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.
Meh, yet another set of expensive, ridiculously expensive and ludicrously expensive toys for youtubers to play with.
Icing on the cake is that they were calling this high end product segmentation their “full stack” of the 6000 series lineup.
Don’t worry, you will get your cheap and boring but sensible 6000 series cards eventually. They will be released later on without much fanfare. Or you can, you know, just buy an older card if you don’t care about 4K AAA gaming performance anyway.
You can be glad we’re leaving you some cheap RX 560’s to use then. Or a 460 off eBay. Or heck, the AMD CPUs with integrated graphics are actually not bad.
I’m always surprised by people who expect high performance computer parts for cheaper than the price of the cooling shroud.
Stuff is expensive. Get over it.
Thank you for your generous helping of condescending babble and straw man nonsense. Don’t forget to wipe off that spot of smugness on your way out.
Wow, you really are THAT bitter that you can’t afford these cards…
your face looks like itll be expensive to make look better. Anyways that last comment makes you sound pretty stupid “stuff is expensive” yikes, say something useful pls
The whole PC Mustard Race “movement” is a conspicuous consumption circle-jerk. PC gaming made sense when consoles were miserable 720p boxes and gaming rigs were somewhat affordable, but not now. The days when PC gaming was accessible to the average man and you could buy a 3D card for 300 bucks that was capable of playing games without having to tinker with settings too much are over. It’s a conspicuous-consumption party now.
I picked up a refurbished Vega 56 card last year for about $300. It plays games at 4K with some settings tweaks. 1080p is absolutely not a problem for it. 2560×1600 is a sweet spot.
If you look for deals, $300 for a pretty good card is doable.
Depends on what you are after. The new GPUs aren’t that expensive, considering they start at equivalent performance to the 2 year-old RTX 2080 TI, with additional features, at a third of the price. You don’t need the latest CPUs, as a generation or two older still hold up quite well in most circumstances – although this might change as people start to push what the new consoles are capable of.
If you want to be able to play at high resolutions, then you need plenty of VRAM – there is only so much you can expect in lower pricing when the cards have to pack a substantial amount of very fast memory.
But this has always been the trade off – PCs cost more than consoles, but you generally pay less for the software.
grahamtriggs,
The MSRP prices would be one thing, but I just checked and the usual vendors are all out of stock across the board. So most people aren’t able to buy them at those prices.
As for 3070, it’s got great specs for midrange, but I’m not sure why anyone would say it’s just as good as the 2080ti from two years ago. The only benchmark I’ve seen (the cuda benchmark I linked earlier) puts it fairly close, but it is somewhat slower and has a lot less ram, which matters for cuda and future proofing. At $500 it could be a bargain, but it is technically a downgrade from the high end two years ago. I’d be more interested in the 3080, which offers almost the same amount of ram with decent performance bump. IMHO it is very competitive for the high end audience at the $700 MSRP…If only it wasn’t marred by major supply and scalping issues
I think they need to make some changes to how these are sold. There’s only a couple second window in which to buy all available stock, frankly that’s a game that only scalper bots can feasibly win at. We need to recognize this truism: bots will always win at ecommerce product snipping. Captchas don’t work. We need a better fix to take away the bot’s intrinsic speed advantages. Instead of a 1 second purchase window, make it an 4 hour window such that normal humans have an equal chance. Instead of escalating tech war against bots on ecommerce sites, just nullify their advantages.
Heck, the fact that anyone is developing screen scraping bots is indicative that services aren’t optimal. Don’t fight the bots, instead provide a more efficient API that renders the need for them redundant (screen scraping is slower than a direct API). Put these new APIs in the hands of all customers rather than in the privileged hands of scalpers. And rather than encouraging a race to be first to commit a transaction within the first several milliseconds of a product showing up, use human-length eligibility windows where everyone has an equal shot.
While it would still be annoying that there’s less supply than demand, at least scalpers wouldn’t have an advantage using rapid fire bots.
What are you blathering on about, it’s been as easy as ever because games detect your hardware and suggest an “optimal” configuration where it strikes the best balance between yumminess and performance.
You can still set (almost) any AAA title to Ultra settings at 1080p and you’ll get more than 60fps with today’s 300 bucks 3D card. It’s just that the upper tiers that didn’t exist yesteryear now unlock the possibility for ludicrous graphical fidelity, like UltraHD (the so called “4k” – mind you I’ll personally kill everyone with my bear hands if I catch them saying four kay, IT’S RESERVED FOR THE DCI SPEC… YOU IDIOTS, just say UltraHD like a normal person) at very decent framerates.
