According to tipster @patrickschur_, a custom ASUS ROG STRIX Radeon RX 6800 XT part can boost as high as 2.5 GHz when running 3DMark 11. Interestingly, the engineering sample Schur talked about seemed to spend a lot of time at high clock speeds. In an update to his original post, Schur claimed that the ROG STRIX Radeon RX 6800 XT was running at clock speeds higher than 2.3 GHz 85 percent of the time.
These figures, coming just days before the Big Navi announcement, reinforce the possibility of the RX 6800 XT matching or getting close to the Ampere GeForce RTX 3080. Unconfirmed reports indicate that the RX 6800 XT isn’t AMD biggest Big Navi part, with a higher-end RX 6900 XT expected to match or even beat the GeForce RTX 3090 in raster workloads.
The AIB RX 6800 XT clock speeds hint at AMD’s approach to Big Navi. Rather than going “wide and low” like Ampere, Big Navi could leverage fewer functional cores running at a far high clock speed, thanks to the TSMC’s 7nm process. With occasional boost clocks appearing to touch 2.5 GHz, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not 2.5 GHz game clocks are possible with a bit of overclocking on Big Navi. We should learn during AMD’s event on October 28th.