We’re so used to Nvidia being the top dog in the GPU market that we often overlook the offerings available from its main competitor, AMD.
The RX 6800 XT boasts all the premium high-performance specs you’d expect from a top-of-the-line graphics card and can easily meet all your gaming needs, running any modern game at 60+ fps in 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions.
A staggering 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM (4 GB more than the RTX 3080 TI) puts the 6800 XT in a comfortable position to handle high-resolution texture packs, allowing games to run in 4K at over 60 fps, depending on your configuration.
The RX 6800 XT can run Battlefield 5 with Ultra settings in 4K @ 60 fps with the above system configuration. (Credit: AMD)
Despite the card’s high performance, the 6800 XT draws less power than its direct competitor, the RTX 3080 Ti, and sports curved fan blades to keep the card cool while mitigating excessive noise.
If you have a 5000 series AMD CPU, combining it with the 6800 XT will give you access to AMD’s exclusive Smart Access Memory Technology.
This allows your CPU to have full access to the GPU’s RAM, eliminating bottlenecks and increasing system performance overall.
Drawbacks
AMD graphics cards still lag behind Nvidia GPUs in productivity-related tasks like video rendering, so you’ll be better off buying an RTX card if that’s your goal.
Additionally, AMD’s upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super (FSR), is much younger than Nvidia’s DLSS equivalent and supports fewer games.
However, FSR’s open-source code and more straightforward integration methods mean that an increasing number of games, like Far Cry 6 and Horizon Zero Dawn, are getting FSR support.
Finally, the 6800 XT’s ray tracing capabilities are significantly worse than RTX cards, despite having 72 ray accelerators.
Even considering all these drawbacks, the RX 6800 XT is still an excellent choice for the person looking to upgrade their gaming experience.
Below you can see a table of the specifications of the 6800 XT sourced from AMD’s website, with the price sourced from Evetech:
| AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Interface | PCI-E Gen 4.0 |
| Compute units | 72 |
| Ray accelerators | 72 |
| Stream processors | 4608 |
| Core clocks | Boost: up to 2250 MHz Game: 2015 MHz |
| Compute units | 72 |
| RAM | 16 GB GDDR6 |
| RAM speed | 16 Gbps |
| Peak single-precision performance | 20.74 TFLOPs |
| Power consumption | 300 W |
| Recommended PSU | 750 W |
| Power connectors | 2 x 8-pin |
| Price | R27,000 |
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