

The company had been written off by many, and we heard phrases like "how can AMD catch up to NVIDIA ever again?". AMD's card led the company's return to the high-end graphics space after nearly seven years.

The Radeon RX 6800 XT, which was released in November 2020, just two months after the RTX 3080, came as a surprise to everyone in the tech space. This was because the RTX 3080 presented such a massive performance uplift over the RTX 2080 that it was the first card to play any of today's games at 4K Ultra HD resolution, and the RTX 3090 was much more expensive partly due to its 24 GB VRAM, which provides no significant benefit to gamers today. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 was launched as the "flagship" gaming graphics product based on the "Ampere" graphics architecture despite RTX 3090 launching at the same time. For all intents and purposes, the cards we're testing today are posterboys of their respective architectures.
