Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT performance apparently matches the Nvidia RTX 3090

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Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT performance can match the Nvidia RTX 3090 (Image credit: AMD)

It’s been a big year for both Nvidia and AMD, with next-gen releases fighting to top the ‘best graphics cards’ lists. Recent weeks have been great for fans of AMD products as GPU (graphics processing unit) benchmarks appear to tear Nvidia down from its lofty perch as the reigning market overlord, and we’ve just seen AMD’s overclocking speeds deal another blow.

We had our hopes up regarding rumors of AMD’s line of GPUs exceeding their officially listed frequencies, but these whispers may now have some weight to them. In a now-deleted tweet from Twitter user Raichu (@OneRaichu) the Radeon RX 6800 XT was reportedly shown clocking speeds beyond 2.5 Ghz, breaching its expected 2.25 GHz. 

Not only that, but the largely censored screenshot also indicated that the power draw fell under the cards official specification of 300W. 

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As mentioned above, these clock speeds are close to the performance of the Nvidia RTX 3090 which would open up possibilities for the AMD card to actually outperform the Nvidia flagship GPU in some AAA games, as we saw in AMD’s official launch event.

The potential mining performance of the RTX 6800 XT was also noted by Twitter user @Kopite7kimi to be much lower than that of the RTX 3080, which is great news for gamers wanting to avoid any available stock being snapped up by cryptocurrency miners. 

This is certainly looking to be the year of AMD, providing the graphics cards perform as well in real-life application as they do in these leaked benchmarks.
 

Jess Weatherbed

Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.