I'm deliberately not writing about the election today. Every site I read has done nothing else for two days straight and my brain needs a break from refreshing needle graphics, so lets talk about something I actually have some control over: video cards.
AMD did their Radeon RX 6000 reveal last Wednesday, the 28th, and I watched the whole thing on my lunch break instead of doing anything productive. Lisa Su walked through the RX 6800 at $579, the RX 6800 XT at $649, and then the RX 6900 XT at $999, and the slides all claim those cards trade blows with Nvidia's RTX 3080 and even the $1,499 RTX 3090 in rasterized games. The 6800 and 6800 XT ship November 18th. The 6900 XT isn't out till December 8th.
The part that actually got my attention wasn't the frame rate numbers, it was this "Infinity Cache" thing, 128MB of cache sitting right on the die that's supposed to make up for a narrower memory bus without losing bandwidth. Clever if it actually works the way the slide says. There's also something called Smart Access Memory, which only kicks in if you've paired a Ryzen 5000 chip with a 500-series board, letting the CPU see the whole GPU memory pool instead of a slice of it. Convenient that AMD happens to sell both halves of that equation and nobody else's hardware gets the feature.
Which brings me to the actual reason any of this is on my mind. The Ryzen 5000 desktop chips launch tomorrow. The 5600X, 5800X, 5900X and 5950X go on sale November 5th, and I've had a browser tab open on a parts list for about six weeks now trying to talk myself into finally building a new machine instead of nursing my 2016 rig through another winter.
Heres my actual complaint, and its not really AMD's fault: none of this matters much if you cant buy the thing. I tried for the RTX 3080 back in September, the day it launched, sitting there hitting refresh on Best Buy's product page like an idiot at 8:58 in the morning, and it was gone by 9:01. Not "sold out, restock coming," just gone, scooped up in three minutes flat and relisted on eBay for $1,400 within the hour. My brother-in-law actually got one through a Micro Center line at 4am, which, fine, respect, but I am not standing outside a strip mall electronics store before sunrise for a graphics card no matter how good the ray tracing supposedly looks.
So when AMD gets on stage with a chart showing the 6800 XT beating a 3080 by four percent in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, I believe the number, honestly. I just also assume I am not getting one on the 18th at $649 either. More likely I get it in February for $850 off some guy on Facebook Marketplace who "just wants his money back."
None of this is really AMD's fault, or Nvidia's either if I'm being fair. Its a chip supply problem and a pandemic problem and a scalping-bot problem all stacked on top of each other, and 2020 has apparently decided every hardware launch this year gets to be a mess on principle. The PS5 and both new Xboxes land in the next two weeks too, and I would bet actual money on those going exactly the same way the 3080 did.
If you have managed to buy any piece of new hardware since March without camping outside a store or paying a scalper markup, I genuinely want to know how. At this point I'm starting to think the real trick is just not needing anything new.