AMD’s Big Navi presentation came out on October 28th , and for the first time in a
number of years, AMD appears to have been able to match their competitors’ best in
terms of raw performance. 3 graphics cards were announced.
The focus of the presentation was the Radeon 6800 XT, which was shown trading blows with
Nvidia’s 3080, which happened to be the focus of their presentation a month or so
ago. The 6800 XT looks to be competitive with it at both 1440p and 4K resolutions. AMD are
definitely marketing it as a 4K-capable card, and its launch price is set at $650, which
is 50 dollars below the price the Geforce 3080 is meant to start at. As well as this,
the 6800 XT by default consumes 20 watts less power, but has a RAGE overclocking button
that improves its performance but presumably will consume considerably more power as well.
They showed some results from this, but bear in mind these were are also using a ‘Smart
Access Memory’ feature which I’ll talk about later, and most importantly, they didn’t
say how much of the performance increase was from this, and how much was from RAGE. But
let’s just say that, if you want to replicate the performance shown here, you’ll need
to be using a new Ryzen processor and motherboard as well.
The second card they mentioned was the cheaper Radeon 6800, but even that one comfortably
beat the previous gen flagship Geforce 2080 TI by 18%. Again, this was done using the
Smart Access Memory feature, so without knowing how much of a difference that feature makes,
I can’t say how the 6800 will perform in other computer setups. While it was compared
to the 2080 TI in benchmarks, it’s a lot more relevant to compare the vanilla Radeon
6800 with Nvidia’s new 3070, which launches tomorrow… and which was reviewed yesterday.
I suspect this was a deliberate choice by Nvidia to sandwich this AMD announcement between
Nvidia news. But from what I can see, these 2 cards don’t appear to directly compete
with each other. For a start, the 6800 is $80 more. This is an odd choice in my opinion.
I guess it’s been done to make the 6800 XT more desirable, but when Nvidia’s Geforce
3070 is such excellent value for money I just don’t see the 6800 remaining at $580 for
long. As well as the price premium, it consumes 30 watts more power than the 3070, and maybe,
if it’s 18% faster than the 2080 TI the 6800 could be a bit faster than the 3070 as
well. But if there’s going to be a price-war anywhere then I expect it to happen between
these two cards. Just days before the Radeon 5000 launch there was a bit of a price war
so, depending on how the 6800 fares in reviews I wouldn’t be surprised if prices shifted
in the lead-up to its launch next month. Near the end of the presentation, Lisa Su
revealed the last, and fastest card of the 3: the 6900 XT. This is Big Navi, fully unlocked,
and when overclocked, seems capable of matching or even slightly beating Nvidia’s top of
the line Geforce 3090 card. The manner in which the 6900 XT was presented was very much
like how Jensen announced the 3090, too. They don’t seem to be the ‘focus’ of the
presentation. The way they’re slipped in at the end almost seems like these cards are
intended to be ‘beyond’ flagship performance, serving as the companies’ halo products.
And for beyond-flagship prices. Lisa used this opportunity to take a few swipes at the
3090 though, first remarking on how the 6900 XT didn’t need to be any bigger than the
6800 to deliver this level of performance (While the 3090 does)
‘…and you’ll see that it’s actually relatively compact for all of the performance
it delivers. It’s actually the same size as our 6800 XT card.’
…and also by announcing it will launch for $1000, which is $500 less than the 3090 currently
sells for. These are both cards priced beyond what most
gamers are able to spend. For most people, it shouldn’t matter how these top of the
line cards perform. But inevitably it does. Having a top performing card improves a company’s
reputation in the eyes of consumers. By being unable to match Nvidia’s best, for generations
AMD may have been seen as an underdog. But now AMD is able to compete at the ultra high-end
it may have a benefit to how people perceive their product lineup as a whole.
This is the first time in years that AMD can claim to have matched Nvidia’s best. Recent
attempts, like the Radeon 7, Vega 64 and FuryX, have fallen short, competing better with Nvidia’s
second fastest offerings. The last time AMD could claim to have been ahead in performance
was with the Radeon 290X, way back in 2013. And even that was a short-lived victory. So
this is why the 6000 series is such an important moment for AMD’s graphics division. They
haven’t looked so competitive since their 7000 series. Lol.
As well as fast performance, all 3 of these cards have a generous 16 GB of VRAM, which
is more than what the Geforce 3070 and 80 currently offer. The 3070 has 8 and the 3080
has 10. But this is something the cards have been criticised for by some people, who don’t
think it’s enough RAM to be future-proof, especially as the next generation of consoles
will be coming out with plenty of VRAM. So for those people, the new Radeon 6000 cards
will certainly look appealing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia at some point announces
Geforce 3070 and 80 cards with more VRAM, in order to compete. This isn’t something
that the Geforce 3090 needs to worry about though, since that comes with a huge 24 GB
of VRAM.
I feel bad that, even though it’s AMD’s launch, I’m mentioning Nvidia’s cards
just as much. It’s inevitable really, given that they were first to launch. But I think
AMD deserves a bit where I just talk about them, and what they’ve managed to accomplish
with this generation. So here it is. With this generation, AMD hasn’t just upped
performance. They’ve also integrated more features. Most important of these is raytracing,
which wasn’t covered as much as I hoped in this presentation, but they did at least
suggest support for it, though we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what the cards
are capable of here.
