General Discussions

[black_zion]

https://wccftech.com/amd-dont-expect-custom-radeon-rx-6800-xt-rx-6800-graphics-cards-at-official-msr...

“We have had a private conversation with AMD. They assured us that in 4 to 8 weeks there will be AIB cards available at MSRP. They said they enabled the AIBs to achieve the 649 dollars [RX 6800 XT] MSRP and they expect that to happen within 8 weeks.”

[Alanboya]

Dont know how it is in other countrys, but in Germany it is a disaster.  Building a pc isnt fun anymore... its just frustrating...

[ajlueke]

You basically just need to assume that the whatever the release date of a product is, the true release date is 5-6 months later when you can actually buy the products at MSRP. 

[pokester]

Ouch, scary but true! LOL

[colesdav]

Has everyone forgotten the RX Vega 64 / 56 launch? 
The cards were launched with a low MSRP. 
Reviews were based on that low MSRP and compared to the GTX1080/1070. 

Then it turned out that there were very few cards for launch day, and they had been "subsidised" to allow the low MSRP at launch.
When reviewers found out about it they were very angry and said their review conclusions would have been different at the higher pricing. 

Seems to me, different GPU, similar competitve position versus Nvida GPUs at 4k (which the AMD cards are targeting). 
Seems like same MSRP game might have been played with RX6800/XT as was done on the RX Vega 64/56 cards. 

How many times ...

[pokester]

Yah it was said that Nvidia did the subsidizing for the first month only initially with Ampere too. Then a couple days ago the AIB partners were listing crazy high prices on the new 3060ti and AMD says they addressed this but didn't say how, to bring those prices back down. My guess would be subsidies again. 

Seem these practices and high prices are never going away again. At least not while GPU are at any level of a desirable state such in the first 6 months or more of release. 

You're right this stuff has been done in the past and is only being done more and more now. 

It is a shame....

[colesdav]

RX6800XT are available on Ebay!

Best Advert I have found so far - it is from Ebay UK: 

Asus AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT printed on a4 paper

Item information

Condition:

New

Time left:

Time left: 5d 10h (09 Dec, 2020 17:33:19 GMT)

Starting bid:

£120.00

Reserve not met

0 Bids

Asus AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT printed on a4 paper. Condition is "New". Dispatched with Royal Mail 1st Class. "
 

[colesdav]

And hunting from US I find: 

Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 Xt 16GB 256-Bit GDDR6 Gaming Graphics Card, New.

8 viewed per hour

Item information

Condition:

New

Price:

US $1,599.00

[colesdav]

There are pracitcally no AMD GPU RX6800/XT GPU in Europe.
Reviewers must have got most of them. 
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/proshop-updates-stock-on-RX6800-RX6800XT

Paper Paper Paper Launch.

[pokester]

Other than the small amount of cards that sold by AMD on launch day, I saw no evidence that any shipped here in the USA on AIB launch day. Best Buy showed as coming soon until yesterday but now reads sold out. I guess they released what they had at the same time as the RTX 2060Ti sale. No idea how many sold. Other bigger online sellers like B&H photo still have the same message up saying they have no idea when or if they will get cards, just that they did order them.  A couple of the YouTube tech reviewers have been saying for weeks and still this week that AMD will still sell more GPUs by years end than the green team. I will have to believe that when I see it as so far it doesn't look like they are on track to even catch up. Hope they do though, as there will be a lot of disappointment for the holiday if not. I am in my local Micro Center at least once a week and the couple guys I know have assured me that the green team cards have been coming in, but just sell immediately. They have not seen an AMD card since the 8 boards they got for launch, and got no boards for the AIB launch.

So I can't really call the Green Teams launch a paper launch as demand has never been higher. I don't like that apparently the sold a ton of cards to miners, at least according to some sites, that could have made a lot of end users happy. 

AMD so far really is pretty much a paper launch. No real volume out there so far. How ever I look forward to the possibility they can get a lot more on the market this quarter.

The sad thing is even if they do will they prioritize retailers that will not price gouge, or sell them all to places that double or more the price. One think I really like about Micro Center is they don't do that. 

[pmc251]

8 weeks is very optimistic IMO.

Double or triple that is more likely.

[colesdav]

Given the Internet and power supply etc will likely be down over Christmas period I have bigger things to worry about to be honest. Take that as a prediction.

[ajlueke]

The problem is, is that the market is universally inflated.  Say I want a 6800 XT, which will cost about $720 with tax and shipping.  I can get one for around a $1200 on eBay, a $500 mark up.  The RTX 3090 is about $1600 with taxes and shipping for the FE model.  It can be sold on eBay for around $2,100 or a $500 markup.

So basically the current state of affairs promotes scalping.  If an individual can get their hands on any GPU at MSRP, they can sell it and use the proceeds to buy the GPU they actually wanted without losing much if any money from MSRP. 

