It’s Official: AMD Radeon RX 6800 Series Is a Paper Launch

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Image: AMD

NVIDIA has been thoroughly chastised and raked across the coals for its lackluster GeForce RTX 30 Series debut. It’s been bad enough that nobody believed that AMD could fare any worse, but judging by the epic ranting that we’ve seen over the past couple of days, red team has actually managed to dig itself into an even more disastrous position, with Radeon RX 6800 Series graphics cards being nowhere to be found at standard retail channels.

Two of the most hotly upvoted threads on r/AMD illustrate the pain of Radeon users itching to upgrade to RDNA 2 perfectly, as even the most die-hard fans have begun to admit that the Radeon RX 6800 Series might be one of the most disappointing graphics card launches ever.

“Prices sky high and availability zero for custom cards,” one user succinctly noted. “Nice paper launch AMD, you did even worse than NVIDIA.”

That hefty claim has since been echoed in another thread, which highlighted numerous reasons as to why AMD deserves even more criticism than NVIDIA did with its GeForce RTX 30 Series: 1) AMD suggested there would actually be stock; 2) review embargoes were lifted at launch time, which was allegedly done to hide performance deficits; and 3) AIBs didn’t even give the pricing of custom Radeon RX 6800 Series GPUs to reviewers.

AMD’s Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions & Marketing Frank Azor is responsible for that first one, having sent a cheeky tweet back in September suggesting that there would be plenty of RDNA 2 cards available. Unfortunately for Azor (who has seemingly taken a break from Twitter), the amount of Radeon fans demanding their $10 is growing by the day.

VideoCardz’s roundup of custom AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU reviews (via TweakTown) has also provided a quick and depressing indication of how many cards there might be among legitimate enthusiasts. If you can believe it, there are only 15 reviews out of all the biggest hardware sites and channels.

“Please note that most reviewers did not have much time for their reviews, others have not even received the final pricing at launch, so their recommendations may be missing,” the site noted.

We can’t even imagine what the situation might be like for AMD’s flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT, which will be “released” on December 8. If you did manage to score a Radeon RX 6800 Series card, feel free to brag to us about it.

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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