AMD's next-generation RDNA2 GPUs will be officially unveiled in just under a week's time, but in the meantime we have more leaks and rumors that point to some exciting performance potential. Citing a "very special board partner," IgorsLab has a report that one of the near-top cards, the 6800XT, may have a boost clock almost 50 percent higher than the 5700XT, reaching as high as 2.57GHz.
That may not be a clock speed that the card regularly hits — although it likely could do with adequate cooling — but a regular 2.3GHz or 2.4GHz seems more than possible with a decent add-in-board cooling solution. With the expected increase in compute units for RDNA 2 cards too, this generation could be very exciting indeed.
AMD is also in an even better position thanks to Nvidia dropping the ball on the launch of its RTX 3000 GPUs. The RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 have real stock issues, with as few as seven percent of gamers being able to get the cards, even after they've paid for them.
If RDNA2 can launch with great performance and in significant numbers, AMD could see fans turn away from Nvidia to purchase the new team red cards instead, especially if they debut at competitive prices.
As it stands, we still don't know quite how good these cards will be, but the suggestion that they'll almost match RTX 3080 performance at the top end and easily eclipse the last-generation 2080 Ti flagship with multiple cards, seems most likely. They should do it with a lower power draw too.
With a narrower memory bus, cheaper memory, but more of it, 4K performance over the long term may give RDNA2 a fine wine profile, and at a more affordable price.
RDNA2 could be something very special indeed.