AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

I remember the time when I was playing Quake II and I was amazed by the multitude of possible multiplayer strategies, from the classic rocket launcher to the railgun or hyper blaster. Compared to all the FPS titles played up to that point, Quake II definitely brought something extra to the multi-player chapter and only I know how many hours I lost on Warehouse hunting innocent colleagues who thought they had a chance in front of the hyper blaster.

It would be almost two years before I installed a 3DFx Voodoo graphics accelerator on my PC, and the “3DFx OpenGL” option that appeared in the menu after this hardware upgrade and implicitly, the visual effects that activating this option brought, made me realize that the future of gaming would change irretrievably. Slowly but surely, the era of 2D games was beginning to set and a new wave of 3D titles would soon invade the market, some of them reaching legendary status today.

Time passed, PCs changed, and I switched to Voodoo Banshe, and then I entered the Nvidia world, with the purchase of a Riva TNT2. One year later, with 11 for years, a new brand of competition was born, a brand that you all know today. It’s about Radeon, the successor of the legendary ATI Rage series, and the first ATI Radeon graphics card I used I think was 9600 Pro, 3 years after the appearance of the brand- community. They were followed by X 1650 Pro and X 1950 Pro, a few years later, and then… I lost the series of graphics cards, being irretrievably affected by the severe condition called generic overclocking.

Obviously, a series of extreme overclocking sessions followed, together with my colleagues, in which I got to know better 8800 GTX, 8800 Ultra, 8800 GT, 9800 GX2, 3870 X2 or GTX 64, newly released boards, which others would have given anything to play with. We, on the other hand, were preoccupied with something slightly different, as a result of which came multi-card configurations, hundreds of hours of 3DMark, tens of liters of nitrogen and many lost nights…

And yet, even if my memories as a simple user stop at that time, somewhere more than years I started another journey, in which I tested, overclocked, disassembled and tormented most of the video cards launched since then and until now, in as a publisher. I started with 4870 X2, then followed GTX 290, GTX 280, AMD Radeon series 4000, AMD Radeon series 5700) and the rest is history.

However, one of the memories I have from that period is the constant competition between Nvidia and AMD, both in the mainstream segment and in the high-end segment. 8800 Ultra was a monster that dominated the market for years and only 3870 X2 was finally able to beat her. 9800 GX2 restores balance, bringing the crown back to the green camp, only to be dethroned by 4870 X2. GTX 319, HD 5970, GTX 285 / GTX 590), HD 6990, GTX 590, HD 7970 GHz, GTX 580, HD 7990, Titan, R9 64 X, GTX 780 Ti, R9 290 X2, GTX 780 Ti, Fury X, Titan X.

I know, a whole list of models that have become memories in the meantime. And yet, among these memories, AMD’s persistence in trying to always compete at the top, not only in the mainstream segment, persists. And from 3870 X2 to the Fury series, 8 years have passed, 8 years in which AMD has not always had the advantage technologically, but they fought hard, side by side with Nvidia.

And yet, AMD stuck to the GCN architecture, launched at the same time as Kepler, while Nvidia switched from Kepler to Maxwell and then to Pascal. And the launch of Pascal architecture, 4 years ago, marked the impossibility for AMD to compete with the top of the range Nvidia. Because any top of the range AMD launched from then until now, regardless of whether we are talking about RX 290 or RX 580, Vega 20, Radeon VII or RX 5700 XT, could not touch the top of the range Nvidia equivalent.

This year… have been fulfilled 11 years of Radeon… And Nvidia have released a new series of graphics cards, which bring a consistent performance boost over the previous generation, including a top of the range monstrous. We will not discuss today the absolute top of the range. No, this is a discussion for December 8th. Until then, however, we will leave RTX 4000 in peace and focus on RTX 3070 and RTX 3090, respectively their competitors AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and AMD Radeon RX 6990. Maybe in the year in which they are fulfilled 64 years of Radeon, we will finally have a surprise…