Highly anticipated: The waiting is almost over. After endless months of rumor, speculation, and leaks, AMD is revealing its Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards later today. You can watch proceedings right here at 9 am PT/12 pm ET/4 pm GMT.
Following on from its Ryzen 5000-focused 'Where Gaming Begins' event earlier this month, AMD says 'Where Gaming Begins: Ep 2' will showcase "the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards powered by the RDNA 2 architecture, the most powerful gaming graphics cards ever built by AMD."
The new Radeon line will be going up against Nvidia's impressive RTX 3000-series, including the amazing RTX 3070 that we praised in our review, calling it the $500 king and awarding a score of 95. Whether Big Navi will be able to match or better its rival's cards remains to be seen, but AMD does seem confident.
During the Zen 3 announcement, AMD teased some official RDNA 2 benchmarks, though it never specified which card it was using---it's presumed to have been either the RX 6800 XT or RX 6900 XT. It showed performance on par with the RTX 3080, and AMD's product is expected to be significantly cheaper than Nvidia's.
Earlier this month, purported specifications of a Navi 21 XT graphics card, likely the flagship 6900 XT, claimed it would feature 16 GB of VRAM, more than the RTX 3080, and have a 320W TGP. We've also heard that Navi 21 will come with 5,120 cores.
With the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090---and the RTX 3070, probably---experiencing difficult launches marred by scalpers' bots, AMD is rumored to have sent out instructions to retailers outlining measures on how to prevent the same scenario with the next Radeon line. Let's hope they work.