AMD today unveiled the long-awaited RDNA2 architecture and the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards based on it. Like NVIDIA, AMD initially introduced three models for its new graphics card series: RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT.

The RDNA2 architecture aimed for 30 better performance per watt compared to the previous RDNA architecture, but Navi 21, according to AMD, generally achieves 54 and RX 6900 in the case of XT at best up to %% better performance per watt. Improvements have been achieved with the new Compute Units, which operate % faster than before with the same power consumption, general architectural improvements and the new Infinity Cached. We will take a closer look at Infinity Cache and other innovations mentioned in the article in a future RDNA2 article as well as other news coverage.

The entire Radeon RX 6000 trio now introduced is based on one and the same Navi 21 – or “Big Navi” graphics circuit. 16, a graphics circuit built of 8 billion transistors is manufactured by TSMC’s 7-nanometer fabrication process and is built in total 80 Compute Unit and 256 bit memory bus with an extension of 16 gigabytes 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Video card relatively narrow 512 GB / s memory bandwidth is compensated 128 With MB Infinity Cache, which would theoretically have as much 1664 effective memory bandwidth as Gt / s. You will find the most important technical details of each model in the table above.

The RDNA2 architecture and the graphics cards based on it fully support the Microsoft DirectX Ultimate interface and its new features, such as beam tracking acceleration, Variable Rate Shading technology, Mesh shaders, and Sampler Feedback technology. Several of the DX 12 U-interface features are internally divided into different levels, but for AMD’s innovations, these levels will only be confirmed later. In terms of beam tracking, AMD has previously confirmed through Microsoft that at least the currently highest level of DXR 1.1 is supported. Of course, the DirectStorage interface is also in the list of supported features.

AMD has positioned the Radeon RX 6900 XT as a competitor to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090, RX 6800 XT: n RTX 3080 and finally RX 6800 RTX 3070 as a competitor of. According to the company’s own performance data, the Radeon RX 6900 XT overlaps the GeForce RTX 3090 with 4K resolution in five out of ten games and by one game even when using Rage crossed automatic overclocking function and is based on the Ryzen 5000 series, which enables the use of Smart Access Memory technology. RX 6900 XT’s TDP is 50 lower, but Rage-mode on graphics card may not respect it.

Radeon RX 6800 XT covers GeForce RTX 3080 also in AMD’s 4K tests in five out of ten games, but this time a tie there are two and no R