AMD RX 6000M Series: All you need to know about the laptop GPU range

With the release of the Radeon RX 6000M Series, AMD has finally brought its RDNA 2 technology to laptops. The RX 6000M Series, comprised of the Radeon RX 6600M, 6700M and 6800M, bring many of the upgrades from the RX 6000 desktop graphics cards to laptops, including better power efficiency, faster performance and, at long last, ray-tracing support.

In fact, AMD claims that the mobile GPU range has the potential to outpace Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series for laptops. Here’s all there is to know about the AMD Radeon RX 6000M range.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000M series outlined

The flagship of the new mobile graphics cards is AMD’s Radeon RX 6800M, which the company claims can offer 1440p gaming at a smooth 120fps, and that it’ll directly compete with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 3080 in real-world tests.

The company claims it achieves a higher frame rate in major AAA titles like Resident Evil Village compared to the RTX 3080 when plugged in, and it’s 40 percent faster when playing on battery too, although reviews suggest it lags behind in the ray-tracing department. Still, at least it’s here this time around!

The RX 6800M sports 12GB of GDDR6 RAM clocking in at 2.3GHz, 40 compute units and ray accelerators, and there’s a 192-bit memory interface on the top-end model too. That’s a huge jump in performance compared to the RX 5000M series, which offered a max of 8GB of RAM and 36 compute units.

The next step down, you’ll find the RX 6700M, which AMD claims is targeting 100fps performance at 1440p, sporting 10GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 36 compute units.

There’s also the entry-level RX 6600M, targeting 1080p@100fps performance with 8GB of GDDR6 RAM and 28 compute units.

AMD claims that the entire RX 6000M range offers a 50% boost in speed and a 43% decrease in power usage compared to the previous-gen mobile GPUs, offering improved performance across the board. This makes the range much more likely to be used in gaming laptops, something that never really happened with the RX 5000M series.

AMD Radeon RX 6000M Series specs

AMD Advantage

As well as revealing the AMD Radeon RX 6000M Series graphics cards, AMD also revealed AMD Advantage, a new certification process that looks similar to that of Intel Evo, but for AMD-powered gaming laptops.

Like Intel’s Evo certification, AMD Advantage-certified laptops have to offer certain features and hit specific benchmarks including:

• Feature an AMD Ryzen 5000 mobile processor, Radeon 6000 graphics and Radeon software
• Support for AMD’s Smart Shift and Smart Access Memory technology
• Minimum 144Hz refresh rate and low latency technology with support for AMD FreeSync display tech
• 300nits display brightness, with either 72% of NTSC gamut or 100% of the sRGB gamut
• Maintain a surface temperature of less than 40 degrees Celsius around the WASD keys
• An NVME PCIE Express Gen 3 SSD
• At least 10 hours of video playback on battery

When will we see AMD RX 6000M Series GPUs in laptops?

AMD has confirmed that one of the first AMD Advantage-certified laptops that include the Radeon RX 6800M will be Asus’ new ROG Strix G15. That’s paired with AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900Hx and a 15in 165Hz WQHD display with a fast 3ms response time, and it’ll be released in June.

Assuming all goes well and there aren’t any manufacturing constraints, we should see more AMD RX 6000M Series-equipped laptops follow on shortly, including those with the lower-spec RX 6700M and RX 6600M at the heart.