The important thing is, YOU DON’T HAVE TO buy into the 4k 120fps gaming trend, and while not doing so you can save yourself a few quid. You won’t miss out on anything.
Also the consoles that are about to appear may seem so very potent compared to a gaming PC, but any gaming PC that costs 1.5x the price of the console will have absolutely no problem keeping up with it. Yes, unfortunately the PC-tax of 1.5x is there, but that is offset by the cheaper games you get on PC, especially during sales.
Agreed, and I just sold my gaming rig to a friend at a discount to help him out and to get myself out of that whole rat race. Right now I’m slumming on a Ivy Bridge i7 ($30 on eBay) and a Radeon FirePro W4100 ($25 on eBay) and Void Linux is just as fast for most tasks as that gaming beast was. I don’t really play games much anymore and what little I do can run just fine on my Thinkpad, so I’m set with a nice compact mini-ITX system that meets all my needs.
If I ever do get the gaming itch again, I’ll probably check out Amazon’s game streaming service; much cheaper than building another $1200 monstrosity that will be “obsolete” in two years.
The cheapest card launched (whcih is actually faster than a 3070 or 2080ti by a notable margin) is $435 in 2005 money…. I guess you just don’t understand inflation. Consdiering that’s only about $100 more than what high end GPUs in 2005 cost in 2005 monies. We are paying a bit more these days because it’s harder to make these GPUs, just look at the complexity of the most complex GPU from 2005 and a midrange one today…
As always, we’ve got to wait for 3rd party benchmarks. But one of the biggest selling points for Radeon right now could end up simply being available for purchase. The latest nvidia cards have been totally out of stock everywhere. People were saying to sell their RTX 2080s while they still could before 30XX came out because RTX 30XX have greater value on paper. However that’s only if you manage to buy a RTX 30XX GPU. Even the older 2080s have gone up in price. If you need a RTX3090 today you can forget about MSRP, you’re looking at scalpers reselling them at $3000-3500 – that’s one hell of a markup.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/24/nvidia_rtx3090_shortage/
This video was from a month ago and limited inventories are still disappearing within seconds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7Cp9RIotPU
I have no idea if AMD’s radeons will face the same shortages or not, but if vendors are able to keep radeons in stock for buyers it could end up converting a lot of users who would have bought an nvidia but couldn’t.
Anyone else notice the price hicks on high wattage power supplies and keyboards/mice too? It’s slim pickings… Some of this started even before the pandemic due to tariff-man’s tariffs, but the pandemic has exacerbated it.
I am looking forward to seeing reviews comparing these 6000 series radeon cards to nvidia’s cards in the field. I’m happy to have more competition, at least this could be a bit of good news against the backdrop of sucky market conditions. It hasn’t been a good year to build computers and makes me glad I did it when I did.
Everything sold out = Product is priced a bit too low.
It is okay to have a slightly higher initial price when the product begins its lifecycle. Early adapters know they are paying more to help make it affordable for future buyers, and it “tampers” the demand. This way people who “really, really, really” want to have it will jump in.
On the other hand, if you release $499 card that beats much more expensive cards, people will be unable to buy it, and scalpers will grab the difference. It now sells for almost $1,000 on ebay:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=RTX+3070&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Complete=1
They should have priced it at $700, and more people would be happier. They could slowly reduce the price over time, and this way the people who worked on it would earn the money, not the scalpers.
sukru,
It might mean that, but sometimes the supply chain trouble is real and it isn’t just a matter of adjusting prices. For example, the wildfires in the west have caused a lumber shortage. Some relatives here can’t get construction projects done at any price because of it. Now sure, maybe there’s some kind of black market they could go to, but for a lot of the normal channels some of the materials are completely out with no estimate for availability. Prolonged disruptions have the potential to kill off the natural efficiencies of the free market and revert to the need for a regulator to distribute goods to those who need them. Nobody likes the idea of government controlling distribution of goods, but when supply chains fail the free market can break down completely. Hurricanes are another good example. A few years ago there was no possibility of buying gas at gas stations. If you were desperate enough you might try to siphon it from your neighbors tanks, but wasn’t something you could buy locally at any price.
Anyways I just wanted to add more nuance to the view that “Everything sold out = Product is priced a bit too low.”
I was talking about the higher end cards, but even talking about the low/midrange cards that’s a 100% markup and in truth it’s even higher than that because you’re not buying a new card with a new warranty.. Buying it from a scalper makes you a second-hand owner. So not only are you paying 100% more than what the card is sold for from nvidia (if you manage to buy one), but your buying something of lessor value without a warranty. Obviously if the cards are going for $1000, they’d still be out of stock even if nvidia were selling them for $700. That’s a hell of a lot of money for nvidia’s midrange cards.
