AMD 6000 reviews thread

[CakeMonster]

a hypothetical 12GB 6800, and 14GB 6800XT would make a 16GB 6900XT look much better value.

Which would be perfectly fine IMO and neither amount of VRAM would be problematic for the expected lifetime of either. Of course they'd have to be cheaper than today's price though.

 

[Mopetar]

It may not work like that. I don't know if it's true but someone had stated in the other thread that the infinity fabric was tied to the memory controllers so disabling one or two of those would also decrease the amount of IF as well. That may not be worth it.

 

[Hitman928]

Reducing the VRAM would also require you to reduce the bus width of the memory interface so you would lose bandwidth as well. Under the current configuration you could have 16 GB or 8 GB. I don't think people would be happy with 8 GB for a 6800XT. Maybe you could get away with it on a 6800 since the 3070 has 8 GB, but it also gives AMD a competitive advantage here. I think the 16 GB across all 3 cards is great for consumers. Yes, it gives less incentive for people to buy up to the 6900XT, but those are the fully enabled and best binned dies anyway, I don't think AMD expects these to be high volume in the first place. The people that want the best of the best for AMD will spend the extra money and those that don't mind a small performance difference for a large cost savings won't. I don't think having a couple more GB of VRAM would change anything there.

 

[linkgoron]

6900XT added to OP. It's absolutely amazing to see AMD compete with the 3090.

Yep. Hardware unboxed has the 6900xt being faster than the 3090 at 1080p and 1440p. TPU obviously has Nvidia leading in all resolutions (including the 3080 leading by 1% at 1080p).

However, given the pricing I don't really see who would buy a 6900xt, except for die-hard AMD fans or if there's no 6800xt supply. The 6800XT is definitely a better deal.

 

[Dribble]

Now that the review is out, it's obvious that 6900XT is not worth the money. 6800XT is $350 cheaper and that's the card to get. Or 3080 depending on the preference.

It basically is a very expensive 6800XT with a particularly large o/c. Hence it has no o/c headroom, and you might as well just buy a 6800XT and o/c almost the same performance. That said I don't suppose it matters as imo it only exists to make AMD look better in reviews, I don't think they really expect people to buy them.

 

[zinfamous]

Yeah, I’m well aware that the 3090 is actually the worst value per frame for gaming, and the comment was tongue in cheek, but there is also some truth to it. The 6900XT has no real advantage over the 6800XT aside from ~7% gaming and compute performance — no product differentiation aside from that. On the other hand there are AI/ML workloads at work that I can run on a 3090/Titan class GPU that I can’t on a 3080. Arguably that’s the intended use case (along with trying to keep the overall performance crown for marketing purposes) even though plenty of gamers buy them anyway, and for the intended use case that is a LOT of value.

The good news is patient gamers can save a bunch of money and just buy the 6800XT, and not miss out on anything.

exposing my ignorance of how these things are made, I'm wondering why the 6900 couldn't add a bit more to the big die--like a much larger IC, for example. Is this limited by the board or maybe the current IO chiplet on Zen2? With everything else being equal, a couple extra CUs really doesn't seem like enough of a bump up to another tier, especially with the current results from performance comparisons.

with what has been learned about IC over the last several weeks, that seems like the area that is going to be getting a lot of attention with the next generation, especially for pushing 4K and beyond. ...I'm just wondering what is the limit for bumping that up in the current generation, on the flagship. ....Maybe they just aren't going to make enough of them (planned), to benefit from those assumed increased costs?

 

[pj-]

Was kind of hoping for a clearer win in raster vs 3090

If a 3080ti materializes, that seems like it will be the one to get for the "dumb but not insane" crowd of which I am part. Basically top end perf + all the nvidia proprietary crap

 

[Timorous]

TPU obviously has Nvidia leading in all resolutions (including the 3080 leading by 1% at 1080p).

Yea TPU have 5 games where in older DX11 titles the Radeon cards get cpu bottlenecked at a lower FPS vs the NV cards at 1080p and 1440p and that skews the results a bit. Considering the fps is 95+ in those games it is not like performance tanks but the 3080/3090 are 10%-30% faster in those games.

 

[Mopetar]

Was kind of hoping for a clearer win in raster vs 3090

I don't know if that was ever going to happen. I'm rather surprised AMD gets as close as they do given just how many CUDA cores Ampere has. Sure the architecture is a bit different so they can't necessarily utilize all of them, but the 3090 essentially has twice as many shaders and twice the traditional memory bandwidth of the 6900XT. Infinity Cache and higher clock speeds help to compensate for that, but the Nvidia card is a monster.

If a 3080ti materializes, that seems like it will be the one to get for the "dumb but not insane" crowd of which I am part.

Some rumors basically say that it's a 3090 with 20 GB of VRAM. I don't know if that's true or if Nvidia will release something that has slightly fewer CUDA cores as well, but given how little of a gap exists between the 3080 and the 3090, I don't see it being a better value than the 3080 and the extra GDDR6X is uses limits the number of cards they can make if that's part of what's supply constrained for them.

 

[CP5670]

Was kind of hoping for a clearer win in raster vs 3090

If a 3080ti materializes, that seems like it will be the one to get for the "dumb but not insane" crowd of which I am part. Basically top end perf + all the nvidia proprietary crap

I plan to do the same thing. I would get a 3080/6800XT but it looks like there is basically no chance of finding either one at MSRP before the 3080ti comes out, and if I'm waiting anyway I would rather have the extra memory.