[ajlueke]

"Seems to me, different GPU, similar competitve position versus Nvida GPUs at 4k"

Not really.  Vega 64 was pretty comparable to the GTX 1080 while consuming far more power.  AMD had nothing for the 1080 Ti or the Titan card.  Effectively they were competing with the tier 3 GPU while consuming more power.

The 6800 XT competes with the RTX 3080, which is this generations tier 2 GPU, while consuming less power.  So AMD is in a much better position than during the Vega launch.  It is actually quite similar to the Fury X launch, which easily eclipsed the GTX 980 and was actually close to the Titan card, so NVidia dropped in the 980 Ti to compensate.  Basically what is happening this time around with the RTX 3080 Ti.

[colesdav]

RX Vega 64 Liquid was comparible to the GTX1080.
The RX Vega 64 reference blower was slower. Sitting between GTX1070 and 1080. 
Many reviewers recommended not to go near the RX Vega 64 reference GPU because of heat, noise, and poor performance. 
AIB RX Vega 64 cards from Sapphire and PowerColor could not keep up with AIB GTX1080s either. 
The Power Consumption on RX Vegta 64 Liquid is a massive 360 Watts for the GPU core alone at 4K Ultra. 

[colesdav]

In many ways the position against Nvidia is worse than RX Vega was. 
It is slower than RTX 3080 at 4K. 
It is far behind in Ray Tracing. 
It has no AI at all. 
It has no DLSS. 
It has no easy to use Compute on Windows or Linux. 
It is miles behind in Blender.  
Nvidia are about to release their version of SAM FYI and results look pretty good. 

There seemed to be more Vegas at launch. 

[ajlueke]

Definitely disagree.

For the vast majority gamers, rasterization performance is what matters.  In that regard Vega 64 was about 5% slower at launch than the GTX 1080.  Now the 6800 XT is also 5% slower than the RTX 3080 (at 4K) so on the face of it, that seems similar, but there are numerous significant caveats there.

   The GTX 1080 was over 20% slower than the GTX 1080 Ti, so Vega 64 hit in a performance bracket 25% below what NVidia was capable of.  The 6800 XT lands about 15% slower than the RTX 3090 at 4K at lower resolutions the comparison improves.  

  The 6800 XT consumes less power than the NVidia competition, which was not true of Vega 64.  The 6800 XT also offers more VRAM than the RTX 3080 while Vega 64 and the GTX 1080 had identical 8 GB VRAM allocations.  So the 6800 XT already sits more favorably to NVidia in rasterization performance, power consumption and VRAM vs Vega 64.  Couple that with the fact that Vega 64 was the top tier AMD card while the 6800 XT is only the second tier RDNA2 release behind the 6900 XT hard to make the case that RDNA2 vs Ampere is similar to Vega vs Pascal.

[colesdav]

RE: For the vast majority gamers, rasterization performance is what matters.  

The RX6800XT is definitely faster at 1080p and slightly faster overall at 2K than the Nvidia RTX3080 based on reviews I have read and watched.

It will be interesting to see what the Nvidia Drivers team do to address that 1080p and 2K gap in coming months especially at 1080p. It is likely they will be able to do driver optimizations to push 1080p/2K performance higher if they put the effort in. They have done similar in the past where AMD were beating Nvidia in Vulkan and DX12. I see no reason for them not to do it again if they think it is important enough. 

Pretty sure those benchmarks are all run with additional Nvidia Gameworks options still switched off in most cases.

GPUs that run reliably on a wide number of games with stable drivers  is what matters.
There are not enough RX68000XT out in the wild yet to see how the drivers perform. 

It better not be same story as RX5700XT Navi 10, which are crashing again on Adrenalin 20.11.2/3 drivers, with Blackscreening/BSOD/PC Reboot after being ~ stable for a ~ 3 months since August.  
Jury still out. 

The RX6800XT consumes about 25 W less power than the RTX3080 FE in FurMark at 4K.
Overclocked RX6800XT pulls only 4 Watts less than overclocked Nvidia AIB RTX3080 at about 340W in FurMark at 4K. 
That is just one benchmark from one reviewer though. 

The AMD GPUs are running on far more advanced and power efficient  TSMC 7nm node versus Samsung 8nm for Nvidia. 
Sure the GPUs are what they are.
But it still means Nvidia have potential to pull farther ahead when they move to a better process node. 

These GPUs are meant to be 4K with Ray Tracing. 
That's why people are supposed to be prepared to pay the high fictional MSRP or the even higher reality pricing.  

The pricing is really high for these "High End" GPUs. 
I do not think 1080p/2K performance will be the deciding factor at all. 

It will be 4K and RayTracing. Driver reliability and productivity/compute/Blender.
Additional features available in Nvidia GeForce Experience will be important for many.

AMD do seem to have made good progress versus the RX5700XT performance. 
It looks like they have implemented Smart Power stages on the PCB and are actually monitoring & controlling Total Board Input power at last. 

It looks like Nvidia have been siutting with "Ti" cards ready as usual. 

So it seems to me, same old story as RX Vega launch, except this time around, the RX6800/XT is not even a real launch at all in comparison. There is no product to buy.