The new AMD RX6800XT design reveals - and it makes the RTX3080 look boring

The new AMD RX6800XT design reveals - and it makes the RTX3080 look boring

AMD Big Navi graphics cards made an appearance, and Sapphire showed us how its version of the RDNA 2 GPU would look.

The graphics card maker offered a sneak peak of the Radeon RX 6800 XT PULSE and RX 6800 XT Nitro+.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ features a gray and black color scheme with various slashes and accents on the GPU shroud to enhance the gamer's aesthetic. It also has a sort of light-up logo and RGB lighting that greatly shows off the graphics card when attached to a window-side gaming PC.

The Nitro+ has a 12-blade fan, with additional heatpipes and heatsinks under the shroud for potentially enhanced passive cooling. While the design of this graphics card clearly screams "gamer," it is a fairly well-designed assembly of transistors, fans, and silicon. It also looks like it could have stepped out of the Star Wars universe; PC gamers with RGB-centric desktop setups will no doubt be dazzled by this card.

For those who want something a bit more understated, but worth peering into their PC case to see, Sapphire's Radeon RX 6800 XT PULSE may be the card to consider. Its gunmetal gray/black shroud has a red line running through it, indicating that the graphics card is pulsing

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Also, the triple fan array is chunky but conveys a functional beauty and seems to promise that the GPU will perform well without getting too hot. All of the above cards have HDMI ports and three DisplayPort connections, with all four ports capable of outputting resolutions up to 8K.

Speaking of resolution, both of these cards are set to target games at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, aiming to compete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080; 16GB of GDDR6 video memory and the new RDNA 2 GPU architecture (the same GPU architecture is found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X), the Radeon RX 6800 XT will likely be a serious competitor to the RTX 3080.

Sapphire has not revealed the price of the RX 6800 XT. However, AMD has set a base price of $649 for the new graphics card, which is below the $699 RTX 3080.

We will have to wait and see if the Radeon RX 6800 XT can beat the RTX 3080 in real game tests on November 18, when AMD releases its next-generation GPU. We are quietly hoping that increased competition in the graphics card arena will bring more exciting and powerful GPUs at more affordable prices, making 2020 a good year for PC gamers.

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