RX 6700 XT vs. 6800 XT vs. 6900 XT

AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics cards are the most impressive that have been made in the last few years. They compete with Nvidia’s best in price and performance, and offer real-time ray tracing support for the first time on AMD hardware. Aside from the hassle of getting your hands on one of these cards, they’re a great option if you’re looking to upgrade your graphics card. But which one offers the best value for money?

Whether you’re aiming for high-fps 1440p gaming or need something to make your PC 4K-ready, let’s take a look at our comparison of the best AMD RX 6000 GPUs to find the best one for you.

Prices and availability

AMD

On November 18, 2020, AMD launched the RX 6800 XT and 6800 graphics cards, starting at $649 and $579, respectively. They quickly disappeared from the shelves due to a conglomerate of global silicon shortage issues, cryptocurrency miners buying up all the GPUs they can find, and gamers genuinely excited about the new generation’s performance. Since then, prices have skyrocketed at both retailers and the used markets, where you can expect to spend more than $800 on both cards if you’re buying new, or more than $1,000 if you’re shopping on eBay or the classifieds.

Similar problems awaited the 6900 XT, which launched on December 8 for $1000. In early 2021, it’s just as hard to find any of the 6,800 cards that regularly sell for over $1,500 at retail or over $2,000 on eBay.

With that in mind, the RX 6700 XT faces a bumpy launch when it goes on sale on March 18. AMD reference cards will retail for $479, while third-party cards will likely sell for $500 to $600, depending on clock speeds and cooling configurations, but how long that will last remains unclear. There are strong rumors that stock of the 6700 XT will be very limited at launch, with some major market countries receiving only a few hundred on launch day. This will only exacerbate the price gouging and scalping issues, although AMD has promised to release their reference cards in batches to try and help gamers get their hands on reasonably priced cards.

Performance

The RX 6700 XT, 6800 XT and 6900 XT are multi-tier GPUs, so real-world performance will generally trend upwards in the same direction as the price. However, it’s important to consider how this translates into bang for your buck. The 6900 XT and 6800 XT are relatively well-known features at this point, where the 6700 XT’s capabilities can only be guessed from AMD’s first-party benchmarks. These tend to prove fairly accurate, but will have some inherent biases, so it’s important to wait for third-party reviews and test results before jumping to a firm conclusion.

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However, we can take a look at the existing performance numbers and specs to speculate on what the new card will be capable of and how it will compare to its more expensive RDNA 2 cousins.

The 6900 XT is the big daddy of the three cards and will firmly hold its claim to being one of (if not the leading) fastest graphics card in the world in general rasterization. It typically only offers about 5% to 12% better real-world gaming performance over the 6800 XT, however, which is significantly cheaper (or at least should be), despite having significantly more stream processors and typically running at higher clock speeds.

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The 6800 XT can handle most modern AAA games at well above 60fps at 4K and above 100fps in many others at 1440p. The 6900 XT achieves a bit more, although its price is far higher than its performance benefits justify.

This puts these cards in relative competition with Nvidia’s RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. The RX 6700 XT, with its significantly reduced stream processor count but much higher clock speed, is destined to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s RTX 3070. Where the 6800 (non-XT) would could beat Nvidia’s card in a number of scenarios, although the battle with Nvidia’s gold standard mid-range card and the 6700 XT should be far more fierce.

AMD’s first-party benchmark results — shown at the launch of the 6700 XT — suggested that it would easily beat the RTX 3060 Ti and often edge out the RTX 3070 in a number of popular games. Where it couldn’t win outright, it was very competitive, with AMD leaning heavily on the idea that this was the flagship 1440P gaming graphics card.

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In these kinds of games and with this kind of power, it’s unlikely that the 6700 XT would be the ideal 1440P card for high-fps gaming (100+ fps), but it’s certainly a solid contender for smooth AAA gaming at that resolution. Its 12GB of memory will give it a potential edge over Nvidia’s competition, but with its narrower memory bus, it could struggle with 4K resolution compared to its beefier RDNA 2 siblings.

However, the high clock speed it can support shows some potentially exciting performance potential. With a much lower TDP, it will be interesting to see if the powerful cooling means that the difference between the 6700 XT and 6800 XT can be bridged with sufficient overclocking.

Air tracking and more

Ray tracing is supported on all new generation RDNA2 graphics cards, thanks to a new ray accelerator part in each compute unit. It’s not as powerful a solution as Nvidia’s RT cores, and Nvidia will retain the ray-tracing performance advantage this generation (especially with deep learning super-sampling enabled), but you can at least turn on low-level ray-tracing lighting with the AMD 6000 series to enjoy the feature at lower frames per second. The 6700 XT will be the weakest of the lot, with a more limited number of accelerators, so it may not be the most used feature — at least not until AMD’s DLSS alternative, Super Resolution, comes along, but it’s a nice feature to have nonetheless.

The 6800 XT and 6900 XT, by comparison, offer a more robust ray tracing offering, with performance close to that of the 2080 Ti. This means that 4Kray tracking at decent frame rates is possible, although not very smooth. This further cements the difference between AMD cards in the new generation. The 6700 XT targets 1440P, while the 6800 XT and 6900 XT are much more focused on 4K.

All of these cards can also take advantage of AMD’s Fidelity FX sharpening and anti-lag features. Rage Mode will help them all reach slightly higher clocks with automated overclocking, and Radeon Boost and Variable Rate Shading should allow for a higher number of frames per second without too noticeable a drop in visual quality. Since these are software features and not hardware-accelerated features, the effect should be largely down to software rather than hardware. However, if the 6700 XT has any specific bottlenecks with its weaker hardware layout, it may be to see a higher percentage of improvement in its use in certain titles.

Each of these GPUs can also take advantage of Smart Access Memory if you have a Ryzen 3000 or 5000 CPU (and a 500 series motherboard) for a modest but significant performance boost.

Buy what you can get

With fairly clear definitions of what these cards are for, it’s almost an easy recommendation: if you want to game at 1440p at a relatively high frame rate, the 6700 XT will be more than enough to get the job done. If you’re looking to play at higher fps or 4K, the 6800 XT is a better bet, and if you’ve got deep pockets, the 6900 XT will give you the most performance at a hefty premium.

But none of that really matters when none of these cards can be bought at a fair price. With no stock for the existing 6800 XT and 6900 XT cards, the 6700 XT will either have to arrive in enormous quantities to meet demand, or it will suffer the same fate of being out of stock and overpriced if it doesn’t.

The gaming graphics card market in 2021 is a wasteland and it’s really a matter of buying what you can get because you probably won’t get a second chance. If you see any of these cards close to MSRP and need a new GPU this year, get them. You can always sell them later for a profit if that’s too much of a cost to swallow. Alternatively, and probably better yet, wait for this generation, or at least wait until later in the year when better stock becomes available and Intel’s own GPUs may once again shake up (or maybe even help stabilize) the market.

Editor’s recommendations

Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn

Links: RX 6700 XT vs. 6800 XT vs. 6900 XT – Tekmonk Bio, RX 6700 XT vs. 6800 XT vs. 6900 XT – Kungfutv, RX 6700 XT vs. 6800 XT vs. 6900 XT – Blogtomoney