In the last couple of years, every best AMD graphics cards best was built with one simple goal in mind, and that is to offer a lot of performance for a very reasonable price and they were mostly targeting those entry-level to mid-range gaming bills that are paired with 1080p monitors because if you look at statistics, that is what the majority of gamers are playing on the right.
{tocify} $title={Table of Contents}
AMD Radeon RX 6800 & RX 6800XT & Benchmark
Now while AMD did have an occasional higher-end card here and there. They never really challenged the most expensive and the most powerful GPUs on the market in any of their previous generations.
Because all this will change today with these two new graphics cards. So here I have the brand new Radeon RX 6800 XT which is a $650 or 670 euro graphics card that is meant to go head to head with a slightly more expensive RTX 3080.
And this is the RX 6800, which is a $580 or 600 euro GPU, that is meant to outperform and video slightly cheaper, Rtx 3070.
Then in the next couple of weeks and rx 6900 XT will show up as well. That one is supposed to take on the most powerful card at the moment, the Rtx3090.
While costing much less so no wonder, this whole tech scene was waiting for this lineup to come out and to bring some, you know, actual competition and some proper excitement to this high-end segment as well.
So without much further ado, let's check these cards out let's see how they perform, and talk about all that fun stuff like if your CPU will make a difference about ray tracing and the most heated topic in these last few months, availability. Let's begin.
Best AMD Radeon Graphics Cards
This post is brought to you by Seasonic and their prime series power supplies, these top-quality power supplies are very efficient.
They whisper quiet, extremely reliable, and my go-to choice for most of my test rings and builds around here, and to make the deal even sweeter, Sonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year-long warranty. Check them out using the links in the description below.
New Reference Design
AMD graphics card best to worstcompletely changed the reference design they dropped a blower-style cooler they use before, which kind of always ran really warm and really loud, and they went with a proper big heat sink with three fans instead.
And I have to say they're well built, too They are heavy they have a sturdy metal backplate, and they just look and feel like proper high-end graphics cards. The Rx 6800 XT is a two and a half slot card while the 6800 is a two-slot card.
But I would say in every other way they look pretty much the same. I do have to say I'm not a huge fan of any design that uses an accent color like these red lines are the red logo that you cannot change.
I do know that red is an AMD scholar, but it does feel a bit old school and it does make it much harder to match with your other hardware.
Connection
Now both best amd radeon graphics cards come with 2 DisplayPort 1.4 connections and a single HDMI 2.1 port, plus a Type C connection that Nvidia has dropped, completely from their cards.
And when it comes to power, both the 6800 and the 6800 XT required 8 pin power connectors, as they are 250 watts and 300-watt cards, respectively.
RDNA 2 Promises
But the most interesting thing about these cards is actually on the inside, Amd new RDNA to chip, and obviously, the first time we saw this RDNA was in their Rx 5700 and 5700 XT cards from last year that was, per usual, aimed at that mid-range segment.
Well, this new and improved architecture actually promises a lot more performance, and a lot better power efficiency than the previous chipset, so I would say, No wonder they decided to use this exact tag for both the PlayStation five, and the new Microsoft Xbox consoles as well.
Gaming Performance vs RTX 3070 & RTX 3080
But the real question here is, How fast are they? now it does both of these cards on my i9 10900k bench and in raw numbers, the 6800 non XT showed some pretty good results.
Overall, so it was usually ahead of the RTX 3070 from a couple of percent in some titles to double digits in others.
There are still some games that just a favorite post, and there are some games that just favor AMD. I would say that is even more noticeable when you look at the results of the RX 6800 XT compared to the RTX 3080.
Where AMD is 15% slower in some games, and then 10% faster and others so I would say overall it gives great frame rates on 1080P and 1440p resolutions, and it offers a pretty good 4k experience as well.
Now the fact that these numbers vary so much per game is important to keep in mind because it means that you cannot really compare different reviews, side by side because all reviewers just use a different set of games and their benchmarks and, you know, depending on those games, they might end up with different conclusions about these cards as well.
So for example, if you take this graph here and you take out a couple of games that do well with AMD and post will come up ahead, or if you put those games back and you take out a couple of games that favor Nvidia AMD would be a clear winner. And with these results just being all over the place like this.
My advice would be to just check more reviews and check more benchmarks before forming in conclusion, and don't just stick to one single percentage between them.
