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AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT

AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT: Power for Mobile Gamers and Professionals

April 2025

Introduction

Modern laptops are increasingly replacing desktop PCs, especially among gamers and creative professionals. The AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT, unveiled at the end of 2024, has become AMD's response to the demands of the mobile market. This model combines advanced architecture, high performance, and energy efficiency. Let’s explore who this GPU is suitable for and what it is capable of.

1. Architecture and Key Features

RDNA 3: The Power's Foundation

The RX 6850M XT is built on the RDNA 3 architecture, which is an evolution of the previous generation. The TSMC 5 nm manufacturing process has increased transistor density by 30% compared to RDNA 2, directly impacting performance and energy efficiency.

Unique Features

- Ray Accelerators: The card is equipped with 48 Ray Accelerators for ray tracing. This is 20% more than the RX 6800M, enhancing performance in ray tracing-enabled games.

- FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3): AMD's technology for increasing FPS through AI upscaling and frame interpolation. It supports resolutions up to 4K.

- Hybrid Compute: Optimization for simultaneous gaming and streaming by partitioning GPU resources.

Competition with NVIDIA

Unlike NVIDIA's DLSS 4.0, FSR 3 works on any graphics card, including competitors', but requires manual adjustment in some games.

2. Memory: Fast and Plenty

GDDR6 with a 256-bit Bus

The card features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 512 GB/s (16 Gbps). This is sufficient for 1440p and 4K gaming, as well as handling heavy textures in 3D editing software.

Smart Access Memory (SAM)

The SAM technology in conjunction with Ryzen 6000/7000HX processors increases CPU access speed to GPU memory, adding up to 15% performance in CPU-dependent workloads.

3. Gaming Performance: Numbers and Facts

1080p: Maximum Settings

- Cyberpunk 2077 (without RT): 110 FPS.

- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare V: 144 FPS.

- Horizon Forbidden West: 98 FPS.

1440p: Ideal Balance

- Cyberpunk 2077 (RT Ultra + FSR 3): 68 FPS.

- Alan Wake 2: 75 FPS with RT enabled.

4K: Only with FSR 3

- Red Dead Redemption 2: 55 FPS (FSR 3 in Quality mode).

- Starfield: 48 FPS (RT enabled).

Ray Tracing: Compromises Required

The RX 6850M XT handles ray tracing at 1440p, but requires reduced settings at 4K. In comparison, the RTX 4070M delivers stable 60 FPS under similar conditions thanks to its advanced Tensor Cores.

4. Professional Tasks: Not Just Gaming

3D Rendering and Modeling

- Blender (OpenCL): Renders the BMW E27 scene in 4.2 minutes compared to 3.8 minutes for the RTX 4070M (CUDA).

- DaVinci Resolve: Smooth 8K video editing thanks to AV1 decoding.

Scientific Calculations

Support for ROCm 5.5 allows the card to be used in machine learning, but its performance is two times lower than that of the RTX 4080M in TensorFlow.

5. Power Consumption and Cooling

TDP 175W: Moderate Appetite

The card requires a quality cooling system. In laptops like the ASUS ROG Strix and Lenovo Legion 7i, vapor chambers and three fans keep core temperatures at around 75-80°C under load.

Recommendations

- Choose laptops with aluminum chassis for better heat dissipation.

- Use cooling pads for extended gaming sessions.

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA RTX 4070M

- Advantages of NVIDIA: Better ray tracing, DLSS 4.0, CUDA for professionals.

- Disadvantages: Priced $200-300 higher.

Intel Arc A770M

- Cheaper by $150 but lags 25-30% in FPS at 1440p.

Conclusion: RX 6850M XT wins on price/performance but falls short in ray tracing and AI features.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: At least 280W for the laptop (e.g., ASUS ROG 280W).

- Compatibility: Works best with Ryzen 9 7945HX processors thanks to SAM.

- Drivers: Regularly update Adrenalin Edition — AMD actively optimizes older games (e.g., +20% FPS in The Witcher 3 after update 24.5.1).

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- 1440p gaming on ultra settings.

- Support for FSR 3 and AV1.

- Pricing starting at $1200 (laptops) compared to $1500+ for competitors.

Cons:

- Ray tracing performance lags behind NVIDIA.

- No hardware support for AI neural networks.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the RX 6850M XT for?

This graphics card is an excellent choice for:

1. Gamers looking to play at 1440p without compromises.

2. Creative professionals working with editing and 3D on a laptop.

3. AMD enthusiasts who appreciate open technologies like FSR.

If you need maximum ray tracing or a mobile workstation for AI — consider NVIDIA. Otherwise, the RX 6850M XT proves that AMD knows how to balance price and power.

Prices are current as of April 2025. Listed for new devices in configurations with Ryzen 7+/Intel Core i7+ processors.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

January 2022

Model Name

Radeon RX 6850M XT

Generation

Mobility Radeon

Base Clock

2321MHz

Boost Clock

2581MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x16

Transistors

17,200 million

RT Cores

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

160

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

7 nm

Architecture

RDNA 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

12GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

192bit

Memory Clock

2000MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

384.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

165.2 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

413.0 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

26.43 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

825.9 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

12.946 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

2560

L1 Cache

128 KB per Array

L2 Cache

3MB

TDP

165W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.5

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.