AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPUs renders-2

Custom AIB AMD RX 6800 XT NAVI 21 GPUs expected to be in limited Stock at launch


Just a few days ago AMD officially announced its RDNA 2-based flagship Big Navi graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, respectively. AMD will launch the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT series of graphics cards on November 18th. The RX 6800 XT will be priced at USD 649 while the RX 6800 will be priced at USD 579.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT flagship card on the other hand will be available on December 8th and will cost around $999 USD.

Now, it appears that the RX 6800 XT GPU is also likely to face a similar stock/inventory issue at launch, like the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Ampere GPU. One ASUS Nordic brand representative, David Hammer, posted a statement issuing a warning about the low stock and availability of the RX 6800 XT GPU at launch day.

Following is the statement from the ASUS rep, coming via Wccftech:

“It will be quite limited: more RX6800, fewer 6800XT … as with basically all graphics cards now, we expect that everything will be gone in a few minutes so you need to hang on the lock.

Then it is 1-2 weeks later until we start delivering our Partners cards, too early to say what the supply looks like there, but the demand will probably continue to be great”Sweclockers Forums.

According to the report, AIB GPU partners are expecting the stock to be sold out within minutes of the launch window. This doesn’t come as a surprise, given the huge demand for these new RDNA 2-based GPUs.

Even though the ASUS rep has specified the XT variant SKU, we expect the demand of the non-XT plain RX 6900 SKU to be even higher than expected, given the price tag and the Gaming market segment this GPU targets. So this card may also sell out pretty fast, despite having a bigger stock.

AIB retailers have already reported that the stock of the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU is going to be limited at launch, but the RX 6800 XT GPU was not mentioned before.

The ASUS rep also confirmed that other RX 6000-series AIB custom cards are going to be available around a week or two after the initial launch date, and this applies to the entire AMD Radeon RX 6800 Navi 21 GPU lineup. So we might be looking at a repeat of what we saw during the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series launch day.

“It should be quite difficult to get a new card to be cool. To be honest, it is quite unexpected that Lisa Su dares to bet on this release date. I think it should only start to increase in December.

In fact, the production capacity has always been sufficient, but how much of these production capacity of Navi may depend on Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen consoles.” – via (Google Translation) PTT Forums.

AMD has already issued preventive measures to retailers to circumvent the scalping of Radeon RX 6000-series RDNA 2 GPUs. AMD expects huge demand for its next-gen RDNA 2 GPUs, and has outlined some measures to partners/retailers to prevent scalper bots from obtaining these cards on launch day.

But despite AMD’s initiative, the scalper bots have managed to grab the Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPUs which have now been listed at eBay with inflated prices. These CPUs were released yesterday.

RDNA 2 GPUs are expected to be fabbed on an optimized 7nm process node, and they will support hardware-level ray tracing as well, and are expected to deliver a 50% increase in performance per watt over previous-gen RDNA arch.

Along with an improved performance-per-clock (IPC), we also expect a logic enhancement that will help reduce the design complexity and switching power. The GPU clock speeds are also going to get a boost.

Here is hoping that the demand and supply issue isn’t that aggressive as the Ampere launch. It seems this year it has been hard to purchase a new flagship gaming graphics card. So the demand is bound to be very high.

To make matters worse, Nvidia Ampere GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 GPU shortages will last until 2021, according to CEO Jensen Huang. So gamers might turn to AMD if they cannot wait till next year.

Stay tuned for more!