And if you're just interested in one particular game. Just make sure you check which GPU that game works better on.
Performance Summary on i9-10900k
Now, overall in triple-A titles, the 6800 XT ended up around 3% behind the Rtx 3080 across all resolutions.
which is actually great for a card that is meant to be $50 cheaper and the 6800 non-XT ended up around four to 12% faster than the RTX 3070 depending on the resolution, which again sounds pretty okay for the price premium over the RTX 3070.
Esports Gaming Performance
But let's check some eSports games as well in very light titles like cs go or Overwatch. It doesn't really matter which one you pick as all these cards are more than powerful enough.
If we take some slightly more demanding games like Warzone for example, there is also actually very similar to the triple-A titles so the 6800 non-XT is doing better than the RTX 3070, while the XT is just slightly behind the RTX 3080.
RX 6800 XT -i9-10900k vs Ryzen 9 5950k
Best amd radeon graphics cards : There is a little twist in this story, and because all this was tested on an i9 system, which is my regular test bench for GPUs.
And one of the things AMD was really focusing on with this launch was the integration between their own GPUs and CPUs and using a feature called Smart access memory.
Now, these new BIOS settings should be available on all B550 and all x 570 motherboards either now or very very soon. And according to AMD.
This will give you a little bit of extra performance if you use an AMD GPU on an AMD gen three systems.
So, I decided to test this 6800 XT again, but this time combined with Ryzen 9 5950X with smart access memory turned on and then compare these results to the previous ones. And the result was different, but it was still actually all over the place.
I mean, there are some games that really benefit from AMD new processors, which are also much more powerful, but they're also still games out there that just form better on an Intel system for some reason, and using an AMD card instead of an Nvidia r TX card doesn't really change that story.
So overall device a nine system with smart access memory enabled ended up around 1% ahead of the Intel system in 1080 P and 1440 p gaming, which is not much, but it is still better.
Now, interestingly enough, the story also doesn't change that much when we moved both GPUs to the Ryzen 9 system, so it still varies a bit per game with AMD winning some and Nvidia winning others and this is with smart access memory enabled for the AMD card.
Power Consumption & PSU Advice
When it comes to power consumption AMD did a good job once again, the CCA had an XT ended up using a little bit less than that 3080 for almost the same performance.
The 6800 falls in between the RT x 3070, and the 6800 XT, both in terms of performance and power consumption, so my power supply advice would depend on your CPU choice for the 6800 non XT.
You should get a good 550-watt power supply when combined with a mid-range processor and consider a 650 watt one for a higher-end CPU, well for the RX 6800 XT, I would suggest a 650-watt power supply when combined with a mid-range CPU, and a nice 750 watt model for a higher-end one.
Thermals and Noise
If you plan to overclock you should just, you know, go one step higher, I don't have other and Radeon cards to compare thermals and noise performance to at least not yet.
But if we compare these cards to the founder's edition cards from Nvidia, I would say they actually perform really well.
The 6800 XT, it's slightly warmer but slightly quieter than the 30 at founders edition, and the 6800 non-XT makes a little bit more noise than the RTX 3070, which uses less power, so I would say their reference design does quite a good job. They're cool enough, and they are quiet enough.
Ray Tracing
Best amd graphics card with ray tracing : Now that we know the pure performance of these cards best amd radeon graphics cards , let's talk about some features, and I'm going, to begin with, ray tracing.
Nvidia has been actively enforcing ray tracing for you know more than two years now, and it has become a standard topic by now. But I would say it's also a very complicated one.
So these new cards do have support for Direct X 12 ultimate that has most of the same ray-tracing features as Nvidia has on their RT x cards, and they have dedicated ray-tracing accelerators built into these cards as well.
But not many RTX games are supported, even though they work quite well with Nvidia, so I do think that this can be fixed with game updates, but that kind of game support will take some time as these cards, just came out, but at this moment right now. Many of the RTx titles just won't support ray tracing on these Radeon cards, just yet.
Where is AMDLSS
Amd radeon graphics card best to worst : The main problem here is that turning best amd graphics card with ray tracing on really hurts performance in controlling 1080 p the 6800 x t is barely able to hit a 60 FPS average, and in World of Warcraft retracing is playable when you're just adventuring but if you get you to know near a world boss fight, your game will be completely unplayable.
