AMD's "Where Gaming Begins" Radeon Live Blog: Starts At Noon Eastern (16:00 UTC)
by Ryan Smith on October 28, 2020 9:15 AM EST
11:49AM EDT - AMD's second and final product keynote of the month is taking place today, with an event AMD has dubbed "Where Gaming Begins". Hosted as always by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, AMD will be focusing on the new Radeon RX 6000 series and more, unveiling for the first time their latest generation of video cards. Powered by the company's new RDNA2 architecture, the RX 6000 cards and associated RDNA2-powered game consoles mark an important launch for AMD as they establish the technological cornerstone of gaming products for years to come.
11:54AM EDT - Ian here, I'll be running this Live Blog. Set to start on the hour
11:55AM EDT - If it's anything like the CPU announcement on the 8th, expect some fast paced action
11:56AM EDT - We highly encourage readers who are following us live to put the AMD Livestream and the AnandTech Live Blog side by side to get as much info as you can muster. Here's the link to the livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpgu-cTjyM
11:57AM EDT - As before, we expect it to be pre-recorded, which usually means a faster pace than usual
11:59AM EDT - The countdown begins
12:01PM EDT - In comes the metal music
12:02PM EDT - An opening video of what is probably a series of optimized games
12:02PM EDT - Far Cry 6, WoW Shadowlands
12:02PM EDT - Godfall
12:02PM EDT - Lisa Su to the stage
12:03PM EDT - Ryzen 5000 video was the most watched launch in AMD history
12:03PM EDT - Now for Navi and RX6000
12:03PM EDT - 5700XT + Ryzen 3000, AMD became first company to announce high perf CPU+GPU together
12:03PM EDT - 2020 is year of the gamer
12:03PM EDT - Next-gen consoles
12:04PM EDT - World's best gaming processor - Ryzen 5000
12:04PM EDT - Leadership perf/watt
12:04PM EDT - Drop in upgrade
12:04PM EDT - Also need to compete at high end GPU
12:04PM EDT - AMD is ready
12:04PM EDT - Most powerful gaming GPU from AMD
12:05PM EDT - Taking another big step with RDNA2
12:05PM EDT - Big NAVI
12:05PM EDT - 26.8B transistors, 7nm
12:05PM EDT - Laura Smith, AMD Fellow
12:06PM EDT - Engineers have had plans in the works with RDNA2 since before RDNA came out
12:06PM EDT - Broad ecosystem relationships
12:06PM EDT - Console, PC, and beyond
12:06PM EDT - Targets for RDNA2
12:07PM EDT - Infinity Cache
12:07PM EDT - Pushing Performance needs good design and power
12:07PM EDT - Significant gains in all areas
12:07PM EDT - Leveraging CPU techniques for clock gating
12:07PM EDT - Improve performance, minimizing data movement
12:07PM EDT - 30% more efficient
12:08PM EDT - Infinity Cache for double the bandwidth
12:08PM EDT - at less power than a wider bus
12:08PM EDT - graphics optimized, high density cache based on Zen3 cache
12:08PM EDT - Minimizes bottlenecks
12:08PM EDT - 256-bit GDDR6 interface with Infinity Cache
12:08PM EDT - Frequency
12:08PM EDT - RDNA2 has custom libraries and high speed design flows
12:09PM EDT - +30% frequency increase over RDNA
12:09PM EDT - +54% performance
12:09PM EDT - DX12 Ultimate
12:09PM EDT - Sampler feedback
12:09PM EDT - DirectStorage API
12:09PM EDT - Mesh Shaders
12:09PM EDT - DX Raytracing
12:10PM EDT - Double the performance at better power efficiency
12:10PM EDT - RDNA3 by end of 2022
12:10PM EDT - Scott Herkelman to the stage
12:10PM EDT - New Radeon RX 6800 XT
12:11PM EDT - Aimed at 4K highest settings
12:11PM EDT - 2250 MHz boost clock, 16 GB GDDR6, 128 MB Infinity Cache
12:11PM EDT - 2015 MHz game clock
12:11PM EDT - Check out Scott's t-shirt
12:11PM EDT - 300W Total board power
12:12PM EDT - Beats the competition at less power
12:12PM EDT - Against 3080
12:12PM EDT - 1440p max wins as well
12:13PM EDT - Rage mode
12:13PM EDT - One click overclocking
12:13PM EDT - Only AMD can deliver processors and GPUs
12:13PM EDT - AMD Smart Access Memory
12:13PM EDT - Leverage CPU+GPU memory access
12:14PM EDT - Comes through a BIOS setting
12:14PM EDT - Up to 13% boost with OC and Smart memory
12:14PM EDT - Reducing Latency
12:15PM EDT - Radeon Anti-Lag
12:15PM EDT - 37% lower latency
12:15PM EDT - Radeon Boost goes beyond Anti-Lag for select games
12:15PM EDT - Dynamic resolution
12:15PM EDT - Enabled via software
12:15PM EDT - Don't require proprietary API
12:16PM EDT - Visual experience
12:16PM EDT - Full support for DX12 Ultimate
12:16PM EDT - VRS and Ray Tracing
