AMD 6000 reviews thread

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BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,672
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Wow, even the number 3 card has 16GB VRAM and is faster than the 2080TI. And the $1000 6900XT matches the $1500 3090 in performance.

The 3000 parts don't look so hot now.

Post reviews edit:
It's astonishing what AMD have managed to achieve with both the Ryzen 5000 and the Radeon 6000, especially given the absolutely minuscule R&D budget and resources compared to nVidia/Intel. Lisa Su is definitely the "Steve Jobs" of AMD with such a remarkable turnaround.

6900XT:
(It's absolutely amazing to see AMD compete with the 3090)


 
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Adul

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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danny.tangtam.com
the only major issue i had with the 5700xt drivers was the random screen blanking issue that took them a bit to figure out earlier this year. I been good since and not really have had any issues to complain about since.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
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I don't know why you guys complain about drivers.

Because everytime Nvidia fixes something, they break something else on my 2080ti.
Its like they only care about improvements on 0 day games, and completely ditch the fact those quick fixes break older games. (rant)
But the new drivers do optimize the hell out of new games, and Nvidia to my knowledge is always extremely quick about new drivers.

(i also own a nvidia card only..... but i would really like to get my hands on a 6800XT for my brothers Ryzen 5900x system he wants me to build this xmas.

I also want to play with that smart access memory. Both GPU and CPU are supposed to share.

But i am going lulz.... not gonna happen... no way in hell i'll be able to get my hands on one, i already flipped that magic rainbow on my 3090.
 
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CP5670

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2004
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Because everytime Nvidia fixes something, they break something else on my 2080ti.
Its like they only care about improvements on 0 day games, and completely ditch the fact those quick fixes break older games. (rant)
But the new drivers do optimize the hell out of new games, and Nvidia to my knowledge is always extremely quick about new drivers.

Yes, this can be really irritating. It's another reason I avoid buying games immediately on release. I don't want to deal with these game-ready drivers.

I've had issues with both Nvidia and AMD drivers in the past, but am much more familiar with the Nvidia issues and their workarounds at this point. If something is broken for a particular game on Nvidia, chances are I've seen it before and know how to fix it.
 

GaiaHunter

Diamond Member
Jul 13, 2008
3,628
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the only major issue i had with the 5700xt drivers was the random screen blanking issue that took them a bit to figure out earlier this year. I been good since and not really have had any issues to complain about since.
I still have the lazy card syndrome on 1080p for some older dx9 games.
 

lixlax

Member
Nov 6, 2014
183
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In my opinion AMD has made a great comeback and hopefully their cheaper RDNA 2 cards are also great.
I haven't fully decided yet to what exactly upgrade to, but right now I'm waiting for N22, hopefully it performs at 2080 Super or a little faster.. But the questions remain:
1). When does it launch?
2). When could I buy one?
3). When could I buy one at a normal price?

I feel its going to take forever to get to no 3.
 

Veradun

Senior member
Jul 29, 2016
564
780
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I don't know why you guys complain about drivers. I haven't had a problem with either camp and I've been gaming on 2080 Ti and Radeon VII exclusively since they came out with ZERO issues on a multi-monitor setup.
The last time I had driver issue was with my 6800GTS. That's ancient.

Never had problems since, and I'm with AMD cards since I got an HD3870 to now (several cards later)
 

DisEnchantment

Golden Member
Mar 3, 2017
1,590
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Availability update. TLDW; it's not good. Seems like AMD borrowed Nvidia's gun and are now shooting themselves in the foot as well.
In hindsight, all in all it was a good business decision for NV to go with Samsung so far.
Whether that pans out well in the next year with mobile SKUs remains to be seen.
But at least there is no contest for wafers at Samsung. It does not look like RX 6000 series will in any way impact their sales from supply or competitive standpoint.
They might be impacted by lower ASP but at least they can move more units which in the end is a win.
I am inclined to think they might consider doing the next round of consumer SKUs at Samsung as well. Samsung 7LPP or even 5LPE would have mature well by then.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
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I don't know why you guys complain about drivers. I haven't had a problem with either camp and I've been gaming on 2080 Ti and Radeon VII exclusively since they came out with ZERO issues on a multi-monitor setup.

I still can't get overclocking to work on Radeon VII with current drivers. Every time I think I have it working, it breaks. 100% "fan" (using a waterblock) etc. doesn't fix anything. I've given up.
 

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
7,797
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I've had both Pitcairn and Polaris cards from AMD and have had exactly one case of driver issues, but then again I'm not constantly updating to the latest drivers on day one so that probably helps. I've never personally had issues with Nvidia drivers but do know people who've had problems before.

I suspect that it's mainly people who are always updating immediately instead of waiting a week or two for any major bugs to get ironed out.
 
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Apr 30, 2020
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I'd like to get a 6800XT, but will definitely wait for things to settle down. My 5700XT is just fine for the time being. I assume in typical AMD fashion the performance will increase with subsequent driver revisions.

As far as driver issues go - I've never had any major driver issues with any AMD card I've ever owned. I had a slight inconvenience with my 5700XT when I first got it, where hardware-accelerated web browsing would glitch out (including Discord, Steam, Firefox), but disabling hardware acceleration fixed that. AMD patched it the issue pretty quickly.