I don't think people want to buy a $700 GPU to get a 60 FPS 1080p experience with some you to know fancy or light effects and video manages to get around this but using AMDLSS to upscale a lower resolution image which kind of compensates nicely for that performance loss, and you get to even enjoy ray tracing on Quad HD resolution or even 4k resolution.
Now, AMD has announced that they are working on a very similar feature to AMDLSS, that, you know, isn't just ready yet, but it will be very interesting to see if they can match Nvidia's performance when it comes to using ray tracing.
It took Nvidia about two years to get ray tracing to a somewhat interesting level, only now we have a couple of games that actually have it, and only now where there are 3000 series RTX cards.
It finally feels like it's getting somewhere, not there yet but somewhere so I would say, yeah, Nvidia does have the advantage here, but we also kind of gave in post two years to sort it out and I feel that we should do the same for these AMD cards and considering that the same hardware is in consoles already. I do expect it to improve much quicker.
At least if they managed to deliver their AMDLSS alternatives. Well, and all this, assuming that you even care about ray tracing, which I know that a lot of people just don't.
For Streamers
The next thing I want to talk about is streaming you know I haven't had much time to test it properly yet.
But at first glance, it does look like Nvidia and the encoder will still be a better choice for streamers. And then when you add those little Nvidia features like the broadcast, for example, even though they're quite nice. In my opinion, they still can be a deciding factor for a streamer.
If you don't care about streaming, both of these cards will do just well.
when it comes to memory both of these cards best amd radeon graphics cards have 16 gigabytes versus 7 gigabytes on the RTX 3080 on the RTX 3070, and that is great, especially if you do some work that really needs a lot of memory.
How are the Drivers?
And that only happens when want to again, or when changing settings so there was no crashes during gameplay, or during tests.
So I do have to say that things look pretty stable. Now at launch, but getting a reputation of being a company with reliable drivers is not something that happens overnight.
And I hope they continue like this and keep providing frequent feature and performance updates, and you know dealing with any potential issues, quickly. I really do like the software itself.
You get a lot of features like adjusting the fan curve to your liking or doing some manual overclocking as well. And on the XT you can also just throw in the AMD new rage mode which basically is a small overclock that will give you about 1% to 2% extra performance, but let's recap.
I think the 6800 is in a really nice spot, it's comfortably between the 3070 faster but more expensive RTX 3080 making it's a great choice for fast Quad HD gaming and the XT is in a bit of a more difficult situation, it's slightly behind the 3080.
But if you want to play at higher resolutions like this and you're already spending so much on a graphics card, adding 50 years more to get an RTX that offers better streaming and best amd graphics card with ray tracing at this moment is definitely something to think about. And if these results sound a bit disappointing to you.
You do have to remember that this is the first time, AMD graphics card best to worst is going head to head with the strongest options on the market.
They made an insane generational leap from the first RDNA. And they didn't even release their strongest cards, yet I mean, how amazing and How exciting is that, and this is the first time the strongest Nvidia cards are being properly challenged and in the long run.
I would say a healthy competition like this is just going to end up being better for us, the end-user.
So I would say, in a way, this feels like the first Ryzen release when they just started shaking in those cages but they still had some growing to do.
And then you know they crushed it in a few year's time, and you know now they just launched these cards that are literally competing with Nvidia's highest end. And if they take that same trajectory that they did with ryzen CPUs.
I can't even imagine how much these cards will grow and evolve in the years to come.
Don't let the 1% to 2% differences take away from the excitement, you should be feeling about these cards, and you know, just think about the potential they brought to the market today.
But the thing that everybody is worried about currently is availability, especially after the complete disaster RTX launch was, and the fact that you still cannot buy an RTX cards months later, and if you somehow find one it is way over the MSRP which is even more frustrating.
And I will say, sadly, every source in the industry we talked to so far basically told us that the availability of these best amd graphics cards 2021 isn't going to be much better so I expect AMD prices to be all over the place as well.
Now I really somehow still hope that this won't be the case and I somehow really hope that AMD has a huge secret stock somewhere just ready to ship out and show in the post how it's done.
I hope you enjoyed this review if you did please share this post and if you share this kind of content please subscribe to my topbestgoodreview.com to never miss a post.