[ad_1]
Man, AMD is on a roll. Just a few years ago, the company seemed destined to fade into relative obscurity in the fields dominated by Intel and Nvidia. Now, in 2020, the company is managing to trade blows with its heavyweight competitors in two different markets. Case in point: The company today revealed the Radeon RX 6000 series, with specs and pricing to offer a real challenge to Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards, and potentially save you some money.
That’s no small feat, considering the fact that AMD was behind the previous generation and that the new Nvidia cards are one of its biggest generation leaps. However, if AMD’s performance metrics are to be believed, the RX 6800 ($ 579), 6800 XT ($ 649), and 6900 XT ($ 999) offer real competition to the RTX 3070 ($ 500), 3080 ($ 700) and 3090 ($ 1,500). , respectively. The RX 6900 XT in particular seems like a fantastic deal.
AMD claims that its new RDNA 2 technology offers up to twice the performance of the previous generation and consumes roughly the same amount of power (and less than Nvidia equivalents). This is despite the fact that the company is using the same 7-nanometer transistor size as its previous boards.
One source of the improvement is something called “Infinity Cache”, essentially 128MB of cache on the matrix to reduce latency in GPU processing. The company does not provide many other details on how it is achieving these benefits, but hey, we will accept them.
Ray tracing has been a big part of Nvidia’s graphics push in recent years, which is why the new cards support accelerated DirectX ray tracing on each compute unit for up to ten times faster performance compared to tracing. software-based lightning. The cards are also compatible with AMD’s FidelityFX, an open source suite of tools for developers to easily add high-quality lighting effects.
Variable speed shading, for example, allows developers to spend fewer processing resources on areas of the image that are not as important, while a noise remover should allow for cleaner ray tracing lighting. It also has something called ‘Super Resolution’, which appears to be the company’s analog for Nvidia’s DLSS scaling technology.
AMD also has a more subtle advantage: its technology is used in the PS5 and Xbox series. That should give the company an edge in cross-platform titles.
Here are some slides AMD provided comparing their cards to Nvidia’s. AMD has likely chosen games where its cards will perform better, but it’s impressive to see how the cards go head-to-head. Here’s the RX 6800 against the RTX 2080 Ti, which is roughly equivalent to the RTX 3070:
Here’s how the RX 6800 XT compares to the RTX 3080. In this graph, AMD also shows something called ‘smart access memory’, a proprietary technology that allows computers running the latest Ryzen processors to directly access memory from the GPU:
And finally, here is the RX 6900 compared to the RTX 3090:
It’s the first time in a long time that the red team has flagship graphics cards that appear to be completely on par with Nvidia’s, although apparently they also consume less power.
The proof is in the pudding though, so we’ll learn more once the cards can be evaluated by independent users and posts. The RX 6800 and 6800 XT will be available starting November 18, while the 6900 XT will arrive on December 8.
If you have 25 minutes to kill, you can see AMD’s full announcement below:
For more news and reviews on computers, devices and hardware, follow Connected
Twitter and Flipboard.
Posted Oct 29, 2020 – 02:13 UTC
[ad_2]
