As announced for quite some time AMD yesterday introduced its long awaited new graphics card series. The new models RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 are based on chips with the new RDNA2 architecture and should be able to compete with Nvidia at eye level for the first time in almost seven years.
There were no independent tests yesterday, but AMD was able to present plausible figures in the benchmarks shown, which indicate what had been rumored for a long time: AMD is actually "playing" in the first league again. The biggest surprise was that AMD even launched a competitor for Nvidia's top model RTX3090: The RX6900 (for 999 dollars, starting from 8.12.) could catch up with the RTX3090 (1500 dollars) in many games, even if slightly overclocked and only in combination with an AMD CPU.
The RX 6800 XT is to go already somewhat earlier (starting from 18.11.) for 649 dollar as a competitor for the RTX 3080 into the running. At the same time also a easily abgespeckte RX 6800 for 579 dollar comes into the trade, which will be even still clearly more expensive than the aimed competition (RTX3070, 499 dollar). A clear sign for AMDs new self-confidence.
AMD's new models all have 16 GB memory, while Nvidia's cards are equipped with 8, 10 and 24 GB. Which is however more relevant for video editors: AMD's memory is connected throughout "only" with 256 bits like Nvidias RTX3070. The larger Nvidia models have a faster memory connection, which usually rewards video editing programs with more performance.
By a new "Infinity Cache" AMD can accelerate memory accesses clearly (and gains probably also thereby in this new GPU generation with Games very clearly in performance). However, we dare to doubt that this also provides more performance for video editing, since uncompressed video frames usually cannot benefit from a relatively small (128 MB) cache.
But the biggest question is: Will AMD graphics cards be available in sufficient quantity? Our forecast is: Clearly not! Only yesterday Sony announced that the upcoming Playstation 5 was pre-ordered as often in the first twelve hours as the PlayStation 4 was pre-ordered in the first twelve weeks. The demand for gaming this fall is likely to be even greater than previously assumed due to corona. All AMD RDNA2 chips - not only the new RX6800/6900 models but also the new Playstation 5 and the new Xbox are manufactured at TSMC in 7nm. These 7nm fabs are currently bursting at the seams and are rumored to be unable to fully meet the unexpectedly high demand.
AMD has certainly calculated in advance with a high demand, but probably not with the fact that
Nvidia cannot deliver its graphics cards in large quantities in the Christmas quarter. For this reason, AMD's graphics cards will most likely also be hard to get until after Christmas. At least we strongly suspect this...