AMD's New Radeon RX 6000 Series: 4 Big Questions We Still Have About 'Big Navi'

Nvidia struggling to keep up with orders on its GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards. Cards from third-party makers sold through for weeks. eBay scalpers licking their chops. The launch of Nvidia's RTX 30 Series GPUs has revealed some stellar silicon, but the buying experience has been anything but smooth.

With its decloaking of the first three Radeon RX 6000 Series "Big Navi" cards on Oct. 28, AMD looks seriously well-armed on the high-end gaming graphics front for the first time in many years. Based on initial specs and claims, come mid-November AMD could be primed to compete hard with Nvidia in the arena for PC gamers' hearts and minds...at least, folks playing at 1440p and 4K.

AMD put down its GeForce challenge at a virtual keynote. It was a dense 25 minutes long, and you can catch up with it here, I'll wait...

...but even after two views and some judicious emails to certain PC component makers, I was still left with some questions after AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su exited the stage.

1. The Radeon RX 6000 Cards: Will You Actually Be Able to Buy 'Em?

This first question on everyone's mind is the right one to be asking, given Nvidia's current state of supply despair.

So far, there is no concrete indication, one way or the other, as to how the supply situation for the Radeon RX 6000 Series will shake out. This isn't just a paper launch, by all indications; cards will, at least in some quantity, make their way to consumers on launch day, but just how many remains to be seen. Rumors have been swirling around supply-side issues facing GPU production since long before Nvidia even announced the GeForce RTX 30 Series, with battles for foundry space with semiconductor contractors (a previously dry and inside-baseball kind of subject) suddenly becoming more mainstream news. Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang originally stated most of the "Ampere" generation of cards would be produced on a 7nm process at TSMC; as it turns out, these initial Ampere cards are using an 8nm process via Samsung fabs.

Atop that, so far, keeping up with demand for the first two Founders Edition cards, not to mention RTX 3070 and 3080 third-party cards, continues to be a thorn in Nvidia's paw...so where does that leave rival AMD?

Unconfirmed reports out of the China Times have suggested that TSMC might have open space at its foundries after complications arose around its contract with China-based tech manufacturer Huawei, though again it should be stressed that nothing about TSMC being bottlenecked on supply for AMD's needs has been confirmed.

In a beat, to answer whether or not you'll have a decent shot of getting an RX 6000 Series card after launch: We have no idea. AMD didn't take the opportunity to jab at Nvidia about supply issues at any point during its presentation (of course, being careful to refer to the graphics giant simply as "the competition"). Mum's the word from AMD, from TSMC, and from any suppliers in between on the prospect of extended, consistent availability of reference or third-party RX 6000 Series either on the day of launch or the weeks and months after.

Indeed, if the new Radeon cards review well and Nvidia's RTX 3000 Series cards stay scarce, that might put extra stress on AMD to keep up with demand, as some folks may opt to spring for Radeon...in other words, what they can actually get.

2. What's With That Pricing?

Next up, the pricing scheme for the three new Radeon RX 6000 cards. While there is nothing out of the ordinary about AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT ($649) being just ever-so-slightly cheaper than the competing Nvidia card it's meant to go up against (RTX 3080, $699), it's more about the specific placement of cards in the stack against each other that raises a question mark above our collective heads.

But before diving into AMD's RX 6000 Series pricing, let's get some Nvidia-laden context first...

As you can see above, there's a $200 gap between the prices of the stellar GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 Founders Edition cards. Makes sense in our heads, especially given the performance gap we saw in our benchmarks between those cards...

AMD, meanwhile, has placed its $579 Radeon RX 6800 and $649 Radeon RX 6800 XT, which ostensibly compete with those two GeForce RTX cards, only $70 apart from each other. Here's a look at their basic specs.

