AMD unveils Radeon RX 6000 family of graphics cards

The new cards provide 'up to double' the performance of AMD's previous-gen flagship cards

AMD has unveiled its new Radeon RX 6000 series of gaming graphics cards, based on the new 7nm RDNA 2 gaming architecture.

According to the chipmaker, its new high-end graphics cards - Radeon 6900 XT, the Radeon 6800 XT and the Radeon 6800 - are capable of delivering "ultra-high" frame rates and 4K gaming, while also offering up to twice the performance of AMD's previous-gen flagship cards.

The company's RDNA2 microarchitecture supports a variety of features, including DirectX 12 Ultimate, Ray Tracing, Infinity Cache, DirectStorage and Smart Access Memory.

The flagship of the new cards is the $999 RX 6900 XT, with 80 compute unites and 16GB of dedicated GDDR6 memory. It offers 2,015 MHz clock speeds, with 2,250 MHz boost clock speeds under ideal conditions. For 4K gaming purpose, AMD claims that the overclocked card (AMD calls it 'Rage Mode'), with Smart Access Memory enabled, will be able to offer more than double the performance of an RX 5700 XT.

Next is the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which has similar specs to the 6900 XT, but with 72 compute units. AMD says this $649 card consumes 300W of power and offers 54 per cent higher performance-per-watt compared to the Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

Finally is the Radeon RX 6800, with 60 compute units, 16GB GDDR6 memory and 128MB Infinity Cache. It can clock up to 1,815 MHz under load, with boost clock speeds up to 2,105 MHz. The company claims a total board power of 250W for this $579 card, and says it can match or even beat Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti in many games at 1440p and 4K.

All new cards support accelerated PCIe Gen 4.0, accelerated DirectX raytracing and AMD's FidelityFX, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to easily introduce high-quality lighting effects.

The RX 6800 and 6800 XT will be on shelves starting on the 18th November, while the 6900 XT will arrive on the 8^th December.

All AMD board partners, including ASUS, ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte, XFX, PowerColor and SAPPHIRE, are expected to start shipping new GPUs starting next month.