Is the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT worth buying this holiday sale?

The Radeon RX 6800 XT was launched as a high-end graphics card by the red camp back in 2020 and is placed between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080 in terms of performance.

It was priced at a hefty $649 upon launch. Thus, when pitted against the $499 RTX 3070 and the $599 RTX 3080, the card wasn't seen as a value-for-money product. Thus, when compared to almost every other RX 6000 series GPU, PC users overlooked the card for being overpriced and not bringing anything extraordinary to the table.

However, since the global chip shortage, Nvidia cards have still not hit the MSRP mark. AMD has offered massive discounts on their graphics cards to stay ahead of rivals Nvidia, and, thus, the 6800 XT suddenly makes for an interesting choice.

Gamers should consider a few more factors before finalizing the GPU. Thus, let’s look at the competition and overall performance of the graphics card in late 2022 and try to evaluate whether it is worth the money.

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The RX 6800 XT is great value for its price

The RX 6800 XT is a solid video card on paper. Based on the Navi 21 processor also found on the RX 6900 XT and the RX 6950 XT, the chip packs 4,608 shading nits, 288 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 128 Render Output Units (ROPs), and 72 ray tracing (RT) cores.

Like any other RDNA 2-based card, the 6800 XT has a high base clock of 1,825 MHz, and a game and boost clock of 2,015 MHz and 2,250 MHz each, respectively.

The card is bundled with 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM and is based on a 256-bit bus. The memory is capable of producing an output bandwidth of 512 GB/s and is clocked at 2,000 MHz.

Theoretically, it can deliver a peak graphics computing performance of 21.74 TFlops.

Thus, the card is a solid on-paper offering. According to TechPowerUp's GPU computing power aggregates, it is around 15% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti and is almost equivalent to the RTX 3080, and lags behind the flagship RX 6900 XT by just around 9%.

These on-paper specs and performance predictions translate very well in terms of gaming performance. The AMD RX 6800 XT beats the RTX 3070 Ti consistently in every video game including ray-tracing heavy titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman III, and Watch Dogs: Legion.

The card is priced closer to the more expensive RTX 3080 and even beats it in a few titles when played at 4K UHD resolution.

However, AMD RX 6000 series cards have a few trade-offs when pitched against their Nvidia RTX counterparts. Since these cards are the first iteration of Team Red's ray tracing technology, the image output and performance with the tech turned on are not nearly as good as that of Nvidia.

AMD's upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has gotten a lot better over the last few months and can deliver a higher framerate gain when compared to Nvidia's DLSS 2. However, its final output is nowhere near the polished images DLSS can generate.

Thus, despite being a solid video card with awesome price-to-performance ratios, the RX 6800 XT has a few caveats. But that does not change the fact that it is a solid card for 4K gaming, and at $550, it is a steal.