12:16PM EDT - Super Resolution
12:16PM EDT - Denoiser
12:16PM EDT - Optimized denoiser
12:16PM EDT - VRS adjusts based on luminance and motion
12:16PM EDT - *Working on a super resoltuion feature
12:17PM EDT - 35 AMD Fidelity FX games supported
12:17PM EDT - Godfall
12:17PM EDT - 3d-person looter slasher
12:17PM EDT - Ray Tracing, VRS, Fidelity FX CAS
12:17PM EDT - Game Dev Partner videos now
12:18PM EDT - Far Cry 6
12:18PM EDT - Taking full advantage of the new GPUs
12:18PM EDT - Best Possible experience
12:18PM EDT - Dirt 5
12:18PM EDT - Compute shader to detect luminance for VRS
12:18PM EDT - WoW Shadowlands
12:19PM EDT - Ray tracing and shadows
12:19PM EDT - The Rift Breaker
12:19PM EDT - Real Time Ray-Traced shadows
12:19PM EDT - Enables custom lights in a scene
12:20PM EDT - RX 6800 XT - Nov 18th at $649
12:22PM EDT - RX 6800: $579
12:22PM EDT - Also on November 18th
12:22PM EDT - Meanwhile, Lisa has "one more thing" to show off
12:22PM EDT - And that is the Radeon RX 6900 XT
12:23PM EDT - 80 CUs, game clock of 2015MHz, 16GB of VRAM, and a 300W TBP
12:23PM EDT - 300 W, 16 GB GDDR6, 80 compute units#
12:23PM EDT - +65% perf/watt over first gen RDNA
12:24PM EDT - Beats RTX 3090 at 4K using rage mode and smart access memory
12:24PM EDT - Dec 8th, $999
12:24PM EDT - AMD bringing some fire
12:24PM EDT - Pushing the AMD+AMD experience
12:24PM EDT - Every gamer and every price, AMD has the CPU and GPU for you
12:25PM EDT - Worked years for this moment
12:25PM EDT - The best for the industry
12:25PM EDT - That's a wrap.
55 Comments
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fallaha56 - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
doubt your doubts ;)this is already confirmed in most leaks, just not in ray tracing
esp 1440p eSports will be AMD, esp if comp Intel/nVidia vs AMD/AMD
nandnandnand - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
You were proven wrong. RX 6900 XT = $1000, comparable performance to RTX 3090.shabby - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
Good, now let's hope they can supply the cards since Nvidia can't.Santoval - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
If (per AMD) the 6900 XT is more or less as fast (slower in some games, faster in other games) as the RTX 3090 then it will obliterate the RTX 3080. That is apparently why Nvidia are reportedly prepping an RTX 3080 Ti. I doubt AMD are completely full of $hit, therefore the graphics card market has for the first time in many years a healthy competition. That's good for graphics cards buyers because competition leads to lower prices.nandnandnand - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
The funny part is that if RTX 3080 Ti is cut down at all from 3090, it will be slower than 6900 XT. At the rumored 12 GB it would have less VRAM too. What should a 3080 Ti look like?Zodfrey - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
I wonder will they unveil something akin to DLSS. It will be very interesting to see what the price/performance is going to be like compared to nVidia. And how will the ray-tracing performance be compared to the greens. Nevertheless, I need to upgrade and I will get whichever brand gives me more bang for my buck. :-)brucethemoose - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
An open source, universal DLSS would be amazing, even if its not as clean as Nvidia's implementation.ArcadeEngineer - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
I hope they don't, at least not yet. Unlike with ray-tracing there's no vendor-agnostic way to do DLSS; there's no way to do DLSS on anything other than amd hardware, and similarly any amd equivalent would have to be implemented on a per-game basis for amd hardware only. Hopefully MS are working on an agnostic interface for this kind of thing.brucethemoose - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
This is not true. A content agnostic, real time NN upscaler is totally doable.But its not going to be as refined as DLSS. Also, its going to have more of a performance hit without dedicated silicon like Nvidia's tensor cores.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - link
And what would be the reason someone would make and maintain such a thing? Sorry, AMD is going to have to do their own work. Anyway, they don't have the tensor cores in this generation of hardware to run it efficiently, anyway. Maybe RDNA3 will have tensor cores.