AMD Might Refresh Its Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics Cards With Upgraded Memory Too
A refresh might be in store for AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards as we wait for next-generation RDNA 3 parts to arrive. If so, AMD would be taking a similar approach as NVIDIA, the latter of which has introduced an upgraded GeForce RTX 3080 with more memory, and is rumored to be doing the same to its GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.
NVIDIA tacked on an additional 2GB of GDDR6X to its GeForce RTX 3080 for a total of 12GB. It also widened the memory bus from 320-bit to 384-bit and unlocked more CUDA cores (8,960, up from 8,704). Various leaks, including a pair of registrations at the EEC website by ASUS and Gigabyte, suggest the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is getting more memory too.
What about AMD, though? During CES week, the company announced several new products, including five new mobile Radeon RX 6000M GPUs built on a 6-nanometer manufacturing process. Those rank as AMD's first 6nm GPUs, though probably not its last.
According to @greymon55, a prominent leaker that's built up a pretty solid track record over the past half year, AMD appears to be cooking up a refresh to its desktops lineup.
"AMD seems to be preparing a new version of the RX 6000 series, I don't know the details, maybe an upgrade to 18Gbps?," @greymon posted to Twitter.
Deeper in the thread, the leaker confirmed they were talking about the desktop series. Going with faster memory would be somewhat interesting, and probably the most logical guess, given that the amount of memory is already competitive across most of its Radeon RX 6000 series. Here's a brief overview of the current models...
- Radeon RX 6900 XT: 16GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 256-bit bus, 512GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6800 XT: 16GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 256-bit bus, 512GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6800: 16GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 256-bit bus, 512GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6700 XT: 12GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 192-bit bus, 384GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6600 XT: 8GB GDDR6 @ 128-bit bus, 256GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6600: 8GB GDDR6 @ 14Gbps, 128-bit bus, 224GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6500 XT: 4GB GDDR6 @ 18Gbps, 64-bit bus, 144GB/s bandwidth
- Radeon RX 6400: 4GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 64-bit bus, 128GB/s bandwidth
Note that AMD does actually already employ 18Gbps memory on one of its cards, the Radeon RX 6500 XT. So it's at lease plausible that other cards would get the same speed memory if a refresh were to occur. While the jump from 16Gbps to 18Gbps won't be night and day in terms of gaming performance, it would be appreciated on higher end SKUs with wider bus widths where it could be put to better use than the 6500 XT. We shall see.
