AMD officially announced their new RX 6000 graphics cards yesterday in a video hosted by CEO Lisa Su.
Nicknamed “Big Navi”, the cards are an attempt to stir up the GPU market currently dominated by Nvidia.
The $579 RX 6800 and $649 6800XT cards are due to be released on Wednesday, November 18th. The flagship $999 RX 6900XT is slated for release on Tuesday, December 8th.
AMD emphasised some features they will be implementing to improve the gaming experience. “Ray tracing”, a cutting-edge lighting feature pioneered by technology rival Nvidia, will be included with AMD cards for the first time.
The new “Infinity Cache” aims to provide higher memory bandwidth compared to previous cards whilst decreasing power consumption.
Also new is “AMD Smart Access Memory”, where the new AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU can gain full access to the RX 6000 Series GPU’s memory.
This never-before-seen feature claims to provide performance gains compared to previous CPU and GPU pairings.
AMD have already proven themselves to be gaining traction in the gaming CPU market, with the recent Steam hardware survey showing AMD usage has risen from 19% to 25% on their platform in the last 18 months.
The Steam GPU survey seems to show that AMD GPUs are still struggling to gain acceptance by gamers, only having around a 16% share.
With strong 4K and 1440P performance, AMD’s specs suggest the new cards match or beat Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series GPUs. With similarly competitive prices, AMD are looking to increase their foothold in the market.
AMD can capitalise on Nvidia’s current “paper launch” stock issues by having a smooth launch themselves. It will be interesting to see if the figures provided by AMD match up with real benchmarks when the cards are released in the coming weeks.
For my opinions regarding the cards, check https://www.lankychin.com/amd-rx-6000-series-reveal-opinions
Watch the full reveal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpgu-cTjyM
Additional Sources:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey
