUs, but they tend to use a lot of power. First is the suite of nine games we've used on recent GPU reviews like the RTX 30-series launch. But these are mostly very small differences, and any of the three CPUs tested here are sufficient for gaming. 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. Naturally, those same spikes are much less pronounced with Rage Mode overclocking, measuring only 210W and 173W. Flipping over to the vanilla RX 6800 and the RTX 3070, AMD does even better. Otherwise, you get dual 8-pin PEG power connections, which might seem a bit overkill on the 6800 — it's a 250W card, after all, why should it need the potential for up to 375W of power? The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 can go head to head with Nvidia's best, and often come out on top at 1080p and 1440p. There also aren't any HDMI 2.1 monitors that I'm aware of, unless you want to use a TV for your monitor. This CPU will be able to handle even the most demanding of games at 1440p and 4K. But the transient spikes are noteworthy because some CPUs, like the Intel Core i9-9900K and i9-10900K, can consume more than 300W, adding to the total system power draw. Overall, the RX 6800 XT was 4-6 percent faster when overclocked (the higher results were at 4K). Yes, Big Navi has been seated on the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. Oddly, my test systems ended up with the Core i9-10900K and even the Core i9-9900K often leading the Ryzen 9 5900X. AMD's RX 6800 series can definitely hold its own against Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs in traditional rasterization modes. We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra results for each of the games, as well as the combined average of the nine titles. The 12-core processor has plenty of performance available so we rounded up some of the best GPUs for gaming right now to go along with it. Visit our corporate site. If you want the very best, go with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Should you already own an Intel motherboard or prefer team blue, this is the best value chip, but if you're starting fresh, we'd recommend the Ryzen 5 5600X. Full specs are in the table below. Which isn't to say you shouldn't want to buy an RX 6800 card. Which is why we need 2TB drives. That's what we're here to find out. That's sort of been the standard disclaimer for AMD GPUs for quite a few years. Noise and thermals 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. AMD Radeon RX 6800 & 6800 XT: 4K Performance of 17 launch reviews compiled. The Radeon RX 6800 XT’s 300W power rating is 20W less than the RTX 3080’s. FurMark pushes power on both cards a bit higher, which is pretty typical. Take the new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Hopefully that gets updated soon. But then there's Cyberpunk 2077 looming, which could be the killer game that ray tracing hardware needs. 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. Enabling Rage Mode on the 6800 XT obviously changes things, and you can also see our power figures for the manual overclocks. Review. 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 interest in the RX 6000 Series is … If you're just here for the benchmarks, skip down a few screens because, hell yeah, do we have some benchmarks. 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. AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT specs and performance. The RTX 3070 comes out with a 10-15 percent lead over the RX 6800, but individual games can behave quite differently. Now we're looking at a $700 graphics card instead of a $500 graphics card, but at least it's a decent jump in performance. We're still investigating overclocking as well, as there's a bit of odd behavior so far. AMD's RDNA2 chips can do FP16 via shaders, but they're still a far cry from the computational throughput of Tensor cores. DLSS may not always look better, but a slight drop in visual fidelity for a big boost in framerates is usually hard to pass up. In terms of features, Nvidia still comes out ahead. How do AMD's latest GPUs stack up to the competition, and could this be AMD's GPU equivalent of the Ryzen debut of 2017? The one potential concern with AMD's reference design is the video ports. 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 … We've rounded up some of the best CPUs to use with it. Clock speeds are also higher, and — spoiler alert! We've rounded up some of the best … AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 … Meanwhile, DLSS is in a couple of dozen games now, and it's also in Unreal Engine, which means uptake of DLSS could explode over the coming year. You will receive a verification email shortly. Increase the power limit, GPU core clocks, and GDDR6 clocks and you get more performance. … Thank you for signing up to Tom's Hardware. 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. The other GPUs also swap places, though usually the difference between CPU is pretty negligible (and a few results just look a bit buggy). Yes, Big Navi has been seated on the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. Maybe, but it's probably more likely that AMD is working with Codemasters to ensure it runs suitably on the RX 6800 cards. Well. Ignoring the often-too-low framerates, overall, the RTX 3080 is nearly 25 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT at 1080p, and that lead only grows at 1440p (26 percent) and 4K (30 percent). We had to cut a bunch of previous-gen cards from our testing, and the hardware varies a bit among the PCs. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. We didn't have time to do a full suite of CPU scaling tests, but we did run 13 games on the five most recent high-end/extreme GPUs on our three test PCs. But that's only at the highest resolution, where AMD's Infinity Cache may not be quite as effective. 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. 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. To drill down on the topic, we split out our power measurements from each power source, which you’ll see above. Besides a shared 1MB L1 cache for each cluster of 20 dual-CUs, there's a 4MB L2 cache and a whopping 128MB L3 cache that AMD calls the Infinity Cache. The other problem is probably just a bug, but AMD's RX 6800 cards seem to render the reflections in Watch Dogs Legion with a bit less fidelity. With the Radeon RX 6800 series, AMD is mostly able to put questions of power and performance behind it. Otherwise, you get a similar industrial design and aesthetic with both the reference 6800 and 6800 XT.