‘Realtime raytraced shadows allow us to introduce additional shadow-casting lights
into the scene…’ ‘Here you can see raytracing evident in
how the shadows are interacting with your character.’
AMD’s main focus was on a number of DirectX 12 features, which they’ve included under
their FidelityFX umbrella. And there was mention of a reduced latency feature which they’re
calling Radeon Boost. There was a time when performance was king, but the extra features
that come along with it are growing increasingly important with every generation so I wasn’t
surprised to see so much emphasis on these. Because it’s getting to the point where
some features can command a price-premium in the eyes of consumers.
Drivers will also be an important area to improve upon. The 5000 series definitely damaged
AMD’s reputation, with numerous reports of black-screening and other problems. This
is not something you want from an expensive new piece of hardware so I’m hoping for
AMD’s sake that they’ve majorly improved the drivers in time for this release- I know
already that there will be people who will avoid the 6000 series just because of the
reputation AMD’s drivers have. The efficiency of the cards is also important
to mention. Typically, graphics cards rely on smaller nodes to advance efficiency. But
AMD was already on 7 nm before this generation. So to be able to claim 50% better efficiency
this time around is a great achievement! Compared with their previous generation, under very
specific conditions, the 6800 XT delivers (a rather suspicious looking) 54% more performance
per watt, and the 6900 XT offers 65% more. They showed a breakdown of where these improvements
came from, which comes down to adjustments to the card’s design, like the 128 MB of
super-fast infinity cache, which I don’t have much to say about but it sounds like
a clever way of getting more out of less. And perhaps some of this efficiency improvement
is down to sneaky adjustments to how efficiency is measured in the first place.
Both XT cards, by default, seem rated for 300 watts, and I think this is the power rating
at which the efficiency improvements have been calculated at. But these cards also have
a RAGE setting which overclocks them at the click of a button, squeezing a bit more performance
from them. This will no doubt come with disproportionately more power consumption, but it is nice to
know you have the choice between improved efficiency or more performance.
All in all, I would say that the 6000 series has surpassed my expectations. After the teased
performance at the start of the month, I was expecting Big Navi to match the Geforce 3080,
but I wasn’t expecting them to be able to compete up to the 3090 level. So that’s
excellent. But remember: we are going by AMD’s own slides here. And while I don’t expect
them to lie, I do expect them to show their products in the best possible light. So here
are the things that concern me from the presentation. We still haven’t seen raytraced performance.
In the presentation they briefly mention it while showing some not very impressive gameplay
footage. I was hoping they’d make a bigger deal about this feature, perhaps dedicating
a section of the presentation to it, instead of only talking about it in passing. This
past year or so, raytracing has become an important feature in PC gaming, and a fundamental
part of the next generation of consoles. It seems odd to avoid it when talking about new
graphics cards, especially in the high-end! My fear is that this was done because Nvidia
are ahead of AMD here. But I guess we’ll have to wait for benchmarks.
My next concern- well, it’s less of a concern and more of a curiosity. I want to know how
they’re going to counter Nvidia’s DLSS feature. It’s no secret that I really, really
like DLSS. It intelligently upscales images to provide anti-aliasing, more detail and
higher framerates. It’s like magic, really. But it’s supported by just a few games at
the moment. AMD may actually be in a better position to
make a smart upscaler, since these new RDNA 2 graphics cards are powering the next generation
of console games, many of which will be raytraced and upscaled. Surely it wouldn’t take much
to bring those features across to desktop! They briefly cover ‘Super Resolution’
in the video, hinting that it’ll be an optional setting to give users more performance when
using raytracing. Yeah, that sounds similar to DLSS in function
to me! They also talked about optimised denoising,
which is used to improve the quality of real-time raytracing. And on top of this they mentioned
their FidelityFX features, which I guess will also be used to enhance visual clarity in
games. They’re taking a leaf out of Nvidia’s book here. Nvidia likes to give technologies
an Nvidia-only branded name, like RTX and G-Sync. AMD has similar technologies- they’re
just called DXR and freesync, and anyone can use them. So in a way I feel like they’ve
had to push ‘FidelityFX’ to give their brand the same premium feature appeal as Nvidia’s
been doing for years. I don’t even know if any of these things are AMD-exclusive,
they’re all part of the DX12 standard. But I’m happy in a way that AMD’s at least
trying to make them sound exclusive. I’m looking forward to seeing how much of an improvement
these features can have on performance and visuals in games.
And last, SMART ACCESS MEMORY! While it sounds like a GOOD feature, I worry for what it means
for users who don’t have support for it. They didn’t say how much of the performance
increase was from RAGE, and how much was from SAM, so my worry is that SAM has helped AMD
to beat Nvidia in these benchmarks, and that users with different PC setups won’t be
able to replicate that level of performance if they upgrade to one of the new Radeon 6000
cards. In short: ‘SAM’ requires a Radeon 6000 series card, a Ryzen 5000 series processor,
and a 500 series motherboard, and it sounds like it lets the CPU access the GPU’s memory
to somehow improve gaming performance. But beyond that, very little has been said about
it. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
But at least now we have performance figures, and 2 of these new cards will be out in under
a month. As usual, wait for benchmarks! While 2020 won’t be remembered as a ‘good’
year, it’s been an excellent year for computer hardware. Good guy AMD for giving us a reason
to stay inside.