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I'll be doing further tests on Smart Access Memory in due course, but so far I've seen next-to-no boosts in some games, while jumps of up to 11% in others.
![amd radeon rx 6800 xt amd radeon rx 6800 xt](https://www.lion.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt_9s5x.jpg)
This is still in its early stages at the moment, and even AMD have admitted that the gains you can get by enabling it right now are pretty small. There's also the untapped promise of AMD's Smart Access Memory feature, which has been designed to boost the RX 6000 series' performance even further when paired with one of their frankly astonishing Ryzen 5000 processors and a 500-series AM4 motherboard. The RX 6800 XT is quite a chunky graphics card, taking up 2.5 PCIe slots, but its length of 267mm means it should fit into most full-sized tower cases without issue. We've already seen Watch Dogs Legion's high VRAM requirements butt up against the 8GB you'll get on the RTX 3070, for example, and even the RTX 3080's 10GB of GDDR6X memory is starting to feel a little stingy by comparison.
#Amd radeon rx 6800 xt series#
For starters, it actually fits into my damn case without requiring any HDD bays to be removed (something I can't say is true of all RTX 3080 cards), and its rated power draw of 300W (versus Nvidia's 320W) also only requires the usual pair of 8-pin power connectors, disposing of the triple power connector nonsense seen on a lot of third party RTX 3080 cards.Īll of AMD's Big Navi RX 6000 series have a massive 16GB of GDDR6 memory, too, leaving them better equipped to deal with the increasingly large memory requirements of 'next-gen' games. In any case, the lack of any DLSS-style frame rate hoiking leaves the RX 6800 XT feeling rather lacklustre compared to the RTX 3080, even though there are several parts of its design and tech specification that make it much more attractive.
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It may even be a resuscitated form of their older Virtual Super Resolution tech. "We will share more details as it becomes available," say AMD, but right now I couldn't tell you whether it's going to be an AI-driven thing like Nvidia's DLSS tech, or a riff on some of the existing parts of their FidelityFX suite, such as their Contrast Adaptive Sharpening gubbins or variable rate shading techniques. Dubbed FidelityFX Super Resolution (catchy), AMD have told me it will bring "an open, easily adoptable super resolution capability which will boost ray tracing performance at higher resolutions" when it's finally released, but beyond that. Worse still, we currently don't know when it's going to be available either. Instead, AMD are still working on their answer to DLSS, leaving the RX 6800 XT at a severe disadvantage compared to its RTX competition. For while Nvidia's RTX cards increasingly have their sophisticated DLSS technology to fall back on to help bump up the frame rate to an acceptable level when ray tracing is enabled, AMD have nothing at all. However, I suspect my conclusions will be largely the same. Game / Boost Clock Speed: 2015MHz / 2250MHzĪt the moment, I've only been able to test AMD's more expensive RX 6800 XT so far, so I'll have to reserve judgement on the regular RX 6800's ray tracing performance until a later date.However, despite coming out strong with their Ryzen 5000 CPUs, I can't help but feel like AMD's first batch of Big Navi cards could have done with a little more time in the oven, especially when it comes to that increasingly important graphics battleground of 2020: ray tracing. Utilising AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture, the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT are both aiming for Nvidia's equally new RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 GPUs, offering 4K 60fps performance in today's biggest blockbuster games, and well in excess in that at 1440p and below to make the most of the ever-swelling ranks of high refresh rate displays. AMD have been on a real winning streak this month with the recent launch of their Ryzen 5000 CPUs, and now they're hoping to follow it up with the launch of their first set of ray tracing-enabled Big Navi graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.