XFX Speedster MERC319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT CORE Gaming Graphics Card with 16GB GDDR6 HDMI 3xDP RX-68XTALFD9

The RX 6800 XT is one of the best red team alternatives to Nvidia's top-tier graphics cards. Any PC gamer interested in 4K should give a highly competitive card that comes so close to its rival—with a negligible performance difference to the RTX 3080—some serious thought.

While several additional cards have since entered the market in addition to the RX 6800 XT, which was the first AMD RDNA 2 GPU to do so, this one stands out among the competition and is the most cost-effective. It does, at least when you consider its MSRP, and given that AMD's GPUs are more quickly returning to affordable pricing points than Nvidia's, this might give the red team the advantage in the short term.

The memory front—covering both bandwidth and capacity—has been a primary area of conflict for Nvidia and AMD this generation. A 256-bit bus connects the 16GB of GDDR6 memory on the RX 6800 XT, giving it a 512GB/s maximum bandwidth. Accordingly, AMD has the 10GB RTX 3080 from Nvidia on the ropes in terms of capacity, although it lags slightly in raw bandwidth due to the RTX 3080's 760GB/s.

In terms of throughput, AMD has an advantage because of its Infinity Cache, which significantly increases the card's "effective bandwidth." According to AMD, there is a 3.25x increase in bandwidth over the RX 6800 XT, or about 1,664GB/s. Despite the highly different underlying technology, it means you're looking at identical performance in terms of gaming.

The RX 6800 XT puts AMD in a great position by delivering what is necessary to get the entire industry to take notice and having a compelling offer to make to gamers immediately at launch. It is no surprise that the collaboration between Zen and RDNA engineers also had a role in this.

We have a lot of respect for what AMD has accomplished with the RX 6800 XT, a return to form for the Radeon Technology Group that brings much-needed competition to the GPU market and provides a respectable red team alternative for any high-end gaming PC setup.