Their respective performance results look to bridge the same canyon that exists between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, but the price difference is much narrower. This clouds up a card launch that, on paper, otherwise features some pretty bold claims for AMD on price-to-performance. Will the Radeon RX 6800 XT be worth it? Will the Radeon RX 6800 be overpriced? Will it be the other way around? Despite the numbers AMD provided, it's just too close to call when it's a $70 difference. I suspect I'll gain a much clearer picture of value once I've had a chance to benchmark the stack.

Then there's the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which...well I don't know exactly who this card is for. Deep-pocketed Radeon-fan 4K gamers, sure. While it supposedly does the job of beating Nvidia's $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition in specific gaming benchmarks, the company made no mention of its workstation or rendering capabilities, which is much more the target of the RTX 3090 than flat-out gaming dominance.

The RX 6900 XT is priced, predictably, well lower than Nvidia's competing option at just $999. But with only 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM onboard (to the RTX 3090's 24GB of GDDR6X), whether or not it can keep pace for enthusiast content creators in their most demanding tasks is a big question mark. Chopping off $500 is a big deal, no doubt, but this card occupies an interesting new middle zone at the elite end of the market.

3. What Are These 'Third-Party' Cards of Which You Speak?

One posse of 800-pound gorillas was pretty much AWOL from AMD's presentation this time around: AMD's board partners.

Neither in the virtual keynote, nor in the slides that followed, did AMD make any mention of when (or if) third-party versions of any cards in the RX 6000 Series will be made available to the public. It's unclear whether any such cards will hit the streets at the time of the AMD reference-card launch, or thereafter.

Now of course, previous logic follows that we'll almost definitely be seeing cards from third-party manufacturers hitting retail at some point, however when "some point" is, exactly? Shrugs all around at the moment.

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4. Ray-Tracing? DLSS? You Writing a Book Report, or Something?

AMD didn't divulge many details about its upcoming adoption of ray-tracing technology. But the chip maker did acknowledge it, albeit stating little more than "it exists," "it's coming," and that support for up to 60 titles (so far) is on the company's roadmap going forward from launch day. Most concerning? No benchmarks, either.

Then there's AMD's answer to Nvidia's supersampling tech, DLSS, which it simply calls "Super Resolution." Credit where it's due, the name Super Resolution sounds a lot less wonky than Nvidia's DLSS. It's clean and to the point; no fluffy acronyms required.

According to the presentation, Super Resolution won't be reliant on hardware like Nvidia's Tensor Core-powered DLSS, and instead will integrate directly into the company's FidelityFX platform at a later date.

Other than that, we don't know much. We don't know how it works, what the tech behind it is, or how much performance increase we can expect from it, versus what DLSS provides on Nvidia cards with its (admittedly few) supported games.

Either way, though, it's good to know that AMD is hard at work on something that will compete with DLSS. But whether or not the problem of supersampling is only one that hardware (or AI neural networks) can solve? That's for future benchmarks to decide.

Questions Aside, Still a (Red) Banner Day for PC Gamers

Regardless of all these queries on our part, if AMD actually delivers on most or all of what Dr. Su and her cohort promised in AMD's presentation, the implications are big.

Not only have the engineers at AMD managed to increase the performance-per-watt of RDNA 2 by as much as 50 percent over the previous generation, they've also got in the works (albeit perhaps nascently) new features that could go toe-to-toe with nearly every feature that Nvidia currently claims as a competitive edge.

This in mind, the company still has an uphill climb against Nvidia's latest heavy-hitter GPU releases like the Editors' Choice-award-winning GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition. That card simply blows up the economics of 1440p and 4K gaming, and since that card also managed to near-approximate a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the Radeon RX 6800 claiming the same wins for $80 more seems like a wildly impressive feat for AMD taken in isolation, but possibly still outshined by Team Green. (AMD shows up in a Porsche, but who knew Nvidia had a Maybach?)

So, then, we'll just have to wait and see how all these numbers shake out in tests of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800, due to launch on November 18th, followed by the Radeon RX 6900 XT on December 8. However they do, this is shaping up to be the video card season for all time.