Okay, I know what day it is. I know what's dominating every browser tab in the country right now, mine included, and I'm not going to pretend I haven't refreshed a few polling-related tabs already this morning. But I'm not writing about that today. Everyone else on the internet already has that covered six ways from Sunday, and honestly I don't have anything to add that a hundred bigger sites haven't already said better. So instead, let's talk about video cards, because AMD gave us something genuinely interesting to chew on last week and it's been sitting in my drafts folder since Wednesday.
Big Navi finally has numbers attached to it
AMD held its "Where Gaming Begins" stream on October 28th and Lisa Su walked through the whole RX 6000 lineup: RX 6800 at $579, RX 6800 XT at $649, and the RX 6900 XT at $999. The 6800 and 6800 XT are supposedly landing November 18th, with the 6900 XT following on December 8th. All three cards get 16GB of GDDR6, which is more VRAM than either the RTX 3080 or the RTX 3090 ships with, and AMD spent a good chunk of the presentation making sure everyone noticed that.
The pitch is straightforward: the 6800 XT undercuts the 3080 by fifty bucks while claiming comparable rasterization performance, and the 6900 XT undercuts the 3090 by five hundred dollars while (according to AMD's own slides, which I'd treat the way I treat any first-party benchmark chart, with a raised eyebrow) getting close in a lot of games. There's also this Smart Access Memory thing that only works if you're pairing the card with a Ryzen 5000 CPU and a 500-series motherboard, which is a neat bit of platform lock-in dressed up as a feature. Infinity Cache is the other headline addition, a big on-die cache meant to make up for a narrower memory bus. Whether that actually holds up outside AMD's own labs, we won't know until reviews land alongside the actual cards.
Here's my actual opinion, not just a recap: I don't think it matters how good these numbers are, because I don't think anyone is getting one of these cards on launch day at MSRP. Remember September 17th? RTX 3080 launch day, I had three browser tabs open at 8:58am — Best Buy, Newegg, and Nvidia's own store — and by 9:01 every single one had already sold through. I didn't even get a "high demand" spinner, I just got a wall of "out of stock" like the drop never happened at all. Scalper bots cleaned house within minutes and cards were relisted on eBay for $1,400 by lunchtime. There is zero reason to think November 18th plays out any differently, especially with a global chip shortage already squeezing supply on basically everything with a die on it. If anything it'll be worse, because now there are two companies worth of desperate buyers competing for the same limited wafer allocation.
Everything is launching in the same three weeks and it's a lot
Zoom out for a second and look at the calendar AMD and everyone else has crammed into this month. Ryzen 5000 desktop chips land November 5th. Xbox Series X and Series S hit shelves November 10th. PS5 follows on the 12th. iPhone 12 Pro Max and the 12 mini start shipping the 13th. Then the RX 6800 cards on the 18th. That is five separate hardware launches from four different companies inside a fourteen day window, all after a year where most of us are stuck at home with nothing better to spend money on than upgrading our setups. I don't think that's a coincidence so much as it's every manufacturer betting the same thing: a pandemic holiday season means people are sitting on cash they'd normally spend on flights and restaurants, and they all want a piece of it before December hits.
My PC still has a GTX 1070 in it, bought back in 2017, and every single one of these announcements is doing a very good job of making that fact feel personally offensive. I built a whole spreadsheet last night comparing power draw and pricing across six cards I have no intention of successfully purchasing, which is either healthy hobbyist research or a mild form of self-harm depending on how you look at it. I'll probably end up waiting until January when the initial rush dies down and actual stock exists. That's the plan, anyway. Ask me again in three weeks when I'm hitting refresh on Newegg at midnight like it's 2020 all over again, because apparently it is.