Get an XFX Speedster RX 6800 XT for $769 (was $1099)
$769 is a good price for the RX 6800 XT, some $330 below this particular card’s US MSRP - albeit $120 above the reference model’s launch price. Looking at the market, this is the cheapest model by a considerable margin, with most cards costing closer to $1000. XFX are an underrated manufacturer when it comes AMD graphics cards, and their imaginatively-titled Speedster SWFT 319 model is a solid package. It’s a triple-fan design with a solid backplate, zero RPM mode and dual BIOS support - a handy inclusion if you’d like to try your hand at flashing a faster BIOS. So is there any reason not to pick up this graphics card? Well, like other AMD Radeon RX 6000 models, there are some drawbacks to going with the Red Team. Ray tracing performance from AMD’s first-gen RT offering is not up to par with Nvidia’s second-gen solution in its RTX 30-series cards, so you can expect to experience lower frame-rates if you turn on the feature. This is somewhat ameliorated by the recent release of FSR 2.0, which like Nvidia’s upscaling tech now uses information from previous frames to provide a much cleaner looking end result. This allows you to run games at lower-than-native resolution, boosting performance, without a distracting hit to image quality in most titles. You can use FSR 2.0 to counteract the performance penalty of ray tracing, or just boost performance in general - but it needs to be implemented by the game developer and so far only a handful of titles are supported compared to the longer list of games that have included DLSS. Beyond these factors, the RX 6800 XT is a super solid card in terms of features. It has AV1 decoding, a more efficient tech that can boost the quality (or reduce the bandwidth requirements) of streaming video, and an HDMI 2.1 port that allows a one-cable connection to modern TVs and monitors at up to 4K 120Hz. AMD’s software stack has also seen big improvements recently to usability, so actually using and configuring the company’s many features for boosting frame-rates, streaming games or seeing performance metrics is easier than it’s historically been. So: AMD’s RX 6000 platform is a strong one; the RX 6800 XT occupies a useful place between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 in terms of performance; this particular model is going for a good price ahead of both graphics card companies eventual next-gen models, expected later this year. If you’re in the market for a new GPU, do consider it - and stay tuned for more deals!
