When AMD unveiled their pair of next-gen Big Navi graphics cards at the end of 2020, there was hope that they’d bring some much needed competition to Nvidia’s latest crop of RTX 30 GPUs. Leading the pack was AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT, a £600 / $650 graphics card that aimed to take on Nvidia’s more expensive GeForce RTX 3080. Alas, the 6800 XT fell short when it came to matching the RTX 3080’s raw performance speeds, and AMD’s continued lack of any kind of frame rate-boosting DLSS competitor technology meant its ray tracing performance was also a bit underwhelming.
Now, I’ve finally been able to test the other Big Navi card in AMD’s initial RX 6000 line-up, the RX 6800. While its pricing and availability are all over the shop these days, this normally £529 / $579 graphics card is supposedly primed to sit alongside Nvidia’s similarly-priced RTX 3070. Can it succeed where the 6800 XT failed?