AMD is one of the famous and trustworthy companies selling graphic cards and it has recently announced their three new graphics cards under the Radeon RX 6000 series: AMD Radeon RX 6800, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and its new flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. The last one of them is being said as the fastest gaming graphics card that AMD has ever developed, as claimed by the American Giant.
The first two graphic cards — RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT — will be available for purchase from November 18 at a price of $579 which is about Rs. 43,000 in India and $649 which will cost around Rs. 48,000 in India and with the RX 6900 XT will be made available from December 8 and at a price of $999 which will cost around Rs. 74,000. However, India prices have not been revealed yet and are expected to be revealed closer to the launch date. With its new RDNA 2 architecture, AMD is positioning its 6000-series cards in direct competition with Nvidia’s latest 30-series GPUs in terms of its price, features, and performance.
Infinity catch which is new to the 6000-series cards is 128MB of memory directly on the GPU die. The cache works as a “bandwidth amplifier” for the rest of the card’s memory; 16GB of GDDR6 combined with the 128MB Infinity Cache increases “effective bandwidth”, as said by AMD and by up to 3.25 times compared to the same amount of memory without the cache. The 6000-series cards also introduced a hardware-accelerated ray-tracing along with one ‘Ray Accelerator’ per Compute Unit.
The card’s ray-tracing technology is based on the DirectX 12 Ultimate implementation; AMD said that the developers can mix and match ray-tracing effects and rasterization, with “an order of magnitude” improvement in ray-tracing operations as compared to the last generation of Radeon cards. The company will also be introducing a unique feature for users who wish to pair AMD’s 6000-series GPUs with the company’s own 5000-series Ryzen CPUs. The company says the Called Smart Access Memory feature will allow the CPU to access more of the GPUs memory at once, which will result in a performance boost of a few percentage points depending on the title.
| Model | AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT | AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT | AMD Radeon RX 6800 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 80 | 72 | 60 |
| GDDR6 | 16GB | 16GB | 16GB |
| Base Clock (MHz) | 2015 | 2015 | 1815 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | Up to 2250 | Up to 2250 | Up to 2105 |
| Memory Interface | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit |
| Infinity Cache | 128 MB | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Price (USD) | $999 | $649 | $579 |
| Price (INR) | 74,159 | 48,177 | 42,981 |
There is not a really groundbreaking change in performance by itself, it’s essentially ‘free’ (if you use the right combination of hardware), and is a smart way to leverage the broader hardware portfolio of the company. AMD’s own versions of the Radeon RX 6000-series cards include a USB-C across the board, which would allow the cards to support the VirtualLink standard for the VR in particular, —a USB-C ‘alt-mode’ designed to provide the VR headsets with data, power, and video all through one single port.
In short, a USB-C port on the RX 6000-series cards would mean that VirtualLink devices would work fine, and headset makers could always create their own single-cable headset connection based on the card’s USB port. The RDNA 2 architecture of the 6000-series GPUs also support the Variable Rate Shading which will allow fine-grain control over the shading rate from one frame to the next.
This can be used to lower the resolution of some parts of the scene while maintaining a full resolution is important, or high detail of the particular scene. The Variable Rate Shading feature opens the door to more precise foveated rendering for the VR headsets specifically, which could be static or active. AMD hasn’t shown its own VR-specific solution (like Nvidia’s Variable Rate Supersampling) but the underlying technology for supporting this kind of foveation is there under the hood.
