AMD’s RX 6800 is one of the best value high-end graphics cards on the market – and today you can pick up this GPU with Starfield Premium Edition for just $430 at Amazon US, down from $490.
This particular model is the XFX Speedster SWFT319 variant, which comes with a ‘urban’ and ‘gritty’ naming scheme (that I remain mystified by… why 319?) and a cool triple-fan design. XFX aren’t the absolute best-loved AMD GPU maker, but their designs have always worked well in my experience, and there’s certainly enough thermal heft here to ensure a cool and quiet experience for this 250W card. This model comes with reference clocks, rated up to 2105MHz boost, but as with other modern GPUs will boost beyond this if thermals and power budgets allow, so you’re not missing out compared to an ‘OC’ model really.
In terms of actual performance, the RX 6800 is a good fit for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but will stretch to 4K with RT disabled in many titles. Back in early 2021, Katharine’s review revealed ~60fps or greater averages at 4K that compared well with Nvidia’s RTX 3070 in the likes of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Horizon Zero Dawn, Monster Hunter World and Metro Exodus, though it fell behind its competitor in Total War: Three Kingdoms and Final Fantasy 15.
Unfortunately, RT performance in these crop of titles (where available) is much worse than the RTX 3070, and many games also support DLSS rather than AMD’s FSR 2, leading to the 3070 having a solid lead in these titles. With RT enabled, the RX 6800 is more of a 1440p card, which is a shame – but depending on your tastes, it may be a complete non-issue.
In any case, Starfield is rumoured to only come with FSR 2, so you won’t have any such issues in the AMD-sponsored title… and you get a free copy of the premium edition of the game, which is great.
That just about does it for now, so I hope you found this helpful and have a great weekend!
