AMD announces Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, available for $649

AMD has announced a brand new graphics card: the Radeon RX 6800 XT. Announced during the company's 'Where Gaming Begins: Ep. 2' live stream, this new graphics card is built on the brand new RDNA 2 architecture, and aims to top Nvidia's RTX 3080 at 4K and 1440p.

So what can you expect? Well a GPU with up to 26.8bn transistors, for one. AMD promises that will compete with the absolute high-end of graphics cards, and a great deal of that improvement can be attributed to the improvements the Radeon team is bringing with the new architecture, including those carried over from AMD's Zen CPU architecture.

Not only that, it's bringing improved performance per watt with RDNA 2. The company is touting a 54% performance per watt gain over the initial RDNA architecture.

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Radeon RX 6000 series
Header Cell - Column 0	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800
CUs	80	72	60
Process	TSMC 7nm	TSMC 7nm	TSMC 7nm
Game clock (MHz)	2,015	2,015	1,815
Boost clock (MHz)	2,250	2,250	2,105
Infinity Cache (MB)	128	128	128
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6
TDP (Watt)	300	300	250
Available from	December 8	November 18	November 18
Price (USD)	$999	$649	$579

AMD is also bringing new AMD-only features with the RX 6800 XT, such as one that pairs up your RX 6000-series GPU with your Ryzen 5000 CPU, called AMD Smart Access Memory. This gives your Ryzen CPU full access to the GPU memory, and alongside a one-click overclocking feature called Rage Mode, AMD is promising a significant uplift in performance (in some cases up to 13%, it says).

The AMD RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 will be available from November 18. Meanwhile, the high-end RTX 3090 competitor, the RX 6900 XT, will start shipping December 8.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.