AMD 6800 series

Games, Gaming & Hardware
1

So, now that they’ve come out, seems from reviews that they’re good for gaming just about but they’re still pretty much lacking in the other aspects so not much of a Nvidia killer yet.

Which brings about the question on what you use your computer for?

For gaming it looks like AMD 6800 series cards but their raytracing is poor at best, not surprising since it’s first gen for that. Plus AMD hasn’t a suitable version of DLSS yet that works and works enough to look good.

RTX cards though would be the choice if you do more than gaming. 6800 cards can’t compete in 3D modeling, AI, encoding video and other creativity stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, what AMD has done is in the right direction but they still got a fair way to go in other parts as well as improve their driver software. It’s not like Intel they’re up against here. Nvidia has done more AI software such as remove background from webcam, put you, yourself with the game you’re playing behind you without a green screen.

So they got to catch up right there.

However…

If you don’t do other creativity stuff and just game then the AMD 6800 series cards are decent enough to buy, just don’t expect great raytracing performance but non-raytracing and they’re really good cards.

2

i did exactly what i had planned to play around their scummy review embargo. rush to order, read review, cancel if disappointing.

i actually snagged one (maybe, may have gotten canceled later), but ended up canceling my order right after checking reviews. it’s not good enough for the price they’re asking for in sweden. our supply was not terrible. it sold out instantly, but i saw 32 MSI in stock when i placed my order, as well as 98 ASUS non-XT. i was going really fast and didn’t really get a great look at the overall situation.

the MSRP was supposed to be about €700, but they were actually almost €800. one of our retailers said their purchase price was higher than the MSRP, so that was a joke. the performance was underwhelming in the sense that they only match the 3080 on average in rasterization, while having huge gaps elsewhere (for me, RT and DLSS, for others CUDA, OptiX, RTX Voice etc).

the 6800 XT is good, but there are many cases where it is vastly inferior to the 3080. there are little to no cases where the 3080 is vastly inferior to the 6800 XT. for an extra ~€100 i can have a 3080, and when you’re at this price point it just feels like a waste to save €100 when you will inevitably end up in situations where the 3080 would have been much faster when either RT or DLSS is available, or god forbid both at the same time.

my british friend had much more reasonable prices at £600, but their supply seems to have been atrocious. i read a lot pre-launch about seemingly awful supply in the US as well. i wonder if maybe sweden’s retailers paid a premium to get priority.

i was really disappointed in the overclocking performance as well. the 2.5ghz rumours were true, which is a huge boost on the core, but it resulted in almost no performance gains. the XT must be memory starved big time.

if you have a large price gap, the 6800 XT is a cool product, at least if you don’t value RT too highly. but when it starts to creep too close to the 3080, it’s just not worth it.

3

Yeah, that’s how I see it, AMD has made some improvement but they’re still a long way to actually having a card that can compete with the RTX cards right now.

The hype just wasn’t there, seems AMD does better with their CPU’s than their GPU’s right now. And I’m not sure how much more improvement can be made when the whole CPU can use GPU ram either.

Looks like for raytracing, the hardware route is the way to go, same for the AI stuff on the die. It’s also the lack of software AMD has right now without their own DLSS and AI upscaling that’s becoming an issue as well.

If the 6800 cards were prices £100-200 less then I would say, yeah go for it. But they’re nowhere near to competing against a 3080 and I can’t see their 6900 card competing against the 3090 either.

Hype that unfortunately fell short and couldn’t repeat the Ryzen team efforts of carrying it through.

4

i think the radeon group’s product is much more impressive than the ryzen group’s. the improvements they’ve made are incredible. they’re just up against a much more difficult competitor in nvidia. the 6800 XT is fantastic within the context of AMD, or even pre-ampere nvidia. the problem is that the 3080 exists.

i’m sure it’ll still sell well, especially since pricing seems to be more reasonable outside sweden, assuming they will actually have any supply long-term.

weirdly, despite the huge price gap i think the 6900 XT will be less competitive with the 3090 than the 6800 XT is with the 3080. few reasons:

  1. 3090 is a great value card for prosumer/professional applications due to its VRAM, compute performance and software support. AMD can’t compete in this space.
  2. as for gaming, i think the price difference will be ineffective. for me (and most people), a $500 difference is fantastic and makes it way more interesting. but if you’re interested in price/perf at all, you’re not buying the 6900 XT anyway, the 6800 XT is much better value. the people who buy 3090s for gaming are the folks who do not care about value, they just want the best. and judging by 3080 vs 6800 XT, the 6900 XT will not be the best.
5

GPU advancement gen to gen are way way higher. CPU advancements slowed down since many years in x86 family. The Zen 3 over Zen 2 and Zen 2 over Zen 1 is IMHO much bigger challenge than those GPU changes - but that’s still low in the context of like ARM advancements.

