With AMD's launch of its new Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs, the company's Radeon RX 6800 XT ($649) finds itself in the unenviable position of diving into shark-infested waters. With its sights set squarely on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, AMD has set the goal for itself of remaining competitive with all takers; Intel on the CPU side, and Nvidia on GPUs. While AMD's CPU division has pummeled Intel over the past year and a half, its graphics card arm still finds itself on defense versus Nvidia. And that narrative doesn't change much with the Radeon RX 6800 XT (dubbed during its development "Big Navi"). At times, it's the fastest GPU we've tested to date in its price range. At others, it returns inconsistent results across some modern AAA titles, legacy AAA games, and synthetic benchmarks.
At $50 less than the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, the Radeon RX 6800 XT does present an enticing value proposition—and, unlike, the latest GeForce RTX "Ampere" cards, may prove to be made of something other than unobtainium. (Maybe you'll be able to buy one in the hours after its launch, or maybe not?) But the early drivers and firmware behind it, in its launch state, make us withhold our seal of approval. With substantial overclocking headroom and plenty of new features to show off, the Radeon RX 6800 XT holds a lot of promise. But until its drivers can regularly deliver on that potential, early adopters might want to hold off. (We'll keep an eye out for firmware updates and re-test and re-evaluate our score as necessary.)
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Design: Inspired by the Classics
The first thing I noticed about the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT as I pulled it out of the box was just how big it was. Now, at 10.5 inches long, it's actually the same length as its nemesis, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. But it's thick, too. The 2.5-slot width and the sheer weight remind you that this is a top-end, big-iron GPU.
But in contrast to the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, where the total length of the card is made up of only about 50% PCB (with the rest dedicated to the heatsink and cooling system), the PCB of the Radeon RX 6800 XT runs the full length of the card. And it features many of the traditional design elements we've seen on reference versions of AMD cards in the past. You'll see some refinements here and there, but none is nearly so drastic as the changes Nvidia made between its GeForce RTX 20 Series and RTX 30 Series of GPUs.
Similar Products
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super
AMD Radeon RX 5700
Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 OC
MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
On the back of the card we find a die-cast aluminum backplate, which is the same material found throughout the construction of the rest of the card, including the shroud and the frame.
The reference model of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT uses three fans in a push-pull configuration, which draws in heat in from the bottom of your case, passes it along the aluminum heatsink, and expels waste heat through the backplate as well as through vents on the side and rear port of the card.
Just as AMD kept things familiar with the design of its PCB and cooling system, the traditional dual eight-pin power connector makes an appearance on the RX 6800 XT, delivering 300 watts of power.
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT slims down its port offerings from previous AMD cards, offering up two DisplayPort 1.4b ports, one HDMI output, and one USB Type-C output all told. Like the 30 Series, that HDMI output has been upgraded to the HDMI 2.1 spec, up from 2.0 in previous RDNA cards.
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT: To Infinity Cache, and Beyond!
So, onward to the specs. Let's see how the RX 6800 XT shapes up against the rest of the new Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" line (the RX 6800 non-XT, and the forthcoming RX 6900 XT), as well as some preceding AMD cards and the two most relevant Nvidia ones (click the tab for the Nvidia cards)...
Understanding the differences among these cards is best broken down into a series of separate considerations. Let's get into them.
RDNA vs. RDNA 2
RDNA ("Radeon DNA") is AMD's preceding card architecture, debuting in 2019's Radeon RX 5700 line, headed by the Radeon RX 5700 XT. The story of RDNA moving to RDNA 2 is one of refinement, innovation, and refinement again. AMD's engineers have taken almost every element of RDNA and honed it down, chipping off the odd ends and focusing in on what works best.
Every GPU announced so far in the RDNA 2-based RX 6000 Series line utilizes some version of the same Navi 21 die (the 6800 XT is fittingly powered by the "Navi XT" variant), complete with 26.8 billion transistors spread across a 519mm2 die. This is a step up from the Navi 10-based Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700, which had "just" 10.3 billion transistors on a 251mm2 die.
The company is launching three cards altogether as a part of the Radeon RX 6000 Series debut: the top-of-the-line Radeon RX 6900 XT (due out December 8, for $999), the Radeon RX 6800 XT (launching today at $649), and the Radeon RX 6800 (today too, at $579).
AMD says to expect 1.3 times more throughput per compute unit at the same power in RDNA 2 compared with the original, as well as up to a 54% improvement in performance-per-watt over RDNA.
