Welcome back to the high end, AMD. After years of being mired in second place, far behind the top GeForce offerings, the $580 Radeon RX 6800 and $650 Radeon RX 6800 XT deliver blistering performance on a par with--or better than--than Nvidia's flagship gaming graphics cards in everything but ray tracing, as we covered in our AMD Radeon RX 6800-series review. You need a pixel-packed monitor to push these graphics cards to their limits, however (though AMD's RDNA 2 architecture scales down to 1080p much better than rival Nvidia GPUs). For most people, that means a 4K or 1440p display. But there's another option: 3440x1440 ultrawide monitors split the performance difference between a 4k and 1440p display in terms of raw pixel count, and provide a level of immersion you just can't achieve on a standard rectangular display. Better yet, AMD's latest graphics cards come stuffed with a massive 16GB of onboard memory that can handle any high-resolution textures your games can throw at it, even under strenuous ultrawide conditions.

With the debut of the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, AMD is clearly on a roll. Mere weeks ago, the company's Ryzen 5000 processors seized the unquestionable performance lead from Intel--yes, even in games--for the first time in over a decade. On Wednesday, it's the graphics division's turn to shine with these two Radeon RX 6000-series "Big Navi" graphics cards powered by AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture. Rival Nvidia has largely been competing against itself in the high-end GPU space for several years now. AMD's Vega offerings showed up disappointingly late and disappointingly underpowered in 2017, followed by (awesome) first-gen RDNA cards that sadly topped out with the midrange Radeon RX 5700 XT in 2019.