The launches are so bad that people will buy whatever is in stock - brand loyalty will be broken quite easily. If AMD actually has that backloaded stock and next week there will be hundreds per country then they will gain a substantial part of Nvidia customers… however some shops counter that stock rumor saying they have no info if and how many cards they will receive… not to mention that like one of local shops here in Poland did not allow for back-orders as they don’t expect ANY subsequent shipments of the reference PowerColor cards :smiley:

3090 is still not a Titan as Nvidia did not enabled Titan specific features and pro-drivers (Linus talked about it and showed benchmarks). Also in some compute workloads… Radeon VII is still best :smiley: 3090 and 6900 XT are halo products intended to steal the media coverage (and to milk whales) as those will be commonly used in showcase builds, benchmarks, analysis and whatnot.

Shadowplay is better than AMD stuff, but actual video encoding is done via other means - wherever CPU or whole GPU computation (some video processing apps really like GCN like Radeon VII). Nvidia has Optix and CUDA and an ecosystem of pro-sumer apps but current shortage isn’t due to pro-sumers rushing stores but gamers (plus pro-sumers here and there).

People in 2020 will buy what will be in stock. In 2021 Q2+ people will buy what’s better value for them. In 2020 brand loyalty will mean little.

And DXR or DLSS aren’t key features yet, there will be next gen so AMD has time to do stuff properly.

7

Yeah, got the cpu and mobo upgrade first but then looking at the 3080 and it’s. Ugh.

There’s a queue already in the 500-700 range waiting for back orders to come in.

And AMD is not really saying much right now with their stock availability but fullly expecting some people to get around some sites and buy out all the stock anyways to resell for a higher price.

Not seen a single launch yet with actual decent unit numbers. Even the PS5 today has hit stock issues.

8

sort of. 3070 and 3090 availability has been pretty good recently here, even multiple large shipments of ASUS 3070 for €40 over MSRP that stay up for hours (we never got the FE 3070 at all, so the MSRP is purely theoretical). my friend is telling me the 3090 FE drops are up for hours in the UK, and the 3070s for like 20 minutes. german 3080 FE drop today was up for about 5 minutes.

all of this is of course reaaally bad by normal standards, but relative to before it is a lot better.

we have had multiple stores say that they will not receive any more shipments of the reference AMD cards at all. this was it, now it’s gone forever. only partner cards from here on.

yeah, i know, but it is still stupid fast in a lot of workloads and it has 24gb of VRAM. it’s a bad gaming product that happens to be great in other applications. or it’s a gimped titan turned into an overpriced gaming card. it’s not really clear what it is. as for different workloads, yeah it’s hard to speak generally about that stuff because it varies soooo much depending on what workload you are talking about.

different models have vastly different delivery times here at least. asus are the worst by a very wide margin, especially the non-OC models which are barely being produced at all. MSI is also looking quite bad. zotac OC cards (do not buy the non-OC, they barely exist, just like ASUS), all the EVGA cards, PNY, gainward, palit are all shipping decently, two days to a few weeks seems quite common.

probably varies by country though, but if your shops are communicating well it should be possible to get one fairly soon.

9

Some are returning 3090 due to 3080 Ti rumors and other options seeing how 3090 has trash prices. As for 3070 yes, they are more available… and I got one today as local shop casually had 7 of them. But looking how people went for lots of Ryzen 5900X and 5950X it seems there is bigger hunger for 3080 and 6800 XT.

10

grats on the 3070! i would be lying if i said i haven’t been tempted, but there won’t be any waterblocks for those probably (maybe the FE), and even if there were i wouldn’t really want to.

3080 ti is unappealing to me personally. it’s gonna cost a small fortune for sure. probably $999 which will end up €300-400 over 3080 probably. and for what? the 3090 is barely faster than the 3080, even if they give the 3080 ti all the cores of the 3090 it’s not gonna be much faster. it’s mainly the vram, which may or may not be useful, and just like with the 6800 xt i’m not about to buy it based on what may or may not happen in some cases in the future. it’s a bonus, all things equal, yes, but it’s not significant enough for me to ignore a bunch of other stuff for it.

i think if the 3090 does not make sense to you, then there’s a good chance the 3080 ti doesn’t either. plus it’s a rumour about something that may or may not happen in the future. so first the rumour needs to be true, then we need to wait for the launch, then the launch goes horribly wrong, and then you wait a good while longer to get it. you’ve had your 3090 for so long by then.

agree about the hunger. on the nvidia side the 3080 has by far the highest demand relative to its supply, it’s not even close. will have to see with the amd cards when they have been out for a bit.

