AMD Radeon RDNA2 Navi (RX 6500, 6600, 6700, 6800, 6900 XT)

So only the 6700XT announced. The 6700 and all the mobile versions got left out.

Price is completely inflated for gamers IMO. However the crypto craze is already putting the non-Ti RTX 3060 street/etailer prices at $480 anyways, so if gamers can actually get the 6700XT at these prices from AMD's website then I guess it's probably a better value.


Big white elephant in the room is the continued absence of FidelityFX Super Resolution. IIRC an AMD official had promised to talk more about this back in October. It's been almost half a year since then, so I'm assuming that feature is stuck in development hell.
Linus is saying AMD told them they're working on releasing that feature concurrently on all RDNA2 GPUs, and that includes all Navi2x discrete cards and both consoles, which is the reason for the delay.. meh..

 

All "their" RT implementations so far has been somewhat similar: take a game which is running better on Radeons than on Nv cards without RT, add some minor RT to it so that the game would still be predominantly rasterization limited and ship it in this state with non-RT running better on Radeons while RT performance being somewhat on par with Nv GPUs. We'll see if any future title will fare differently but most RE engine games generally fits the same picture so I doubt that REVIII case will be any different.

 

Cool, it's faster than I was expecting. On paper a touch faster than the SeriesX in most cases but with a lot more fill rate and Infinity Cache (although lower main bandwidth).

 

Then it's a good thing that most of us don't live under the belief that a game only looks as good as the amount of rays intersections it's calculating in real time.

"They seem confident of their RE8 implementation" == They seem confident the game will look good.
How good the game looks is the key differentiator here, not raw raytracing performance demands.

 

I would love to see a Radeon optimized version of the Quake 2 Vulkan Path Tracer or maybe even Quake 3.

 

I honestly don't understand what you want to say. It doesn't matter how something is performing if it looks good?

 

No, he's saying that most don't care how many rays are being cast or any such, but how the end product looks, and more rays doesn't mean end product looks better. And that RE8 looks good regardless of how little or how much raytracing it's using.

 

So their RT implementation is good and they are confident in it because it looks good without RT? And where does the number of rays came from even?

 

To be honest, RE8 Demo RT reflections were awfully bad, something like 1/8 or 1/16 of full resolution with fat visible pixels and very noisy too.
Hopefully they will be able to improve on that quality by a lot (at least on PC) and hoperfully they will enable it for a wider range of materials, not just perfect mirrors.

 

AMD is confident their RT implementation looks good and how good a game looks is not directly proportional to the number of rays being cast, or the "full resolution percentage of the RT reflections".
There's just no simpler way to explain this.


I played the RE8 demo and it looked pretty great IMO. Reflection quality isn't that important to me because I don't spend my gameplay time looking at (or even noticing for the most part) reflections.
To be honest, it did bother me that some busts had visible vertices, and I'm hoping their post-demo work for next-gens and PC focuses on higher poly-count models instead of revamping reflections.

 

Yeah, I give up.

 

Surely – all other things being equal – lowering the resolution of ray traced reflections will proportionally lower their quality?

 

I'm not going to contribute anymore to the derailment of an AMD product announcement discussion into the usual "but nvidia has higher RT performance" narrative.

Despite the faux attempts at "clarification", everyone knows exactly what they're doing. I'll let the mods decide on whether or not this has to become a nvidia fan thread.

 

That's basically every thread that mentions raytracing or AA...

 

I wonder why all those AIB cards need to be gigantic on a 230W GPU.
Do most of their customers really believe there's more value in big graphics cards (which often translates into just a bigger plastic shroud), or are the AIBs just erroneously convinced of that?

Furthermore, these are cards with just 6 GDDR6 (2×16bit) channels. These cards should be smaller, or at least their PCBs..


Another thing I noticed is the 6700XT has no USB-C port.

 

Because doing efficient cooling in small space is more expensive.
Great example of this is Gigabyte RX 6800 XT "Gaming OC", it's actually bigger but still worse than AMD reference 6800 XT, because apparently decent cooling costs too much.

 

High res 60fps on PS5, makes sense for targeting there. Though they really could use some of the reprojection techniques for mirror surfaces that like, Miles Morales demonstrated in practice. Would be a nice bump in quality without too much performance hit.

 

Economy of scale I guess. It's probably more cost effective and also logistically to repurpose the cooler already in use for 6800/6900 than design and order new cooler.

 

And most people are conditioned to watch for 30-50 MHz higher clock speeds, which are completely meaningless in those regions the 6000 series is in (6900 XT stock already breaks 2500 MHz at times), but still.

 

It doesn't really explain it either, see the Gigabyte failure (and I wouldn't be surprised if there were others ending up worse than reference, too)