Our friends at VideoCardz have obtained the press slide deck for the upcoming RX 6000 GPUs from AMD, and as per usual they are leaking it, though this time it is coming in the form of a transcript, presumably to protect their sources. Let’s go through some of the highlights of what AMD is prepared to reveal tomorrow; goes without saying that we’re able to cover this because we haven’t signed any NDAs.
Concerning the hardware, there are a few points that intrigue me. One of them being that AMD claims the 6800XT is 4.1 times more efficient than the 290X, the last AMD GPU that truly stood a chance against Nvidia and was for a time the fastest GPU for gaming you could get. It looks AMD will also be throwing some shade at Nvidia in respect to their 30 series GPUs. AMD is advertising a standard cooler design, standard power draw, and standard connectors, things which Nvidia switched up this year when it released its Founder’s Edition GPUs with fans on both sides, 300+ watt power draw, and a new 12 pin connector. It’s reminiscent of Sony’s rebuttal to the Xbox One at E3 2013. Furthermore, AMD will claim that the 6800XT is 6 dBA quieter than the 5700XT (I would hope so).
Moving onto software, AMD will reveal three different power profiles for the 6800XT and what kind of clock speed you can expect from each. The quiet, balanced, and rage profiles have load clock speeds of 1950, 2015, and 2065 MHz respectively, and boost clock speeds of 2185, 2250, and 2310 MHz respectively. AMD will also be introducing a denoiser with FidelityFX, which is actually a step above Nvidia’s RTX which does not use tensor cores for denoising ray traced effects; tensor cores are reserved for DLSS.
AMD also has some interesting language about ray tracing. While Nvidia tends to say “it just works” and emphasizes how magical it is, it seems that AMD will have a more grounded presentation. Here are a few bullet points:
- As rasterization becomes more cable and complex, its performance cost grows
- In some cases, tracing rays becomes a reasonable trade-off for improved image quality
- Developers are still learning about how best to use ray-traced effects in combination with rasterization
However, it is very possible that AMD is using this kind of language because their ray tracing performance is not very competitive with Nvidia’s. If the 6800XT or 6900XT was much faster than the 3080 or 3090 in ray tracing, I would expect AMD to emphasize that and how important it is. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I encourage you to read the full transcript on VideoCardz’s website, it’s largely material we’ve seen before but much of it is new and interesting.
