The Full Nerd ep. 158: AMD’s Radeon chief answers your burning RX 6800-series questions

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Adam Patrick Murray are joined by a very special guest. Radeon VP Scott Herkelman returns to answer questions and dive deep into the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT, two fantastic graphics cards that compete with Nvidia’s high-end offerings for the first time in a long time.

Scott doesn’t shy away from answering our—and your—questions. He shares insights into how the Radeon RX 6000-series came to be, why these new GPUs perform best with AMD’s excellent new Ryzen 5000 processors, and more. Scott also provides information you won’t find in a typical review, such as:

• Promising that ray tracing will be included throughout the entire Radeon RX 6800-series product stack
• More information about FidelityFX Super Resolution, AMD’s planned DLSS competitor
• How the Ryzen and Radeon teams worked together to make the RX 6000-series better
• What AMD is doing to increase availability and prevent scalper bots from buying these graphics cards, and why it’s so hard to gauge demand for enthusiast products in 2020.
• More detail into what Smart Access Memory actually is, the hurdles involved with implementing it, and that AMD wouldn’t block rival Nvidia graphics cards from working with Ryzen processors if GeForce embraces the technology
• Why having competitive enthusiast-class graphics cards matters for the whole Radeon RX 6000-series lineup
• The death of blower-style reference cards
• How much freedom AMD’s partners will have with their custom board and PCB designs
• No, Sapphire does not design and produce the reference PCB
• …and a whole lot more

You don’t want to miss it.

Scott sticks around for a full hour fielding questions and dropping knowledge. After he leaves, we continue on with our own Radeon RX 6800-series review impressions as Brad slowly descends into darkness. And as always, we fielded questions from you, our viewers, listeners, and Discord members.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 158 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Soundcloud if you prefer the audio alone. 

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Have a PC- or gaming-related question? Email [email protected] and we’ll try to answer it in the next episode. You can also join the PC-related discussions and ask us questions on The Full Nerd’s Discord server. Finally, be sure to follow PCWorld on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch to watch future episodes live and pick our brains in real time!