AMD made two big moves in two days. Yesterday it announced its $35 billion acquisition of Cyrus, and today it unveiled Radeon RX 6900 XT, a powerful rival to RTX 3090. And Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 GPUs.
AMD says these products have enough power to compete with Nvidia’s most powerful graphics cards.
Nvidia RTX, AMD Radeon prices are lower
The three GPUs released today are based on AMD’s latest rDNA 2 technology, which will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing for the next generation of games.
In August, AMD tested the rDNA 2 GPU with the latest light tracking technology. The three GPUs also performed better when using Microsoft’s DXR SDK sample program. The new graphics card can achieve 471 FPS with hardware acceleration enabled, 13.8 times better than other software.
The $649 Radeon RX 6800 XT is marketed against Nvidia’s RTX 3080. The Radeon RX 6800 XT delivers lower power consumption than Nvidia’s RTX 3080, which consumes 300 watts of power, while the RTX 3080 consumes 320 watts of power. The $579 Radeon RX 6800 competes with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 TI. Opposite the $999 RX 6900 XT is Nvidia’s RTX 3090. By contrast, AMD’s three GPUs introduced today are more price-competitive.
No DLSS functionality, testing next generation technology
AMD is using a high-speed 128MB cache based on its Zen 3 L3 CPU cache design, which is optimized for graphics usage and is expected to provide twice the bandwidth. This means that these latest Radeon graphics cards can feed data to the graphics pipeline more efficiently and improve performance without significantly increasing power consumption. AMD aims to double the performance from the previous RX 5700 XT card while reducing the power gain.
However, AMD’s three new graphics cards lack the deep learning super sampling (DLSS) feature found in Nvidia’s RTX. AI-powered DLSS has transformed games that support the technology by simply switching game Settings to show better picture quality. After GPU calculation of low-resolution game screen, through machine learning stretch can obtain high-resolution screen, at present, the latest version of DLSS 2.1 has achieved the following 4K stretch screen than the original image quality is better, higher frame frequency.
AMD said it tested the new super sampling feature, which is designed to improve performance during ray tracing. AMD promises that its super-sampling technology will be open source and cross-platform, meaning it could be applied to next-generation consoles like Xbox X and PS5. AMD is understood to be working with a number of partners to develop the technology.
$35 billion acquisition of Cyrus to boost data center competition
In addition to competing with Nvidia on the GPU front, AMD is also not letting up on the battle with Intel on the data center front. Yesterday AMD announced a $35 billion deal to acquire FPGA creator Silings.
“Our acquisition of Silings marks AMD’s position as an industry leader in high performance computing and the preferred partner for the world’s largest and most important technology company,” AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said in a statement. This acquisition will create significant value for all stakeholders, including AMD and Silings shareholders.”
AMD will deliver its next-generation server chip, code-named Milan, to cloud customers this quarter, while Celings is updating its Inversal ACAP chip, which helps data centers cope with the massive computing demands of artificial intelligence.
