AMD Big Navi released: RX 6900 XT, RX 6800, 6800 XT in full presentation

By Chris Burns/Oct. 28, 2020 12:13 pm EST

Today the AMD Big Navi line of AMD graphics cards were revealed in three sizes, all under the name AMD RX 6000. There's the AMD RX 6800, AMD RX 6800 XT, and AMD RX 6900 XT, all with AMD RDNA 2 architecture. The more tantalizing of these is the 6800 XT, a card that'll do battle directly against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT will compete with the RTX 3080 with availability in stores AND a starting price for $659 USD right out the gate.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT was revealed today with up to 3840 shader cores, 72 compute units, each with 64 shader cores. This GPU has a base clock of 2015Mhz (just over 2Ghz), while the boost clock on this GPU was quoted at 2250Mhz (2.25Ghz). In all, the AMD RX 6800 XT will bust out a potential 20.7 TFLOPS.

We'll be interested to see what the 128MB Infinity Cache is all about. That appears to be far larger than would be... immediately apparently necessary. Infinity Cache has the ability to cut power use by 10 percent vs last-gen while effective bandwidth gets a 117 percent boost. That'd be better than the RTX 3080 on paper – but we'll see.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 appears to roll with 60 compute units, 1.8Ghz base clock, 2.1Ghz boost clock, and the same massive 128MB Infinity Cache. Both the 6800 and 6800 XT have 16GB GDDR6 memory. The total board power of the RX 6800 is quoted at 250W.

Then there's the big kahuna... AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. This graphics card works with specifications that are shockingly similar to the 6800 XT, save the number of compute units. With 80 compute units, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has a theoretical compute performance of 23 TFLOPS at best.

AMD suggests that performance in games with the AMD RX 6900 XT is pretty much on-par with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3900. If true, the AMD card's price at MSRP $999 (a full $500 less than the NVIDIA card) will be a real win.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6800 were given a release date of November 18, 2020. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT was announced with a release date of December 8, 2020.

Above you'll see the AMD presentation of these cards and the newest in AMD tech with graphics cards for gamers. This presentation expands on what AMD is doing with the cards and the hardware that'll allow system builders to integrate the full collection into next-generation machines.