RDNA 2 vs. Ampere
Moving over to Big Green, compared one-to-one with the "Ampere"-based Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition, the Radeon RX 6800 XT wins some categories on paper, while losing others. On power consumption, the RX 6800 XT is 20 watts under the 320-watt GeForce RTX 3070, while also sporting a faster maximum boost clock (2,250MHz) and costing $50 less at MSRP.
The card's 16GB amount of GDDR6 RAM is impressive on its own, but it looks a bit less so once the RTX 3080 Founders Edition enters the picture with 10GB of GDDR6X that can push 248GBps more traffic down its larger 320-bit pipeline, despite having less VRAM to work with. This is down to the improvements made between GDDR6 and GDDR6X, with the latter having the potential to deliver up to twice as much bandwidth in the same amount of memory thanks to uniquely designed signaling pathways.
AMD notes, however, that it has a trick up its sleeve to compensate for this difference: something called "Infinity Cache."
Infinity Cache
One potentially major way AMD is changing up the GPU game with the launch of the Radeon RX 6000 Series is with its new Infinity Cache technology. Featuring a whopping 128MB of memory cache for the card to work with, in theory this allows for the GPU to act more like a CPU, buffering against write and read operations to the main memory, and a safeguard for any larger operations that would otherwise traverse out to VRAM.
The company says Infinity Cache won't just assist in traditional workloads, but should also boost the individual power of ray-tracing compute units (CUs), thanks to the reduction in travel time.
We'll have to find out in our benchmarks whether or not this actually translates to increased performance on the level of what Tensor cores and DLSS 2.0 do for Nvidia cards, or if it's more of an incremental improvement that sees general boosts across the board.
Ray-Tracing Silicon: Now on Radeon
Speaking of ray-tracing, AMD's got that now too! The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT comes with 72 ray-tracing CUs onboard, which AMD claims should be enough to keep titles like Far Cry 6 and Dirt 5 above the coveted 4K/60fps threshold with all ray-traced effects turned on.
When combined with VRS (below), the feature will only be supported by five titles at launch: Far Cry 6, Rift Breaker, WoW: Shadowlands, Dirt 5, and Godfall, though AMD has stated plans for at least 60 titles that should support both features sometime in the future.
Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
Introduced as a part of Microsoft's DirectX 12 VRS API, AMD has also added support for Variable Rate Shading on the RX 6000 Series.
Variable rate shading is a new tool for developers that allows for individualized areas of an image to be rendered at different shading rates to increase performance without losing visual fidelity. The technology made its debut in "Turing"-based Nvidia GPUs, and as a part of Intel's Gen11 graphics architecture in its 10nm "Ice Lake" CPUs.
For example, in the case of Dirt 5 above, you can see that the car, the stands, and background elements of the bridge (the green patches) receive more shading power than the road or people in the crowd. This technique of selectively applying power where it's needed most allows developers to increase the quality of certain elements, while reducing the load on the card at the same time.
VRS offers a clever solution to the problem of power distribution that's still in its infancy, but as a part of the open-source OpenGPU infrastructure, it could play a vital role in increasing frame rates for cards like the RX 6800 XT in the years to come.
Smart Access Memory (SAM)
Last but not least, there's Smart Access Memory. We saved this for the end because, unlike the others above, there's been some recent controversy as to just how unique the feature is to AMD, and whether or not the company is actually using the same version of a technology that's already widely available and attempting to rebrand it as something else.
In its marketing materials, the company suggests that its "Unique to AMD" Smart Access Memory will only be compatible with AMD-branded GPUs in the RX 6000 Series, and even then will only work in tandem specifically with Ryzen 5000 Series AMD CPUs. Turns out, though, that the underlying tech in action here is known as the "resizable bar" feature, something that's been standard as a part of the PCI Express specification for some time. It can be manually enabled through most motherboard BIOSes.
Recently Steve Burke over at Gamers Nexus reached out to Nvidia to inquire about the company's plans to introduce a competing feature, to which the company responded:
“The capability for resizable BAR is part of the PCI Express spec. NVIDIA hardware supports this functionality and will enable it on Ampere GPUs through future software updates. We have it working internally and are seeing similar performance results."
The suggestion here is that the resizable bar feature is not unique to AMD, nor even to PCI Express 4.0. Nvidia says that once implemented, the technology should work on any PCI Express-based platform, AMD or Intel, and be compatible with all Nvidia cards that receive the corresponding firmware update.
