Today AMD formally revealed the next-generation Radeon GPUs powered by the RDNA 2 architecture and it looks like they’re going to thoroughly give NVIDIA a run for your money.
What was announced: Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, Radeon 6800 with the Radeon RX 6800 XT looking like a very capable GPU that sits right next to NVIDIA's 3080 while seeming to use less power. All three of them will support Ray Tracing as expected with AMD adding a "high performance, fixed-function Ray Accelerator engine to each compute unit". However, we're still waiting on The Khronos Group to formally announce the proper release of the vendor-neutral Ray Tracing extensions for Vulkan which still aren't finished (provisional since March 2020) so for now DirectX RT was all they mentioned.
Part of the big improvement in RDNA 2 comes from what they learned with Zen 3 and their new "Infinity Cache", which is a high-performance, last-level data cache they say "dramatically" reduces latency and power consumption while delivering higher performance than previous designs. You can see some of the benchmarks they showed in the image below:
As always, it's worth waiting on independent benchmarks for the full picture as both AMD and NVIDIA like to cherry-pick what makes them look good of course.
Here's the key highlight specifications:
| RX 6900 XT | RX 6800 XT | RX 6800 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 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 |
| Price (USD) | $999 | $649 | $579 |
| Available | 08/12/2020 | 18/11/2020 | 18/11/2020 |
You shouldn't need to go buying a new case either, as AMD say they had easy upgrades in mind as they built these new GPUs for "standard chassis" with a length of 267mm and 2x8 standard 8-pin power connectors, and designed to operate with existing enthusiast-class 650W-750W power supplies.
There was a big portion of the event dedicated to DirectX which doesn’t mean much for us, but what we’ve been able to learn from the benchmarks shown is that they’re powerful cards and they appear to fight even NVIDIA’s latest high end consumer GPUs like the GeForce 3080. So not only are AMD leaping over Intel with the Ryzen 5000, they’re also now shutting NVIDIA out in the cold too. Incredible to see how far AMD has surged in the last few years. This is what NVIDIA and Intel have needed, some strong competition.
How will their Linux support be? You're probably looking at around the likes of Ubuntu 21.04 next April (or comparable distro updates) to see reasonable out-of-the-box support, thanks to newer Mesa drivers and an updated Linux Kernel but we will know a lot more once they actually release and can be tested.
As for what’s next? AMD confirmed that RDNA3 is well into the design stage, with a release expected before the end of 2022 for GPUs powered by RDNA3.
You can view the full event video in our YouTube embed below:
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Feel free to comment as you watch as if you have JavaScript enabled it won't refresh the page.
Additionally if you missed it, AMD also recently announced (October 27) that they will be acquiring chip designer Xilinx.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Mohandevir Oct 29, 2020
Quoting: GuestEven something so simple as: how much power do they draw when idle, what kind of heat do they generate, what noise is produced from the fans running. Power consumption is actually another very important metric of mine, and I don't go out buying the latest & greatest for that reason. I wait a bit to see what comes out that might not use more electricity than my entire current system on full load. Bills to pay and all that.
This! Noise and power draw. On purpose, I never put more than a 500w PSU in my rigs and never overclock. Personnal choice, for similar reasons as yours. Above that, it's too pricy, imo. I believe that RTX will gain mass adoption when it will meet these requirements, also. Even on PS5/Xbox Series X, it's not all games that will make use of RTX.
"Among Us and Fall Guy with RTX!" Like caviar in Kraft dinner!
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Mohandevir Oct 29, 2020
What's the bottom line of all this Lunix? What are you trying to convince us?
Feels like this discussion as lasted way too long.
You got your opinion, fine... Stick to it. Your point of view is your own and has as much value as any other from anyone here. It's all biased in some way by our own personnal experiences that differs from one person to another...
Do you want to have an open discussion or you just want to show us all that you are right? At this point, it's beginning to look like trolling.
Please, be on your way, there is nothing to see...
Feels like this discussion as lasted way too long.
You got your opinion, fine... Stick to it. Your point of view is your own and has as much value as any other from anyone here. It's all biased in some way by our own personnal experiences that differs from one person to another...
Do you want to have an open discussion or you just want to show us all that you are right? At this point, it's beginning to look like trolling.
