it's obvious that NVIDIA gpus are just
playing better I mean look how few people are buying Radeon cards and if
everyone's doing it it must be right right wrong
actually when you look at the price and performance of AMD gpus right now on
paper they're the obvious choice you can
get a 6700 XT which delivers near RTX
3070 performance for just about the
price of an RTX 3060 and we just got our
hands on a one-click tuning software from monasmus the creator of clock tuner
Verizon that he claims will put a 6800
XT this isn't it a 6800 XT in the same
performance class as a 3090 TI a GPU
that costs twice as much now obviously a claim like that needs to
be taken with a grain of salt but if there is even any free performance on
the table it's worth investigating to make sure that you don't get taken for a
ride a ride to this message from our sponsor
enlisted enlisted is a free-to-play multiplayer World War II shooter jump
into large-scale battles with authentic moments in history like the invasion of
Normandy check it out by following the link in the description the truth is I'm
at least partly to blame for the current situation after some very bad
experiences with AMD's GPU drivers that delayed our video production almost
every time we tried to use them we switched to almost exclusively using
NVIDIA gpus in our showcase builds and in our test rigs I mean during a review
for a new card from AMD we would often find that it was pretty okay some
instability or bugs notwithstanding but then it would invariably sit on the
Shelf until it was needed as a point of comparison for some other review for me
the experience that turned me off of AMD was a bit more personal back in 2015 I
was swayed by the please by this person to vote for competition with your wall
call it and I use my incredibly hard earned cash I was a student at the time
to buy a Radeon R9 380. my favorite game
at the time was dirt rally and it had an AMD splash screen at the start so it
should be fine right yeah you would think so
turns out Not only was AMD's performance
subpart but due to driver issues the AMD gpus couldn't properly render foliage
and shadows in effect making my experience barely better than the anemic
gt740 I had before that DDR3 RAM in it
in a game with AMD's logo on the splash
screen it was a similar story many of my favorite games too you can tell how over
it he is by how red his face is right now however there is good reason to
think that things have changed back in July of this year AMD completely rewrote
their DirectX 11 drivers apparently dramatically increasing stability and
performance at the same time so to unscientifically test this Harrison and
Alex from the writing team switched to team red for two weeks and played video
games like they normally would to see if anything wonky happened I wasn't
informed people were just taking gpus home but okay you're in Hawaii and it
was fine the point is that after I made the switch and installed AMD's drivers I
honestly just completely forgot that I'd swapped the GPU until this morning when
I looked at the script again I didn't even have to adjust any of my
in-game settings going from an RTX 3080 to an RX 6800 XT I could have easily
just saved like 200 by going team red of
course you guys deserve a more scientific approach to testing so we
handed the cards that we'll be looking at today over to our Labs team to whip
up some charts and graphs that I assume you're pouring over in detail right now
if you're not super detail-oriented don't worry about that the bottom line
is this AMD is at or near the
performance of NVIDIA in traditionally rendered so not Ray traced games at
anywhere from 100 to 200 dollars cheaper
and that's before we pull out our secret weapon when Asma sent us an early
preview of what he's calling Hydra 1.2 a
user-friendly tool for rdna 2 architecture Radeon cards that can be
used to easily improve both performance and power consumption Alex is going to
show us how it works to get Hydra right now now you have to subscribe to one
usmas's patreon but this tool will be free once it's you know not broken and
stuff speaking of which if you have an Intel CPU it won't work unless you have
an F model so right now the igpu will take priority when you boot it up and it
just doesn't work I'm sure that's very easy to fix but uh we have a I9 12900kf
in here so that solved that problem first of all a warning you can destroy
your processors by using the software if you do something really really bad it's
probably fine most of the time you'll just crash your stuff but you know you
need the warning right there so this is your basic overclocking
dashboard your sort of main stuff is all in here so we have like this eraser
deletes all of your stuff and restores it all back to your factory defaults you
can also come back in here so that you change your horror frequency you can
save it right there boom it's saved now that save button only applies it to you
know this it doesn't actually apply it to the GPU so what this is basically
doing is changing stuff within the GPU
drivers itself the power play table and
that's what's doing your overclocking you do that with this little
lightning bolt then driver resets and
you're good to go now all this stuff right here is just your basic manual
overclocking but why would you overclock something yourself when you can have
just the robots do it for you let's go over the diagnostic window GPU there we
go this allows us to change what kind of a test we're doing so we can change it
from this right here is opengl you can go to whatever you want and it's fine
the duration is how long it's going to
test for stability right now it's 90 seconds that's okay but if this was my
personal rig and I was going to use the GPU like day in day out I would increase
this by quite a bit it's the sort of thing you don't want your computer to
crash in the middle of A ranked game below that we have the do overclocking
window this right here is the real meat
and potatoes of hydro 1.2 basically what this does is move your whole voltage
frequency curve
so your GPU is going to have something that looks a little bit like this given
a frequency you will have a certain voltage to make sure that it doesn't
crash there now AMD doesn't want to have
this like right on the edge of crashing all the time so they're a little bit
conservative with their values what Hydra is doing is just moving this curve
over a tiny bit seeing if it crashes if
it's all good and it just moves over a little bit more once it gets instability
pushes it back a little bit you're good to go