We ran some tests with SAM turned on and off across multiple benchmarks, but never noticed a gain of more than 1% in any of the titles tested. This represents a margin so slim it could be chalked up to run-to-run benchmark variance just as easily as the effect of SAM itself.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Software Features: Playing Catch-Up
FidelityFX Anti-Lag
AMD's Anti-Lag, like Nvidia's Reflex, is a feature that's designed for high-precision esports gamers who want to reduce the latency between their mouse and their screen as much as technically possible.
We weren't able to test the true efficacy of Anti-Lag from our current lab setup, as it requires a high-speed camera capable of recording up to 1,000 frames per second (along with a customized mouse). Anecdotally, however, I've tried the feature out in the past, and it still feels just as crisp while playing with it turned on in the RX 6800 XT.
It's a bit of an odd duck, in that it's only most effective when the resolution is turned to 4K, and it's not often you find people concerned about latency also playing at high resolutions like that. (Esports extremists tend to stick to resolutions like 1080p.) Even still, both Nvidia's Reflex and AMD's Anti-Lag are nice to have as options, and we'll continue to test both features are they're rolled out to more games and engines in the future.
Radeon Boost
Radeon Boost makes another appearance in Radeon Software, and while there haven't been any major improvements made since the last time we saw it, it should still be a consideration for competitive gamers who play any of the titles that it supports.
However, the feature is a bit less important for cards like the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which already has the raw horsepower to keep many of the games supported by Boost well above the 4K/144Hz threshold (at the right settings) where tech like this would be most impactful. This is a feature that provides greater benefit to lower-end cards like the RX 5700 XT, and we'll have to wait and see whether or not AMD has plans to release midrange or low-end cards under the Radeon RX 6000 Series badge anytime soon.
Microsoft DirectStorage API
Like Nvidia's RTX IO, as well as both the Sony PS5 and Xbox Series X, Radeon RX 6000 Series cards will help with the task of getting data off your SSD and into the pipeline faster and more efficiently, thanks to compatibility with Microsoft's DirectStorage API. Though we've only seen the tech in very limited game-design implementations thus far, in titles like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, universally it will allow for games to load in a near-instant, depending on the number of elements it has to pull from the drive. (Puzzle games will load faster than Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, for example.)
The DirectStorage API will be compatible with any game that chooses to support it on PC. Given how much of a hit instant-load has proven to be with players since the release of those two consoles, we imagine it won't be long before PC developers are lining up to add it to their titles, as well.
Super Resolution
Well you can't blame AMD for cutting straight to the point. Like Nvidia in 2018 at the launch of its GeForce RTX 20 Series cards, this year AMD has come to the stage with two features; ray-tracing and its "Super Resolution" upsampling technology. While the former will be supported by five titles at launch, very little information has been released about AMD's plans for its DLSS competitor as of today.
So, what do we know so far? Well, from the rumor mill and confirmation of DirectML features in the Xbox Series X, we've been able to glean that in principle Super Resolution will act in much the same way that Nvidia's DLSS does, by training games on a neural net that approximates polygon positions based on various input types to increase performance with no visual loss in graphics fidelity. Super Resolution is supposedly being developed in conjunction with Microsoft, and could utilize the company's Azure network of data centers to handle the training work for games that want to add Super Resolution support once the feature is available.
When that might be, though, is anyone's guess. Recently, AMD was quoted as saying it has no plans for Super Resolution to make its way to consoles or PC this year, with "sometime next year" the more likely target. Nvidia didn't have DLSS working when it launched the GeForce RTX 20 Series, either, so I won't ding AMD here, but only time (and benchmarks!) will tell whether or not Super Resolution will be able to hold a candle to DLSS once it's pushed to its limits.
Radeon Image Sharpening with CAS
So...until Super Resolution is released, FidelityFX with Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) will have to do for Radeon users.
We've gone into detail about the different reasons why users might prefer using a sharpening software like AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) over Nvidia's more selective DLSS in previous articles. But in short, its near-universal compatibility and hardware-level application make it a more viable option for 99% of titles on shelves today. And, when tuned just right, CAS can offer upward of 30% improvement on your favorite game without a visible loss of quality or sharpness.
