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AMD Radeon RX 6800 | MMORPG.com
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Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
AMD Radeon RX 6800 | MMORPG.com
We already looked at the RX 6800 XT, but how does it's younger sibling the RX 6800 stack up? Find out in our review.
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https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Quadro-GV100-Volta-Graphics/dp/B07JBQ4DBV
Every game I play can be played on max settings; but I haven't really played anything from the last 3 years. Even the 2020 budget cards are ridiculously expensive. I'd like to upgrade, but this is nuts.
Yeah, I'm in this boat as well. I don't think I even have space for a 4k monitor. The only way I could use this is if I streamed to the TV. It's not like I'm missing that. The biggest I could fit is some 2k with 144Hz.
Regardless, that price point is crazy. If only people were smart enough to boycott, but that's too much to expect.
There's no reason why a GeForce GTX 960, GTX 1060, and GTX 1660 Ti couldn't have been the top end Nvidia cards of their respective generations, with the higher end GPUs simply not existing. Indeed, in some generations, AMD has simply not bothered to build an expensive, high end GPU, notably including the Radeon RX 400 series and the Radeon RX 5000 series.
At the rate 2020 is going, I don't expect to see anything in stock until well unto 2021, just because it's 2020 and FU.
Yeah, I misjudged what this really is. This is more like Vega56 or the like than it is like upper middle I figured it to be. My bad.
Though you can't fault me for jumping at a conclusion, given the recent trend of anti consumerism. They want to increase the price of games, hardware etc.
I think the RX6800 is not good enough for the price point. Better spend a bit more for the XT or save and buy the 3070. Because of DLSS and better RT performance.
Currently I can still run AC Valhalla on ~60 FPS in 1080 on my old pc (i7 4790k, 1070 8GB). For that game, the CPU is still fine (~60-75% utilization) but the CPU is on its limit on High settings.
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Playing: Overwatch, Genshin Impact, Black Desert Mobile, Hundred Soul, Cyberpunk 2077
Inactive: WAR, DAoC, RIFT, GW1/2, TSW, Age of Wulin, Black Desert, Blade & Soul, Skyforge
Yes, I honestly never understood why they produced both Vega 56 and 64. Likewise for 6800 and 6800XT. The price difference isn't that large and if you're willing to spend as much on a GFX, just go with 64 / XT. The best thing was when you could literally flash / unlock 56 to actually be 64. Come on, for real?
When they get a bunch of physical dies back from the fab, they test them to see which parts work or don't work. If the whole thing works exactly how they hope, they sell it as an RX 6900 XT. If 3 compute units are defective but everything else works great, they disable some 8 that include the three defective ones and sell it as an RX 6800 XT. If 10 compute units are defective, or fewer are defective but just can't clock high enough to sell it as a 6800 XT, they'll sell it as a 6800 if they can.
Prices of different bins are often a statement about yields. For example, when the chips come back from the fabs, suppose that only 10% of them can meet the 6900 XT bin, another 60% can meet the 6800 XT bin, another 10% can meet the 6800, and the other 20% have to be thrown in the garbage (e.g., if the PCI Express controller or video decode block are defective, you can't sell it as any bin). In that case, if you make all three bins look like equally good deals, the 6900 XT and 6800 quickly sell out while you're stuck with a bunch of 6800 XTs that don't sell at all. (Well, once you can get real volume to retail, that is.)
If instead you price them such that most people think the 6800 XT looks like a much better value than the other bins, then maybe you can convince 6 times as many people to buy the 6800 XT as settle for the 6800, and then you can sell the cards in the same proportion that the dies come back from the fabs. And how do you convince people to mostly get the 6800 XT rather than the other bins? You make prices look about like AMD set them.
So what if we can't actually build a computer with these components until next year? Most of us are just doing PC upgrades that we can do a bit sooner or a bit later depending on when it's a good time to buy. These reviews are something we should have now instead of later so that we'll know it's worth waiting instead of having to make guesses about future products.
They don't just pick random chips to stick in the lower bins. They test each chip individually to see if all of the components work and how high it can clock. If it can meet their required specs for the 6900 XT, they'll sell it as a 6900 XT, not disable parts to sell it for cheaper as something else.
So what will happen if you buy a 6800 and modify the BIOS to try to turn it into a 6900 XT? That depends on the silicon lottery and which chip you happened to get. If the reason it wasn't sold as a 6900 XT is that a compute unit is completely defective, then trying to use the card will probably just crash immediately. It's possible that the entire chip works, but just needs too much voltage or can't handle high clock speeds, in which case, you could make it stable by underclocking it.
It might even seem like it works completely fine at a 6900 XT for a while, then becomes unstable months later. Or becomes unstable when you play particular games. Or when your room gets kind of hot. Or even works just fine perpetually. If a chip is borderline such that AMD thinks there's a 50% chance that everything would be fine if they sold it as a 6900 XT and a 50% chance that it would malfunction at the required clock speeds, then they're going to sell it as a lower bin because a 50% chance of being defective is unacceptable.
If you were trying to mess with the BIOS to turn a lower bin into a 6900 XT, you'd be much better off starting with a 6800 XT. For starters, something that could work as a 6900 XT but not reliably enough would probably meet 6800 XT specs just fine, so it wouldn't be sold as a plain 6800. Furthermore, the 6900 XT is supposed to be able to draw 300 W. That's the same as the 6800 XT, but the 6800 is only built for 250 W. Even if the GPU chip is fine with 6900 XT specs, the VRMs might not be.
Should something like the Ryzen 5000 series launch where quite a lot of CPUs have been shipped but not enough to meet demand be treated the same as the GeForce RTX 3080/3090 or Radeon 6000 series launches where hardly any GPUs had shipped by launch day? Should any of those be treated the same as the GeForce GTX 680, which had a strict paper launch with zero parts reaching retail until about two months after "launch"?
What about laptop parts, where the "launch" is just AMD or Nvidia or Intel or whoever announcing the specs and saying that laptop vendors have permission to sell laptops using their hardware whenever they're ready, which might be months away? Should they be prohibited from announcing specs until laptops are actually available at retail? How about "accidentally" leaking specs and cherry-picked benchmark scores?
Or how about the Radeon HD 5800 series, which would have been a hard launch except that a manufacturing blunder at TSMC ruined about two months worth of production, and AMD surely didn't know that would happen until well after they had chosen the launch date? Those cards were in stock for about a week after launch, then disappeared for about two months before coming back.
And even if you can make choices about what to ban, what stops hardware vendors from merely launching their product elsewhere and not launching in your country until later? Are you going to ban sites in your country from posting early reviews, which would just mandate that they have to move where the site is based in order to continue doing hardware reviews? Lots of people want to read a review on launch day, but a review posted a month later won't get nearly as many clicks.