What is AMD's new RDNA 2 feature Infinity Cache, and what does it do?

AMD's big exciting reveal of their next-gen RDNA 2 graphics architecture is here, with one of the shining stars of the reveal being the new Infinity Cache. But what is it?

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The new revolutionary Infinity Cache technology allows AMD to use a smaller 256-bit memory bus and slower GDDR6 memory on its Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, but it will offer some tremendous memory bandwidth with even more impressive power savings with Infinity Cache.

There's not much known about it so far -- but we know that ALL of the Radeon RX 6000 series cards -- Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and the flagship beast Radeon RX 6900 XT all have 128MB of Infinity Cache, 16GB of GDDR6, and a 256-bit memory bus.

In a nutshell, Infinity Cache allows AMD to have a smaller memory bus -- use less expensive, and more available VRAM (GDDR6 vs GDDR6X) and achieve 4K performance levels that NVIDIA requires larger memory bus widths and faster, more elusive GDDR6X memory.

AMD explains that it needed to have Infinity Cache with RDNA 2 if it wanted to make a powerful 4K gaming GPU, taking what it learned from the Zen CPU architecture -- modified it, optimized it for graphics, and thus Infinity Cache was born.

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AMD offers you 16GB of GDDR6 with 4K gaming performance that rivals NVIDIA's best card that packs 24GB of RAM, and easily beats the RTX 3080 which has just 10GB of VRAM in comparison.

Hell, Infinity Cache and the massive improvements under the hood of RDNA 2 over RDNA 2 means that the Radeon RX 6800 -- the slowest Big Navi card revealed so far -- beats the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in 1440p gaming situations -- by a large chunk, too.

Infinity Cache is shaping up to be a game changer for AMD.

• Read more: AMD Smart Access Memory: Zen 3 + RDNA 2 = Intel, NVIDIA destroyer
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