RIS hasn't changed much since we first got our hands on it in the RX 5000 Series, though in my opinion it didn't really need to. It works for what it does, and while Super Resolution is the ultimate end goal for the whole "more performance with the same amount of power" mission statement of these technologies, RIS is a strong enough stopgap to carry AMD most of the way there until SR is released.
Testing the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT...Um, Twice
And so, onward to the benchmarks! PC Labs ran the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our 2020 PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It's equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard. All cards below were retested on this rig with their latest drivers for an even playing field. Although the recent Ryzen 5000 CPUs complicate the equation, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2020 to cut the CPU out of the picture for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our new standard benchmark regimen, which tests a card's abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and you're worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but many of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling integrated directly into the game. This can mean boosts of up to 40% more performance on top, depending on the setting and the card you're playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our new list of AAA titles includes a mix of recent AAA titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and F1 2020, as well as some older-but-still-reliable pillars of the benchmarker's toolkit, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL's circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We're looking only at the test's Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark's Time Spy Extreme test, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. Finally, there's Port Royal, which is strictly a test for RTX cards right now, measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. (Thus why blank results for the AMD cards on that one.) Also here are a few GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark, LuxMark); more details on those at the earlier "how we test" link.
To start off our suite, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT comes off the line with an early burst of speed in the Fire Strike Ultra run of 3DMark, and keeps pace with the RTX 3080 Founders Edition more often than not. The card slipped slightly in the 1080p Extreme run of Superposition, and then a bit further once we recorded the LuxMark score. Furmark handed the RX 6800 XT a slight win in 1080p, though its 4K results were about 10 percent slower than the 3080 FE.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games
Now on to the real-world stuff. The following benchmarks are games that you can play. We typically used in each case (for these AAA games) the highest in-game preset and, if available, DirectX 12. The multiplayer-focused and esports titles (such as CS:GO and Rainbow Six) coming up in the next chart group were set slightly below top detail settings to maximize frame rates.
Let the head-scratching begin!
One minute the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is hoisting a victory torch above the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, and the next it's trailing the like-priced pack. On the whole, when it comes to modern AAA optimized titles, the RX 6800 XT manages to hold its own against Nvidia's onslaught, posting numbers that keep AMD in decent competition with the Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition. That's at both 4K and 1440p resolutions across multiple modern games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and F1 2020.
But it's not consistent, and the inconsistencies are hard to unpack. Opposed to Nvidia's RTX 30 Series launch, which went off smoothly in terms of performance consistency in our tests, AMD finds itself exhibiting more than its share of puzzling results. To start, running the same test three times in a row for an average FPS produced swings in results of up to 10fps in either direction. For example, upon first noticing the problems with inconsistent frame rates, I decided to run Far Cry 5 (one of the most stable benchmarks of the bunch) through 10 back-to-back tests to see what came back. The card returned results as low as 88fps average all the way up to 98fps: a variance of a little over 11%.
Upon mentioning this issue to AMD, the company was quick to send out a replacement card overnight. On testing that card, we saw variance swings of around 5% on the same test. Optimally? You want to see just a few percentage points at most, from run to run.
We also saw issues where the card seemed to "stall out" on 1080p results, both in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and Total War: Warhammer II when testing in DirectX 12. In both those games, both of the 1080p results and the 1440p results would max out at around 85fps. (And before the "It's a CPU bottleneck!" comments flood in, I'd recommend checking out our review of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition to see what kind of results those games produce when benched on a stable set of drivers using the same testbed as the RX 6800 XT.)
With all that said, if there's one thing AMD is somewhat infamous for by this point, it's the relative lack of early driver stability for its graphics-card launches. During the launch of the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 last year, reviewers across the web (myself included) were getting new firmware updates just a few days before the cards were set to launch, and we here at PCMag needed to get a second Radeon RX 5700 XT card shipped out for testing, due to issues found in the hardware of the initial one we got.
Despite a year and a half having passed since that launch, the same story is repeating itself in RX 6000 Series cards. For now, I'm going to chalk this inconsistency up to AMD's penchant for first-day driver jitters...but given our recent experiences, it doesn't feel great to give AMD the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Just two months ago, during our efforts to update our benchmarking suite in preparation for the GeForce RTX 30 Series and this "Big Navi" launch, we found that both the RX 5700 XT and the RX 5700 were unable to complete the benchmark runs of Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Red Dead Redemption 2, crashing midway each time. This was in the same system in which we had just finished testing roughly 15 other cards (including the AMD Radeon VII and Radeon RX Vega 64), all of which ran the tests. However, neither of the RDNA-based cards was able to complete the task on the current driver set.
