Rumors were that AMD wanted to push the performance and price so they weren't stuck being the discount option forever. This looks like it'll do that. Performance and power efficiency look good, and they implemented most of the Nvidia early adopter features. If they want to really compete with Nvidia as a premium option they'll need to match the non-performance features that Nvidia has:
- Driver stability. Nvidia is not perfect but the 5700 series was awful from AMD (had to return mine). They need to at least match Nvidia.
- DLSS. It started out as a gimmick but with DLSS 2.0 it's just 70%+ free performance improvement with the only downside being somewhat limited game support.
- Video Encoder. Nvidia's encoder has very high quality and is well supported by streaming and recording software. I wonder what sort of improvements the RX 6000 series has?
- CUDA, Tensor Cores, Ansel, etc. I don't really use these things but if I'm paying the same amount I want similar capabilities.
It's kinda crazy that they're using the same silicon in all three cards; the 6800 has 1/4 of the CUs disabled! It is a big chip for 7nm, though. AMD has said that availability won't be an issue (which could give them a leg up on Nvidia in the near term), but I do have to wonder about it.
The 80CU 6900XT was rumored months ago and there was a lot of speculation and incredulity about the memory system to feed all those cores. GDDR6X is Nvidia exclusive so some said a 512-bit bus, or HBM2, or even a combination of HBM and GDDR6. The big cache is an interesting solution, I'm curious how it'll perform. It makes sense in a gaming context where a lot of buffers and textures get reused over the course of a frame. I'm a bit worried about tail latency affecting the 99-percentile frame times which have a huge impact on the subjective experience of smoothness. Also bad for massively parallel compute work.
- Driver stability. Nvidia is not perfect but the 5700 series was awful from AMD (had to return mine). They need to at least match Nvidia.
- DLSS. It started out as a gimmick but with DLSS 2.0 it's just 70%+ free performance improvement with the only downside being somewhat limited game support.
- Video Encoder. Nvidia's encoder has very high quality and is well supported by streaming and recording software. I wonder what sort of improvements the RX 6000 series has?
- CUDA, Tensor Cores, Ansel, etc. I don't really use these things but if I'm paying the same amount I want similar capabilities.
It's kinda crazy that they're using the same silicon in all three cards; the 6800 has 1/4 of the CUs disabled! It is a big chip for 7nm, though. AMD has said that availability won't be an issue (which could give them a leg up on Nvidia in the near term), but I do have to wonder about it.
The 80CU 6900XT was rumored months ago and there was a lot of speculation and incredulity about the memory system to feed all those cores. GDDR6X is Nvidia exclusive so some said a 512-bit bus, or HBM2, or even a combination of HBM and GDDR6. The big cache is an interesting solution, I'm curious how it'll perform. It makes sense in a gaming context where a lot of buffers and textures get reused over the course of a frame. I'm a bit worried about tail latency affecting the 99-percentile frame times which have a huge impact on the subjective experience of smoothness. Also bad for massively parallel compute work.