AMD announces three Radeon RX 6000M GPUs to compete with Nvidia’s best

AMD will step up its gaming laptop offerings with three new RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000M GPUs, designed to battle Nvidia’s 30-series GeForce cards.

A total of three RX 6000M GPUs were introduced Monday as part of AMD’s keynote at the virtual Computex 2021:

• Radeon RX 6800M with 40 compute units and ray accelerators, 12GB of GDDR6 memory, a game clock of 2,300MHz, 145+ watt TDP, 192-bit memory interface, and 96MB of Infinity Cache
• Radeon RX 6700M with 36 compute units/ray accelerators, 10GB of GDDR6 memory, a game clock of 2,300MHz, 135-watt TDP, 160-bit memory interface, and 80MB of Infinity Cache
• Radeon RX 6600M with 28 compute units/ray accelerators, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a game clock of 2,177MHz, 128-bit memory interface, and 32MB of Infinity Cache.

AMD said the RDNA 2 chips offer 1.5X the performance over the original RDNA designs, while also operating at 43 percent less power. In something AMD calls “power constrained gaming” (gaming on battery), RDNA 2 offers a whopping 1.77X increase in performance.

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Red-on-red performance isn’t what AMD cares about, though—it’s really red on green. AMD said its top-end Radeon RX 6800M and Ryzen 9 5900HX in an Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition laptop can outperform a gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop with a Core i7-9750H by 1.4X in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, 1.4X in Cyberpunk 2077, 1.5X in Dirt 5, and 1.7X in Resident Evil: Village, when gaming at 1440p resolution. 

Obviously, that comparison uses Intel’s older Core i7-9750H CPU, which makes it a little unfair, so AMD also showed off comparisons with an Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 with a Ryzen 9 5900HX and GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU at the 115-watt configuration. There, AMD said, the Radeon RX 6800M can match or exceed even Nvidia’s top-end GeForce RTX chip (albeit at a lower-wattage configuration).

AMD isn’t just writing checks its hardware can’t cash, though. In our tests of an Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition by PCWorld, we found the Ryzen 9 + Radeon RX 6800M to be a worthy competitor.

For those who can’t dive into a top-end GPU, AMD’s Radeon RX 6600M will offer 100 fps when gaming at 1080p in popular games, AMD said. In AAA gaming comparisons, the Radeon RX 6600 GPU in an HP Omen 16 trades blows evenly with a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, AMD said.

Laptops based on the Radeon RX 6800M and Radeon RX 6600M are shipping now, AMD said, with laptops based on the Radeon RX 6700M in the “shipping soon” category.

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Amplified Performance

While the Radeon RX series will work with Intel CPUs, AMD would certainly recommend, ahem, Ryzen CPUs. In fact, the company said, an AMD+AMD laptop gives you an “amplified performance.” By combining the company’s hardware-based SmartShift and its Smart Access Memory feature, AMD said a Radeon-and-Ryzen laptop will run up to 11 percent faster in Borderlands 3, 7 percent faster in Cyberpunk 2077, 6 percent faster in Godfall, and 10 percent faster in Wolfenstein Young Blood.

Look for AMD Advantage Edition

In addition to the new GPUs, AMD also announced what it’s calling the AMD Advantage Design Framework. In a nutshell, the program is designed to improve the quality of gaming laptops by mandating brighter displays, fast NVMe SSDs, better thermal designs, and other “advanced system design characteristics,” AMD said.

This may sound like a no brainer because who puts a fast CPU and GPU into a laptop with a terrible screen or SATA SSD? Well, some vendors do, actually, especially in the price-friendly categories where AMD-based laptops tend to play.

What AMD’s Advantage Design Framework will do, however, is essentially guarantee that a gamer will get a fast GPU and CPU and also get brighter display, NVMe SSD, and decent cooling.

The initial AMD Advantage key experience means a gaming laptop will get: 100 fps gaming at 1080p, a 144Hz+ low latency display based on IPS or OLED screens, NVMe SSD, and at least 10 hours of video streaming on battery.

So far, we’ve seen Asus’ impressive ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition, which features a Ryzen 9 5900HX with a Radeon RX 6800M; a 300Hz, 15.6-inch panel; and the first use of liquid metal thermal interface material on both the CPU and GPU.

HP’s new Omen 16 features a Ryzen 9 5900HX and Radeon RX 6600M, along with a 165Hz, 16.1-inch, thin-bezel FreeSync Premium panel. The laptop will offer 15 hours of video performance along with premium B&O audio.

AMD said we should see other Advantage laptops from Lenovo and MSI coming in June.

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One of founding fathers of hardcore tech reporting, Gordon has been covering PCs and components since 1998.