IMO (well really, my wild unsubstantiated guess), is that most of the Navi1 "driver issues" were actually "hardware variability" issues. So many people reported "fixing" their Navi issues by changing their PSUs, changing which PCI-E power plugs they used, changing PCIe modes (4.0 > 3.0), changing which slots they used and other things. No piece of consumer electronics gear should be that sensitive, especially a relatively "low power" card like the 5700XT. I think most of the 5700 series "driver improvements" probably focused on improving fault tolerance and mitigating hardware defects.
 
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Leadbox

Senior member
Oct 25, 2010
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AMD were not expecting to sell too many of these to begin with because they genuinely thought nvidia would have come out a bit better than they did. Nvidia themselves would have known the competition was coming much stronger than before. I'm guessing both IHVs didn't commit as many wafers to production as they now wish they did. So even if AMD learnt from nvidias' mistake two months ago now and decided to ramp production up, the problem is, it still takes 4-5 months to go from wafer to graphics card. So yeah, early next year is when supply will settle to more stable. The human malware vaccines should also help neuter demand as more folk get back into the swing of things.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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AMD were not expecting to sell too many of these to begin with because they genuinely thought nvidia would have come out a bit better than they did. Nvidia themselves would have known the competition was coming much stronger than before. I'm guessing both IHVs didn't commit as many wafers to production as they now wish they did. So even if AMD learnt from nvidias' mistake two months ago now and decided to ramp production up, the problem is, it still takes 4-5 months to go from wafer to graphics card. So yeah, early next year is when supply will settle to more stable. The human malware vaccines should also help neuter demand as more folk get back into the swing of things.

That's almost entirely nonsense. Nvidia is simply limited by Samsung's output, which is apparently absolutely abysmal. AMD likely greatly values Zen production and I have a hunch had some fairly rigid contracts with regards to console chip production that would limit these for this year. Has nothing to do with them expecting low sales because of Nvidia. They also likely are waiting for 7nm capacity to be less constrained (seriously almost the entire industry seems to be trying to use TSMC 7nm - I'm guessing because Samsung's 8 and 7 nm production is awful and doesn't seem to produce terribly great quality chips).

Its possible that Nvidia rushed the 3000 cards out on Samsung 8nm to have something to go up against RDNA2 til they can get proper capacity on TSMC 7nm or til Samsung can get their 7nm properly up and running, and so didn't book much production expecting to do a psuedo refresh for like Spring of next year (when they'd roll out Ti and Titan versions), but I'm pretty skeptical. Samsung was supposedly offering ridiculous discounts to try and woo production.
 
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Asterox

Golden Member
May 15, 2012
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Hm, overclocked to 2.6ghz.

 

Qwertilot

Golden Member
Nov 28, 2013
1,604
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That's almost entirely nonsense. Nvidia is simply limited by Samsung's output, which is apparently absolutely abysmal.

This 'apparently abysmal' bit is a bit hard to sustain when NV are reporting a near 40% increase for gaming GPU revenue this quarter (both QoQ & YoY) and projecting similar revenue next quarter.

No doubt a lot of that's Covid driven, but they also simply couldn't do it if Ampere production was genuinely terrible - there's product out there somewhere.
 
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PrinceXizor

Platinum Member
Oct 4, 2002
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This 'apparently abysmal' bit is a bit hard to sustain when NV are reporting a near 40% increase for gaming GPU revenue this quarter (both QoQ & YoY) and projecting similar revenue next quarter.

No doubt a lot of that's Covid driven, but they also simply couldn't do it if Ampere production was genuinely terrible - there's product out there somewhere.

Without diving into the actual details of the accounting involved, I'd be careful drawing a 1 to 1 line between revenue numbers and product sales/production despite NVidia's comments on the subject. I'm not entirely sure how silicon manufacturing works but I know plenty of other supply chain businesses where a tweak here and there can shift losses and hide underperforming parts of the business. For example, when offering a discount to move crap product, you can "sell" the product at full price thus keeping revenues high in that area and then the discount comes out of the marketing bucket. So high revenues in the interesting category ("See it's not junk after all") and write downs and losses in a different area. I'm not saying/accusing NVidia of doing that, but, these types of things are why analyzing financial statements can get tricky.
 

Elfear

Diamond Member
May 30, 2004
7,096
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Not really since all three are AMD sponsored titles.

Does that matter with AMD these days? Not being purposely obtuse, I'm genuinely asking because back a few years ago Nvidia had the much larger game dev relation budget to be able to send engineers to work directly with the programmers or incentivize them to use Nvidia-exclusive features. It seemed like with AMD sponsored games, it didn't make that much if any impact (I remember some AMD-sponsored games even ran better on Nvidia cards at launch). Haven't been keeping up with how the whole sponsorship efforts have panned out though.
 

lightmanek

Senior member
Feb 19, 2017
387
754
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It seems like UK got some more RX6800's as I have one in transit for delivery tomorrow ;)

I wanted XT model, but vanilla cards came first, no hesitation on my part as I can resell 6800 to my brother or son in few weeks time.

Wish everyone else still waiting, same luck as I had today.