Please, be on your way, there is nothing to see...
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GuestThat is pretty much the question of support. You can try older drivers for older nvidia cards, but using older cards is pointless because they will just waste electricity and barely deliver any performance - that is why companies stop supporting them.
What... Producing new cards is a more waste of electricity than using older cards. In this domain, replacing the components is worse than using older ones. But I assume you care only about your electricity consumption, right?
But you assume that everybody just want to play the big recent games while maintaining great performance, in this case sure it's pointless to use old cards.
Using older cards is pointless for you, because you only seem to care about performance (and features, we know).
Gaming doesn't mean for everybody "AAA gaming", and it's particularly true for Linux users, as other said: we could just stick with Windows.
If someone is happy using an old card because it's just works fine, and one day Nvidia (or other) decide to not support it anymore, it's still an issue. This is a waste, throwing components that still works because people have to buy new ones is nonsense for me...
I read all the thread, and, lunix, what a guy you are.
At GOL we're used to see guys like you, from time to time.
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Mohandevir Oct 29, 2020
Quoting: GuestQuoting: MohandevirWhat's the bottom line of all this Lunix? What are you trying to convince us?
Feels like this discussion as lasted way too long.
You got your opinion, fine... Stick to it. Your point of view is your own and has as much value as any other from anyone here. It's all biased in some way by our own personnal experiences that differs from one person to another...
Do you want to have an open discussion or you just want to show us all that you are right? At this point, it's beginning to look like trolling.
Please, be on your way, there is nothing to see...
You're overthinking it, I just wanted to warn people to carefully evaluate features because if they don't do that they can get burned and then a few months later they'll start to rant how they'll never buy anything from $gpu-company again. And features aren't going to develop themselves just because you buy another product. Nothing special, but it became political. All concerns are valid, the point is to be aware of them.
Agreed. And when you say "$gpu-company" we can add "from chipset to manufacturer". Not all AMD or Nvidia GPUs are born equal (MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, Sapphire, Power Color, etc...) Making the difference between a manufacturer's bad "QA decision" and a chipset flaw is also important. Been there a couple of times.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 29 October 2020 at 4:00 pm UTC
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Quoting: Liam DaweI do have to admit personally, even as a typical NVIDIA fan that AMD are looking mighty tempting.
Join us
6900 XT or the 6800 XT - hmmm....
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Quoting: libgradevQuoting: Liam DaweI do have to admit personally, even as a typical NVIDIA fan that AMD are looking mighty tempting.
Join us
6900 XT or the 6800 XT - hmmm....
Yeah same here. I'm actually quite happy with my GTX 1080, but due to VR I want to go for something more powerful soon. I don't mind that the Nvidia driver is closed source, I have to use dkms also for an out of tree gaming wheel driver. That said not having async reprojection* or being able to switch to wayland might be the reason to go for one of those cards.
Lets see how the actual launch and support looks like...
* I don't know if it is a hack or not, but it really does serves its purpose.
Last edited by jens on 29 October 2020 at 6:44 pm UTC
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Quoting: GuestYou are describing your ideology while claiming not to have one. Kind of underlines most of what I said.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: GuestEvery product is different and the ideology is the least important difference between them.This statement involves at least two major misconceptions. The first is about the nature of the word "important" as it relates to individuals' choices. Obviously, you cannot define for another person what is important to them. If their values are different from yours, what is important to them will also be different. People have different needs and so on. So for instance, if I'm buying a consumer product, it may be important to me that it be purple (note my handle). But I would not claim to you that purpleness is the most important feature of that consumer product and you are a fool making a mistake if you fail to get a purple one. I accept that, for whatever perverse reason, for many people purpleness just isn't that important. So saying ideology is, or is not, important to someone else's choice is in a basic sense a category error.
The other is about the nature and implications of ideology. An ideology is an understanding of how the world works, in a political and economic sense, combined with some values. If you have an ideology, inevitably it has implications about how the world should work--it might imply that the world should work exactly how it does work, although given how it does work that would be kind of a crappy ideology.
