AMD’s RX 6000 graphics cards are an inflection point, finally allowing Team Red to grow and earn places in our roundup of the best graphics cards. Powered by the RDNA 2 architecture, these cards are packed with features like ray tracing and super sampling to power the latest games.

Now that all the cards are here, we’ve rounded up everything you need to know about Radeon’s latest, including pricing, specs, performance, and a bit about mobile GPUs.

AMD RX 6000: price and release date

There are now nearly a dozen RX 6000 GPUs available, with the first cards arriving in November 2020 and the latest in May 2022. Here are all the cards available, along with their list prices:

• RX 6950 XT — $1,100
• RX 6900 XT—$1,000
• RX 6800 XT—$650
• RX 6800 — $580
• RX 6750 XT—$550
• RX 6700 XT—$480
• RX 6650 XT—$400
• RX 6600 XT—$380
• RX 6600 — $330
• RX 6500 XT—$200
• RX 6400 — $160

Of the 11 cards in the RX 6000 series, 10 of them are available. The only oddball is the RX 6600 XT, which AMD replaced with the RX 6650 XT. That said, we still found several RX 6600 XT models available, and while AMD won’t continue to produce them, there should be inventory for some time.

GPU prices have been extremely high, but they are falling. And that’s especially true for the RX 6000 graphics cards. Although AMD no longer sells reference models, you can find most third-party cards for their list price. Keep in mind that third-party cards are often a bit more expensive than the list price. The RX 6700 XT, for example, sells for between $480 and $600 depending on the model you choose.

Unlike Nvidia’s RTX 30 series graphics cards, AMD RX 6000 cards are readily available. As of this writing, we’ve found every model for every card available at list price. The only exception is the RX 6800 XT, which sells for around $100 to $150 above list price.

AMD RX 6000: Specifications

AMD has 11 cards in its RX 6000 line, although the RX 6650 XT technically replaces the RX 6600 XT. Compared to Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs, AMD cards tend to run at higher clock speeds and offer more memory for mid-to-high end cards. However, the RX 6000 cards are more memory limited, using GDDR6 memory instead of the GDDR6X featured on Nvidia’s flagship cards.

On the other hand, AMD’s card consumes much less power. Even the RX 6950 XT peaks at 335 watts, which compares to the 450W the RTX 3090 Ti can pull. Overall, AMD’s current-gen offerings are much more efficient, with the RX 6400 consuming just 50W of power.

Important cards to note are the RX 6X50 XT updates: the RX 6950 XT, RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT. These cards are updated versions of their respective base models and have two differences. Each of the cards features a slight increase in clock speed (up to 4.2% on the RX 6950 XT) and 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, which improves bandwidth.

These new models don’t offer a significant performance advantage based on our testing, as they feature the same number of cores and the same amount of memory as their respective base models. However, you might find these refreshes more readily available as they launched well after the initial lineup.

AMD RX 6000: Performance

Although AMD’s graphics cards have generally played second fiddle to Nvidia’s, that’s not the case with the RX 6000 cards. In many cases, they match Nvidia’s best while still being offered at a much lower price. There are, however, a few outliers.

The flagship RX 6950 XT was able to achieve 68 fps at 4K in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla based on our testing, surpassing Nvidia’s RTX 3090. At 1440p, the RX 6700 XT competes well with the RTX 3070, matching Nvidia’s card in fortnite averaging 121 fps at 1440p with the Ultra graphics preset.

The low-end models have some differences. The budget-focused RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT are great for 1080p gaming, though they compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3060. The only bad option out of the range is the RX 6500 XT, which struggles to deliver playable frame rates due to serious PCIe connection and memory (read our RX 6500 XT review for more) .

AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics cards are very powerful, but they have a big weakness: Ray Tracing. According to our tests, the RX 6000 GPUs produce about half the frame rate of Nvidia GPUs when ray tracing is enabled. It comes down to the way the RX 6000 GPUs are designed, integrating a ray tracing accelerator into each compute unit instead of dedicated ray tracing cores like those used by Nvidia.

AMD RX 6000: Laptop GPU and APU

AMD launched its mobile RX 6000 line with three cards: the RX 6600M, RX 6700M and RX 6800M. The range has grown significantly since then. Here are all the available RX 6000 laptop graphics cards:

We had the chance to test the flagship RX 6800M. AMD claimed it could beat the mobile RTX 3080 in games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Resident Evil: Village, but the results are a bit more complicated. The RX 6800M can indeed beat Nvidia’s best in games optimized for RDNA2, but it may struggle in some setups based on our testing.

AMD also offers its RX 6000S graphics cards, which aren’t as powerful as their M-series counterparts. They match the specs, but these GPUs are designed for thin and light laptops.

In addition to discrete cards, AMD has used its RDNA 2 architecture in Ryzen 6000 integrated graphics. Although integrated graphics never match discrete, the power of RDNA 2 helps Ryzen 6000 laptops achieve playable frame rates. without a dedicated GPU, at least in less demanding games.

AMD RX 6000: Ray Tracing Features and FidelityFX

With RDNA2, AMD now offers fully hardware-accelerated ray tracing, although it does so in a slightly different way from Nvidia. It doesn’t have dedicated RT cores like the RTX 20– and 30-series cards, but instead embeds a ray accelerator into standard Radeon compute units.

AMD has also expanded its FidelityFX feature library to work hand-in-hand with ray-tracing computation and shader effects to bring better visual fidelity to games. Variable rate denoising and shading algorithms help adapt image quality based on luminance and motion, and a suite of compute-based effects is also available for developers.

One such effect is FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). FSR is an oversampling technique that can increase performance without significant loss of image quality. It works by feeding an algorithm with low-resolution internal rendering. The algorithm then takes this information and expands the pixels into a larger grid, leading to what looks like a high-resolution image.

We are now on FSR 2.0, which goes hand in hand with Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Although FSR is a feature of the RX 6000 graphics cards, this feature is not exclusive to them. FSR has been running on Nvidia and AMD GPUs since 2016.

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