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

ADM RX 6800XT
(Image credit: AMD)

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.

All which culminates in the RX 6800 XT. You can check out the specs below.

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Radeon RX 6000 series
Header Cell - Column 0 RX 6900 XTRX 6800 XTRX 6800
CUs807260
ProcessTSMC 7nmTSMC 7nmTSMC 7nm
Game clock (MHz)2,0152,0151,815
Boost clock (MHz)2,2502,2502,105
Infinity Cache (MB)128128128
Memory16GB GDDR616GB GDDR616GB GDDR6
TDP (Watt)300300250
Available fromDecember 8November 18November 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 Ridley
Senior Hardware Editor

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. Since then he's joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor, where he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.