I say "if", but in fact everyone has an ideology. "Pragmatists" who imagine they do not have one are, in reality, just practising some received ideology they do not understand because they absorbed it without thinking about it. You might say instead of them having an ideology, it has them. Refusing to think through what your ideology is or, if you do, to take any actions derived from it, is basically a matter of passivity--accepting that you will be acted on, not an actor, and that the world will be the way all the people who do act cause it to be. Now that's OK in a way, but people who abdicate their agency that way shouldn't be getting on the case of people who have thought things through and do have positions.
Basically, if you haven't reached an understanding of the world or can't be bothered to act in ways consistent with it, shut up when those of us who do know what we're talking about and do have some consistency with our beliefs are talking.
There are various misconceptions in your comment:
1. When we are talking about buying products we shouldn't just look at that one specific thing as the deciding factor - especially when we want to build a gaming PC. This is what I was trying to tell to people but it seems like it fell on deaf ears. If you want a good purchase then you should be really careful what you buy because marketing exists and it is ready to bait you with illusions. Yes, people want different things but ultimately people want features and not vaporware or other illusions.
2. An ideology is nothing just a set of ideas - a dream. "No Tux No Bux", "Free Software for all", "The year of the linux desktop" - how are those working out? Back to square one: people want features which get things done. Ideologies might give you some drive and they might cripple your capabilities but nothing more. Linux rules the server space because of its capabilities. I thought that it is sensible to think that GamingOnLinux.com would focus on gaming but it seems like politics is more important in this community. But you can see that you can only get so far with your ideologies but without political power: linux gaming is pretty much on life support. Proton keeps it alive but for how long? Valve created linux gaming because they saw it as a not-windows-but-kinda-works alternative. Businesses evaluate business capabilities and then they invest. The FSF tries to promote "user freedom" with linux and other free software and yet there are many who say linux is not about choice - who is right and who is wrong? Or is it just another grey area? In the end, we depend on companies. Developers get paid to do things professionally because our charities are just small change.
3. No, not everyone has an ideology and operating through ideologies is not a rational thing to do. Ideologies are just restrictions: it's one thing to think you know how the world should work and another thing how it would be better. It's childish to assume that someone knows how to do things the best way. Yes, we might know how some things but in the end we should strive for what is the best for everyone and for that we need to carefully evaluate our decisions. Of course, if you just want to follow a set of conventions in which people already decided everything for you then you can do that too!
4. Telling people to "shut up" won't make them shut up or think differently - whether you like what they say or not. And it definitely won't make them listen to you, especially if you say absurd things like how you "reached an understanding of the world"
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Yeah, I don't think blob proponents are going to agree with FOSS supporters. So let's not flame this.
What's clear however is the position of the Linux project itself (i.e. kernel developers and maintainers). Linux is rooted in FOSS, and blob approach is not something that Linux as a project appreciates. It might be merely tolerated, but it's not a good thing. There is nothing to debate about that, and blob proponents like Nvidia know it well.
Last edited by Shmerl on 29 October 2020 at 6:25 pm UTC
What's clear however is the position of the Linux project itself (i.e. kernel developers and maintainers). Linux is rooted in FOSS, and blob approach is not something that Linux as a project appreciates. It might be merely tolerated, but it's not a good thing. There is nothing to debate about that, and blob proponents like Nvidia know it well.
Last edited by Shmerl on 29 October 2020 at 6:25 pm UTC
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Vasya Sovari Oct 29, 2020
Quoting: mosCool.
The only detail I'm currently interested in though is WHEN THE FECKING rdna1 PRICES WILL GO DOWN
On an entirely selfish level, hopefully not before I sell my Red Devil
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Quoting: scaineQuoting: GuestEvery product is different and the ideology is the least important difference between them.
For you. Not for me. The ethos of a company, its ethical stance, and its impact on fostering a cultural shift to open methodologies is the single most important aspect of choosing my hardware. Then it's performance, then it's heat/noise/efficiency. Finally, its price comes into consideration.
It's weird to me that you're commenting on a Linux site and don't understand this, or somewhat buy into it. But I suppose as Linux increases in popularity, there will be more and more people like yourself who don't care about open standards (or least, care as much as others do).
I'll buy a AMD card when they have working Linux drivers available at launch. I'm not waiting six months for the Mesa guy to get their new cards working when Nvidia has Linux drivers available for their new card on day one. I'm not supporting a company that treats my OS of choice like a second class citizens.
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