11

4K extreme gaming cards. If someone is into very high end 4K gaming then those prices are “expected”. I’m on 3440x1440 ultrawide which is 60% of 4K and much easier to run so even 3070 should easily handle everything (or “learn to code” for devs if not).

Like even the 3060 Ti will will be quite cheap will bring something around RTX 2080S/2070S to like 2060S prices. That’s also 1440p card.

12

the 3080 is fantastic in 4k though. it’s where it behaves best. that is the reality right now. i’m gonna use it to play 3440x1440 144hz and 4k 60hz. if it was a ti like in previous generations, where it has a significant performance uplift, then sure. but this is gonna be like 5-10%, which does not matter much in the real world if we’re being honest, mainly cool for benching. maybe you’ll have a game where vram limitations is a thing and you’ll wanna bump the textures down one step, but that’s a maybe, and how common would that even be? you’re paying a huge premium for something so minor. the amount of times you will sit there like “damn, i sure am glad i paid the extra for the 3080 ti” is probably not gonna be huge, but you’ll encounter that constantly if you compare, say, the 3070 and 3080, or 3060 ti and 3070 or what have you.

i know people will buy it, people buy 3090s for gaming too, but i don’t think it will be a huge success. it seems like it will be less bad than the 3090 in terms of value, but that’s not saying much.

also though, lots of this stuff in the enthusiast range is not really logical, it’s as much want as it is need. the advice i would give to someone else and what i would do for myself are totally separate things. i would never suggest someone buy a more expensive motherboard because it looks prettier, but i might do that myself. in fact i have done that. i would never recommend custom loops either, and yet i have one.

there also seems to be a subset of people who will only buy x80 ti cards from nvidia and nothing else, seemingly based on name.

13

No where near competing against the 3080 did you actually watch any of the reviews?

14

I did, it does well in raster, that’s about it.

Raytracing is poor as is expected considering it’s the first card to do so.

And it’s not on par with the other creative aspects. So really it’s caught up on gaming if you don’t care for raytracing but as for everything else, AMD still has some work to do.

15

The 6800xt is really good at rasterization bit slower than the 3080@4k faster @1440/1080p and the 6800 faster than the 3070 which is a big win for AMD I do agree though they are still overpriced.
But the 6800xt dose ok in ray tracing as well ok not as good as 3080 but don’t think anyone thought it would be but the 6800xt is between the 3070 and 3080 in RT performance which is not to bad TBH.
But TBH I think raytracing is still over hyped at the minuet it looks good in some games, but only cards that can run it even remotely well are high end cards and even then it still massively tanks performance it wont be until all of the lower mid range cards can run it at a playable frame rate that it will start getting really good.

16

i think this generation is when ray tracing has become a relevant thing. ampere is fast enough that you can get away with running it (depending on resolution, game and framerate goal of course). DLSS is looking quite good now, which it did not back when turing came out, which helps enormously with making the tech viable. additionally, amd now support it, although not as well yet. and who could forget the new consoles?

i would think that it would remain niche during ampere as well, though. i think the next generation will be when it really takes off. amd should have a vastly improved implementation by then (as well as a DLSS alternative), and the performance of the new cards should help to make it more usable in the lower price ranges. the technology will have been available on PC for 4 years, and console for 2, and as a result i think support for it will be pretty common in games by then.

17

Before considering whether you need to get the most recently released hardware, maybe ask yourself what priority you place on playing WoW… then wrestle with your conscience as to whether the expense is worth it.

Any machine with core components predominently from the last 5 years will easily handle WoW at current Raid levels.

By all means, play WoW on a “5000-currency” machine, but that level of hardware is realistically only needed for games released in the last 2-3years… you sure as heck don’t need that level of hardware for WoW, alone.

18

Here is some testing of 6800xt vs 3090 - looks like they are even for WoW and better RT on the 6800xt

19

the RT numbers don’t make sense to me. why is the 3090 performing the same at 1440p and 4K, and also why is the 2080 ti performing the same as the 3090? something is wrong.

the non-RT numbers seem pretty normal. at 1440p 3090 and 6800 xt perform the same here, probably cpu bound a lot. at 4k ampere is better so the 3090 pulls ahead considerably, so probably the 3080 is somewhere inbetween them, which is what happens on average currently.

20

Limited by something else and not the GPU :wink: Also Ampere is heavily optimized for 4K / high resolution workloads in general. It may be that in that scenario there wasn’t much “stuff” for the GPU to scale if it was a GPU limit in the first place.

Also Bastion is a risky spot to test as on Beta for some time there was a bug that dropped like 20-30FPS if you looked wherever north - and he is flying north - after it was fixed but we don’t know how good fix it was :wink:

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