Testing Results: Multiplayer Games
Though most of PC Labs' game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we've kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Final Fantasy XIV tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep frame rates for 1080p games above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That's a coveted target for highly competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 144Hz or 165Hz gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz monitors, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips under 60fps, is fine.
In multiplayer testing, the card stabilized a bit and returned reliable results in all three runs we've included as a part of our benchmarking suite.
While running CS:GO at 4K resolution (there's a phrase you don't read too often), the card was able to keep pace with the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, and the same was true for its Rainbow Six results. The RX 6800 XT was generally just a hair behind the RTX 3080 in all three of our multiplayer games tests in all three resolutions, but that kind of stability was only a momentary respite from what was about to come.
Testing Results: Legacy AAA Titles
Next, let's see how the Radeon RX 6800 XT does against some AAA games that have passed their prime as the most graphically demanding titles on shelves. We ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider (2013), and Bioshock: Infinite, the last being a game that has no business still being as well optimized as it is here in 2020.
This is where things really started to take a turn. In Sleeping Dogs, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT performed well under the expectations set by the results we saw in the current lineup of AAA titles, dropping as low as 58fps in 4K. This results in a maximum frame rate that's 35% slower than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, despite the RX 6800 XT costing just 7% less.
On the whole, 4K results for all the legacy AAA games we tested were substantially slower than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, and both 1080p and 1440p results followed a similar trend. Despite multiple conversations and troubleshooting sessions with AMD's engineers, I was never able to pin down why the RX 6800 XT was so poorly optimized for these legacy games in comparison to modern AAA titles. In a statement responding to these issues, the company has said its team is "...actively investigating these results, and will provide an update when available.”
Note, too: At AMD's request, I ran both of the RX 6800 XT cards I received from the company on two separate testbeds. This included our traditional Z490-based system with an Intel Core i9-10900K, as well as an AMD X570-based bed with a Ryzen 9 5900X installed. In both tests, the cards scored identically in 4K results for Sleeping Dogs, which only bolsters the assumption that the poor results in this game are down to drivers, and not the hardware itself.
The (Unofficial) PUBG Test
For a momentary dose of reality, I decided to step slightly outside the bounds of our normal benchmarking suite to test how GPU-sensitive titles like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) would handle on the RX 6800 XT.
Personally, I know this game inside and out (650-plus hours logged since beta!), and as such, I have a firsthand understanding of just how finicky its performance has been over the years. The PUBG engine is notoriously unoptimized ("janky," is a popular description), and even the most powerful setups aren't able to achieve anything higher than 180fps consistently during an online match.
But, while the RX 6800 XT did retain a respectable frame rate throughout a match on the Sanhok map (about 130fps average, eyeballed), it's what I didn't see that concerned me the most:
Notice how the foreground has grass, plants, and bushes lining the ground, while in the distance it's just one flat ground texture with nothing on top of it? During the early days of PUBG, players would look for any possible way to remove foliage from the map, to make it easier to spot enemies who were crouching or lying down in the grass.
Techniques ranged from using third-party tools like ReShade down to editing the .INI settings file in Steam library folders to manually configure draw distances. Nowadays, though, the old loopholes have all been patched, and the only way to remove foliage is through cheats or hacks that break the engine, either of which will quickly result in a ban if you get caught using them. This means the image above isn't just a graphical anomaly to shrug off...it's actually a bannable offense in online matches.
After spotting the problem on Sanhok, I then loaded into the Erangel and Vikendi maps, and both exhibited the same issues. If you want a prime example of what driver instability could mean for your favorite titles, accidental cheats like this could be just the start.
Overclocking and Thermals: That's a Lotta Headroom!
We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the card peaked at a temperature of 81 degrees C. That's only a few degrees hotter than the hyper-engineered cooling system of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which peaked at 77 degrees C. For all the engineering prowess that went into shrinking the PCB of the 3080 Founders Edition to make room for cooling, we would have expected it to beat a traditionally designed card like the Radeon RX 6800 XT by a few more percentage points.
As was the case in the RTX 3080 Founders Edition review, we used our trusty FLIR One Pro thermal-imaging camera to evaluate how the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT disperses waste heat during that same 10-minute run. At peak temperatures, the card heats up almost near evenly across the length of the backplate, with much of the airflow venting out the side of the card, and slight heat output detected at the rear exhaust port.
