AMD unveils three Radeon 6000 graphics cards with ray tracing and RTX-beating performance

It's time for BIG NAVI, as AMD has unveiled their new Radeon graphics cards: the $579 RX 6800, $649 RX 6800 XT and $999 RX 6900 XT. AMD claims that the cards should meet or beat Nvidia's flagship RTX 30-series graphics cards, all the way up to the $1499 RTX 3090, at a lower price and often consuming while consuming less power. The 6000-series cards are also the first desktop AMD GPUs to support real-time ray tracing, variable rate shading and other DirectX 12 Ultimate features. All in all, it's an exciting package for AMD fans - and would-be Nvidia users that might have become frustrated with poor RTX 30-series availability.

The performance here is what most people are looking for, so let's start with that. In AMD's slides, they showed the 300W RX 6800 XT trading blows with the 320W RTX 3080 at 4K, with small leads for the AMD card in Battlefield 5, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Forza Horizon 4 and narrow losses in The Division 2, Resident Evil 3 and Wolfenstein Young Blood. Elsewhere, like in Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Gears 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the two cards were more or less equal. It was a similar story at 1440p, where the AMD card remained competitive in each title displayed.

Meanwhile, the RX 6800 looks set to compete against the RTX 2080 Ti - and by extension, the RTX 3070. AMD's marketing materials showed the 6800 beating the 2080 Ti comprehensively at 4K and 1440p, often by a 10 per cent margin or higher, although the slide notes that this is with Smart Access Memory enabled (more on that later).

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