Radeon RX 6800 will launch for $579 and go toe-to-toe with Nvidia's RTX 3070

AMD RX 6800
(Image credit: AMD)

Over at AMD's Radeon live stream today, Dr. Lisa Su took the stage to announce three brand new RX 6000-series graphics cards. And while we're certainly intrigued by the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, the cheapest of the three, the $579 RX 6800, is likely to be the graphics card that garners the most interest from willing customers.

You can check out the specs of this card in the table below, and how it shapes up next to its RDNA 2 compadres.

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Radeon RX 6000 series
Header Cell - Column 0 RX 6900 XTRX 6800 XTRX 6800
CUs807260
ProcessTSMC 7nmTSMC 7nmTSMC 7nm
Game clock (MHz)2,0152,0151,815
Boost clock (MHz)2,2502,2502,105
Infinity Cache (MB)128128128
Memory16GB GDDR616GB GDDR616GB GDDR6
TDP (Watt)300300250
Available fromDecember 8November 18November 18
Price (USD)$999$649$579

How it shapes up body part-to-body part with Nvidia's RTX 30-series graphics card in-waiting, the RTX 3070, AMD has not said exactly. What it will offer is a heap of gaming benchmarks showing the RX 6800 toppling the RTX 2080 Ti in a handful of games (with Smart Access Memory on, by the way), and that should put it roughly in line with the RTX 3070.

AMD can claim victory in VRAM capacity, at least. Both cards offer GDDR6 memory, but whereas the RTX 3070 offers 8GB, the RX 6800 will deliver 16GB. I suppose it has to make up for the slight bump in price somehow: the RX 6800 will set you back $579 to the RTX 3070's $499.

The RX 6800 will be available from November 18, alongside the RX 6800 XT. The RX 6900 XT will follow afterwards on December 8.

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Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.