When it came time to overclock the card using the AMD Radeon Software utility, I was able to push the card much further than I expected, achieving a maximum stable boost clock of 2,800MHz(!). This 24.5% boost in clock speed translated to a 10 percent gain in performance in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, moving the needle from 69fps in 4K up to 76fps. That is a full 9fps faster than the stock RTX 3080 Founders Edition.
Overall, that clock remained stable throughout several different benchmarks and real-world play scenarios, an unexpected result, to say the least. Normally, when you push a card this far above stock, it crashes straight off hitting "Apply" on the profile, but the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT stayed stable throughout the most intense scenes, even managing to survive a 10-minute 3DMark stress test on the Fire Strike Ultra benchmark.
Given the driver instability during normal benchmarking, I was taken aback at the amount of extra performance I was able to squeeze out out of the RX 6800 XT without it crashing on me. This leaves one to wonder, then: If the card was capable of being pushed this much further, why didn't AMD do it out of the box to try and deliver a killing blow to the RTX 3080 flat out?
Verdict: Day One Drivers, Day One Performance
What we've got on our hands with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is a card with great potential, which in this difficult case, tempted us to score it four out of five stars. But we opted for half a star less.
If the peak benchmark numbers we achieved are a representation of what we can expect with driver tuning as time goes on, the Radeon RX 6800 XT has the chance to become a top graphics card of the year. But as it stands on launch day, the card is too inconsistent, too often, to warrant our top recommendation. If you play any games we didn't benchmark as a part of our suite (and you will), it's a lottery as to whether or not the 6800 XT will perform how you expect it to.
When the card did perform reliably, a more concrete story emerged. Overall, the card is just about $50 in price-to-performance behind the Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition, and even manages to beat it handily in the case of games that favor AMD, like F1 2020. Considering the company's position five years ago versus where it is today, it's nice to see AMD back in real pursuit of Nvidia, when its cards are able to deliver consistently on their promises.
That said, we noted just too many irregularities in the AMD RX 6800 XT to give it an unequivocal recommendation in its current state. Although release-day driver jitters are nothing new for AMD, this time around the swings with the Radeon RX 6800 XT were a bit too far outside the margins of comfort. For a sense of context, we never ran into any anomalous numbers or unexplainable results during our entire suite of testing with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 Series cards. This includes both Founders Editions we procured (the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070), as well as third-party RTX 3080 cards from Asus and MSI. Straight out of the box, each card performed to expectations, and there was never a point where we had to re-run tests due to numbers that looked out of place. The cards performed so much in spec, in fact, that while diagnosing the problems we were seeing with the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, we had to dig the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, pictured below, out of the pile to act as our control.
This launch has been anything but smooth. Benchmarking took multiple days, across multiple sets of cards (two of which were rushed to us at the midnight hour), all to come to the same conclusion: AMD's driver support continues to be the company's main weak spot. As an architecture, RDNA 2 holds a lot of promise both in PC and console, but as of today, that's all we saw in the RX 6800 XT...a whole lot of promise, without consistent-enough results to back it up just yet.
So, then, we conclude at a place of conflict. If you play Red Dead Redemption 2 or F1 2020, we can confidently say that the RX 6800 XT is a lower-cost alternative to the RTX 3080 Founders Edition that can either match or even exceed its performance in select benchmarks. But if you play Total War: Warhammer II in resolutions outside of 4K, it's a bit of a crapshoot as to what you can expect.
Then there are the four legacy-game tests, which don't look great, to be glib. Three out of the four games returned results that were either inconsistent between resolutions, or were significantly slower than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition (up to a factor of 35% in the case of our Sleeping Dogs run). Despite running through multiple troubleshooting sessions together, the engineers at AMD weren't able to figure out the reason why these legacy games weren't performing up to spec, so anyone expecting an answer at launch may be sitting on their hands for a bit longer.
We'll have to wait to see how the forthcoming Radeon RX 6900 XT stacks up against the GeForce RTX 3090 in the coming weeks. But for now, it looks as though AMD's latest Radeon RX 6000 Series still has some growing pains to shake off...and we'll be here to check back on the cards as soon as they do.
AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT impresses in spots with record-breaking results in specific benchmarks, but inconsistent frame rates on several games, and driver-stability issues, keep it from toppling the best of Nvidia's GeForce RTX.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