I hope AMD is able to bring more competitive offerings to the market. Alas, I’m not so sure when tech component markets will return to normalcy. Are we over the hump on pandemic-related shortages or is this going to be a long term thing? Will trump’s tax hikes on consumer goods ever get reverted?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/trumps-tariffs-are-equivalent-to-one-of-the-largest-tax-increases-in-decades.html
I don’t know, but I’m hoping for 2021 to be better.
I see what you mean. There are of course other factors than the value of the product in the price. However at least for some people the GTX 3070 has a value of $1,000. Obviously nVidia can produce it less than $499, so there is a very wide range for negotiation.
And 3070 compares to 2080 TI, which is a higher end card. Since 3080/3090 are practically non-existent, it would be the best card around (if stock permitted).
I had said $700 as an example, but I think at that price point there was less value for scalpers. For CA, for example:
– There is a 7.25% state sales tax
– eBay takes about 10% in fees
– There would be 3-5% return rate
– The shipping needs to be insured/signed
When all things are added, the profits would be less than $100 for many sellers. That is a very risky situation. There would *still* be scalpers, but not as many.
Note: I think I should say I invested in both AMD and nVidia for full disclosure.
sukru,
Do you have benchmarks for 3070? My position has been to not rely on a company’s own promotional material for data. A lot of the 3rd party review sites I rely on still don’t have data for 3070 yet.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-3070-geekbench-results
I found this for cuda though…
https://browser.geekbench.com/cuda-benchmarks
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti = 164052 = 100%
GeForce RTX 3070 = 152134 = 92.7%
GeForce RTX 3080 = 204616 = 124.7%
GeForce RTX 3090 = 233799 = 142.5%
It’d be a tough call, do you buy a cheaper used 2080ti or a 3070 with no waranty?
I understand what you are saying, but at the same time if nvidia was selling the 3070 for $700 there’s no guaranty that scalpers wouldn’t end up doubling that price. It depends entirely on how elastic the demand is. At this point the scalpers are clearly NOT competing with nvidia’s prices, they’re competing with other scalpers… The cheapest scalpers will tend to set the prices for all scalpers (it’s why so many vendors of identical products have such similar prices on amazon). So assuming $1000 were not profitable for scalping, then I’m incline to think that the scalpers would “agree” to collectively raise their own prices via market dynamics. Naturally there’s a limit to this depending on demand. However given increased demand and decreased supply in the market, nvidia raising prices would probably not impede scalping under current market conditions. I don’t think this is going to be rectified until the supply problems are resolved (or new AMD products can satisfy the demand).
Yes, the scalpers would have wanted to raise the prices. However once again, the competitor is 2080 TI, and the used prices are roughly $900 – $1,000:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=GeForce+RTX+2080+Ti&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Complete=1
Granted these are older cards, most likely out of warranty, possibly mined crypto coins. Nevertheless 3070 New would probably not sell much more than 2080 TI Used. As you said it is a tough call, but most scalpers would be afraid of such risks.
I can sometimes understand small scale scalping (like waiting in the line during black Friday). They really do some work: trading their free time for someone else’s money. But exploiting retail sales in volume is not providing benefit to anyone.
The entire situation is really bad.
sukru,
Black friday used to offer good savings, like “wow this is such a good deal”. But over the past few years I really haven’t seen good deals regardless of whether or not I was willing to stand in line to get them. I commented on this last year…
http://www.osnews.com/story/131016/junk-or-treasure-anandtech-tests-amazons-cheapest-black-friday-desktop-pc/#comments
I have very low expectations for black friday this year. It may be advertised like crazy, but I feel the years of the big discounts worth staying up/going out for are gone. It may be canceled outright due to the pandemic. It was already one of the more dangerous days to go shopping…
https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/black-fridays-most-gruesome-injuries-and-deaths-through-the-years/
I imagine the looting and protests will be bad this year if they try to cancel black friday. Of course by then we may already be in a civil war…It feels like the world’s going down the toilet
Alfman,
Yes the world is not in a good place. Let’s hope 2020 does not get any worse.
Alfman,
Hard to say really. Yes there will likely be restrictions when it comes to buying in physical stores. But that’s not going to make much difference to online sales.
With the disruption this year, there is a good chance that
a) There will be a lot of stock hanging around that retailers want to clear
b) Retailers will really want to get you spending money
There is a reasonable chance that there will be some pretty big discounts on Black Friday, but who knows how desirable they will be. We’re certainly not going to see discounts on some of the latest stock that they can’t keep hold of anyway, But there is going to be slightly older stuff that isn’t moving because of product launches.