AMD Radeon RX 6800

All the VRAM, plenty of cores

- JARRED WALTON

AMD’S RADEON RX 6800 launched last year, but in the hustle and bustle, we never took the time to give it a proper review. The higher-spec RX 6800 XT stole the limelight, with a decent jump in performance for a relatively modest increase in price. Of course, there’s nothing modest about current street prices, where finding any of the Navi 21-based cards for under a grand seems like a great deal.

The main changes relative to the XT model come in the form of cores and clocks. Instead of 72 CUs, you get 60, and instead of a 2,250MHz Game Clock, you get 2,105MHz; the 6800 also has 96 ROPs (Render Outputs), compared to 128 on the XT. It still provides the full 128MB Infinity Cache and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, though, so you’re not losing anything in those departments. In practice, that makes the plain Jane vanilla RX 6800 about 12 percent slower than the XT, and it costs—theoretically—11 percent less.