oh and that is exactly what we're doing
right here so you can see our start offset that is negative
43.75 millivolts so we'll be starting with the Curve moved over by that much
and then the step offset is 6.25 so
every time that it does an iteration it's going to be decreasing the voltage
by another 6.25 millivolts so that's how
you can see for the same amount of power you're going to be getting it going
faster because let's say default we have this amount of voltage
this frequency yeah you get it you get it GP goes
faster the last field here is the power offset this is if you want to increase
your power so that you have a custom water cooler you can just crank your
power right up so say right now it's 15 that increased our TDP from 255 watts to
292. I'm just going to set that back to zero
additional power tune up here is where
some things get a little bit strange so all the do overclocking is concerned
about your GPU core whereas additional power tuning is focused a little bit
more on the memory on some gpus if you get really good RAM you can actually
drop your thermals by a lot while also overclocking the GPU core if you're able
to drop the voltage of your memory chips yeah but some of the other ones it
doesn't work at all just hope you get lucky well Brandon should we run it
to do let's go
here we have MSI combustor it's not crashing so that's good and now
we wait okay the diagnostic process successfully completed so we have a core
curve offset of negative 68.75 millivolts
should have been .025 more we'll fix that later anyway our total board power
has stayed exactly the same our core frequency has only increased what is
that uh 72 megahertz so that's not a
whole lot oh wait uh average FPS in MSI
combustor went up by one so it's not incredible that didn't do too much but
what we did see is about a three to five percent increase in games after we had
done this so not too bad to be clear what we're doing isn't black magic
NVIDIA and AMD for that matter are running these kinds of optimizations
constantly on their gpus to try to squeeze as much performance out as
possible we're just using the excellent
access that AMD provides to overclockers to fly a little closer to the Sun to be
clear three to five percent it's not a ton of extra performance but as I like
to say it's better than a kick in the teeth and given that it didn't cost us
anything but 15 to 20 minutes of our time and it didn't even increase power
consumption or heat I'd say it's kind of a no-brainer
not everyone has 15 minutes though thankfully there's an easier way
whenasmus created a one button overclocking tool that he calls monster
profiles and it's with one of these that he claims we should be able to beat a
3090 TI for half the price
let's give it a shot for the RX 6800 XT
and RX 6700xt their Radeon monster
profiles so all you have to do is click this profile button right here so we
have 355 good bin and bad bin those are
coming soon we don't actually have those and given this cooler that would not
work anyway we also have our 305 watt good bin and
255 so that's stock power good bid we're
going to try the 305 watt good bin use it
apply Radeon monster profile enabled
this is where we should be able to beat a 3090 TI this guy right here in time
spy got us a score of 21
425. can we beat it well I'm not gonna
let the whole thing run because I already ran it and I'm just gonna spoil
it for you we did not beat the 3090 TI the score of
our 6800 XT was 21 255 just missed it
under 200 points oh but that still is
damn close for a GPU that's half as much money
this thing works really quite well although honestly in real games outside
of synthetic benchmarks it's not quite
as impressive but at the same time it's free performance you can just put it on
here your car goes faster the monster profile doesn't always work
out great though our 6700 XT this one
right here absolutely refused to work with any of them even the bad bin
profile caused it to immediately crash the good news though is that hydra's
automated tuning process you know the one that takes about 15-20 minutes did
work for this card and we actually managed a similar performance
Improvement by fine-tuning the voltage frequency curve just like on our 6800 XT
which puts this card comfortably in competition with NVIDIA's 3070 and 3070
TI for a hundred or in some cases well
over a hundred dollars less so the 3090 TI slaying claims were a
little optimistic but hey free performance is free performance and I've
got to say that our experience with these cards both on the bench and for
the writers at home lends credibility to AMD's claims of much better drivers
though there are some inconvenient details in all of this NVIDIA has some
feature benefits over AMD that simply cannot be ignored although AMD did
recently improve their AMF encoder to include B frames it still isn't quite at
the same level as NVIDIA's nvank and if the games that you enjoy support
real-time raytraced lighting and you wish to enable said Ray tracing feature
NVIDIA has a pretty clear performance
advantage and that's before you enable their excellent dlss machine learning
powered image upscaling technology AMD of course has their own version of
dlss called FSR but frankly it isn't as
good at least not yet by the time we
release this video though the story may have changed because AMD will have
announced their upcoming lineup of rdna 3 gpus hopefully with decent pricing and
an even more competitive feature set but with how affordable and tunable rdna 2
is today I think these cards are going to stay relevant for quite some time
like our sponsor enlisted enlisted as a
free-to-play World War II multiplayer shooter available on PC PS5 PS4 Xbox
series X S and Xbox One with crossplay
it has a focus on historical authenticity and gameplay that always
keeps you in the middle of the action you'll be placed in large scale combat
alongside dozens of soldiers vehicles and aircraft directly in famous
historical campaigns like the invasion of Normandy there's hundreds of firearms
and specialized weapons from common ones seen throughout the war to rare
prototypes that you hardly see in other games there's even building construction
and destructible items in the environments if you use our link you'll
get a free bonus just for signing up including three days of Premium Time and
several orders for troops and weapons so head to the link in the description and start playing enlisted free today if you
guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our last one awesome video where we used
clock tuner for ryzen to get free performance out of AMD's CPUs