This could be your last chance to get hold of an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, as stock of AMD’s high-end RDNA 2 GPUs appears to be drying up. With AMD’s forthcoming RDNA 4 GPUs expected to launch at the end of 2024, and its current RDNA 3 lineup dropping in price, there’s little room for AMD’s last-gen graphics cards any more.
Launched at the end of 2020, the 16GB AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT directly competed with the 10GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, with both cards being prime contenders for the best graphics card at the time. However, a boom in demand from cryptocurrency miners, as well as supply problems stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, meant both cards were very hard to find at MSRP.
This time, though, it simply looks as though AMD is phasing out these GPUs as it makes way for its next gen RDNA 4 graphics cards. A quick search for ‘RX 6800 XT’ on Amazon right now reveals a barren desert of stock, apart from a couple of cards going for absurdly high prices, as recently spotted by Tom’s Hardware.
Likewise, there are no Radeon RX 6800 XT cards available on Best Buy right now. The only reasonably priced card we could find in the US was a single ASRock RX 6800 XT model, which is currently going for $559.99 on Newegg.
Interestingly, supply of lower end GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 6750 XT, appears to still be strong, with plenty of cards available at retailers. There are still a few Radeon RX 6950 XT cards available as well, although with prices hovering around the $699 mark, we’d be much more inclined to buy the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super instead, which has massively superior ray tracing performance.
In all honesty, though, I’m surprised these GPUs were even still available right now, and although I’ve been happily using a Radeon RX 6950 XT myself for the last couple of years, I wouldn’t buy one now as the ray tracing performance is so poor.
If you’re looking to buy a new graphics card right now, we recommend bypassing AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards unless they’re going very cheap. The Radeon RX 7600 is a great budget option, while the new Nvidia RTX 4080 Super is our favorite high-end card for 4K gaming.