AMD reveals the Radeon RX 6000 series
Preparing to close out a major month of announcements for AMD - and to open the door to the next era of architectures across the company - AMD wrapped up its final keynote presentation of the month by announcing their Radeon RX 6000 series of video cards. Hosted once more by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, AMD's hour-long keynote revealed the first three parts in AMD's new RDNA2 architecture video card family: the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. The core of AMD's new high-end video card lineup, AMD means to do battle with the best of the best out of arch-rival NVIDIA. And we'll get to see first-hand if AMD can retake the high-end market on November 18th, when the first two cards hit retail shelves.
AMD's forthcoming video card launch has been a long time coming for the company, and one they've been teasing particularly heavily. For AMD, the Radeon RX 6000 series represents the culmination of efforts from across the company as everyone from the GPU architecture team and the semi-custom SoC team to the Zen CPU team has played a role in developing AMD's latest GPU technology. All the while, these new cards are AMD's best chance in at least half a decade to finally catch up to NVIDIA at the high-end of the video card market. So understandably, the company is jazzed - and in more than just a marketing manner - about what the RX 6000 means.
If AMD's promises and performance comparisons shown today hold up, these new Radeon cards put AMD right back in the game with NVIDIA, going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's latest RTZ 30*0 cards - all the way up to the 3090, at lower prices and lower power consumption. Of course, those are just promises and charts, but AMD has proven itself lately to be fairly accurate and fair when announcing new products.
If the promises hold up, Dr. Lisa Su and her team will have not only stomped all over Intel, but will also be ready to stomp all over NVIDIA, especially if they manage to follow a similar trajectory as they did with the Zen line of processors. If you are in the market for a new mid to high-end PC, you haven't had this many viable options in a long, long time.