 

[Borealis7]

the relatively small gap in performance between the 6800XT and the 6900XT does not leave room for a 6900-non-XT card as a refresh in the future even though there is a huge price gap. same with 3080->3090.
both companies kinda shot themselves in the foot there.

 

[uzzi38]

It basically is a very expensive 6800XT with a particularly large o/c. Hence it has no o/c headroom, and you might as well just buy a 6800XT and o/c almost the same performance. That said I don't suppose it matters as imo it only exists to make AMD look better in reviews, I don't think they really expect people to buy them.

No OC headroom?

I see OC headroom even without touching memory clocks.

The test here is Port Royal which - being a RTRT benchmark - is obviously fairly memory bandwidth bound.

 

[exquisitechar]

It basically is a very expensive 6800XT with a particularly large o/c. Hence it has no o/c headroom, and you might as well just buy a 6800XT and o/c almost the same performance. That said I don't suppose it matters as imo it only exists to make AMD look better in reviews, I don't think they really expect people to buy them.

The high end AIB partner custom cards will have good OC headroom, just like the 6800 XT does and perhaps more (since it won't be artificially limited to 2.8GHz).

 

[Head1985]

On the flip side, Nvidia skipped out on vram storage. 8 gig cards will be fine at 1440p for probably 3 more years,

Yes if you want medium Textures For ultra HD textures well its not enough today(Try watchdogs legion with Ultra HD textures at 1440P with 3070)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/jrfsbo

 

[lightmanek]

No OC headroom?

I see OC headroom even without touching memory clocks.

The test here is Port Royal which - being a RTRT benchmark - is obviously fairly memory bandwidth bound.

View attachment 35336

He's max. OC score is less than 500 points ahead of mine on 6800XT. I think there is a bit more in that card, but Steve is moving GPU minimum clock slider all the way to 2450MHz or higher. I think this is not the way to do it, at least on my card. Software will report high stable clocks, but performance will tank when power limits are reached (and they are often when limit is set to 300W). When I was testing PortRoyale, changing my minimum GPU clock to 2500MHz tanked my score from 97xx to below 88xx as the card was forced to clock high, without sufficient power budget. I think AMD is then feeding a lot of NOP's into pipeline or just stalls engine. Anyway, it leads to bad scores, so keeping lower boundary at default will almost always give better scores (maybe apart from LN2 OC when you want to keep card hotter).

PS. My EK Water Block just shipped! I might get to play with it maybe even this weekend!

 

[Mopetar]

the relatively small gap in performance between the 6800XT and the 6900XT does not leave room for a 6900-non-XT card as a refresh in the future even though there is a huge price gap. same with 3080->3090.
both companies kinda shot themselves in the foot there.

That just means that once supply improves the competition will drive prices down. Previously AMD had no answer at the high end (or frankly the upper mid-range at times) so Nvidia had no pressure to lower prices.

Expect the price gap to diminish over time, because neither the 3090 or the 6900XT make a lot of sense. Maybe we'll get some crazy AIB 6900XT cards that are turned up to 11 and actually make sense as a premium or enthusiast product, but the reference model just isn't there. Both the 3080 and 6800XT are just too good and far less expensive.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

the relatively small gap in performance between the 6800XT and the 6900XT does not leave room for a 6900-non-XT card as a refresh in the future even though there is a huge price gap. same with 3080->3090.
both companies kinda shot themselves in the foot there.

- The 6800XT would have historically been the 6900 non-XT and may have been the 6900 non-XT (or vice versa) right up until Ampere launched and AMD saw some opportunities by renaming their stack to line up with NV.

I wonder if we'll get a mid-gen refresh that rebrands the 6900XT to a 7800XT with adjusted pricing as things settle in after a year.

 

[Timorous]

I wonder if we'll get a mid-gen refresh that rebrands the 6900XT to a 7800XT with adjusted pricing as things settle in after a year.

They should make a 6900XT 3Ghz edition with a 400W TDP and a reference 240mm AIO cooler.

 

[lightmanek]

They should make a 6900XT 3Ghz edition with a 400W TDP and a reference 240mm AIO cooler.

I liked my 7970GHz edition a lot

 

[Glo.]

Wrong thread...

 

[Makaveli]

I liked my 7970GHz edition a lot

I still have one of those in a box with a H55 attached to it she broke on me right in the middle of the mining craze. And I had to over pay for my Current RX580 I was not impressed at the time lol.

 

[Saylick]

- The 6800XT would have historically been the 6900 non-XT and may have been the 6900 non-XT (or vice versa) right up until Ampere launched and AMD saw some opportunities by renaming their stack to line up with NV.

I wonder if we'll get a mid-gen refresh that rebrands the 6900XT to a 7800XT with adjusted pricing as things settle in after a year.

It doesn't seem too farfetched, and it would be nice to get a refreshed version with 18 Gbps GDDR6 instead of the currently used 16 Gbps.

 

[Timorous]

Looks like ComputerBase updated their 6900XT review with 7 new games. 6900XT takes 5/7 vs the 3090 @4k and the 6800XT does the same vs the 3080 @4k.

 

[Kuiva maa]

Averages will flactuate depending on that games were tested but all in all,outside RT there is performance parity this round.

 

[Elfear]

Averages will flactuate depending on that games were tested but all in all,outside RT there is performance parity this round.

Finally! This is great for all enthusiasts.