look at this guy do you feel old yet because i sure do
that was me the last time AMD had a truly competitive top tier Radeon
graphics card that was over seven years ago and this is me the last time AMD sat on
top as the single GPU king with the
Radeon hd 7970 and that is why the
excitement around the rx 6800 series is
so high and why it would be so devastating if
AMD let us all down again
thankfully spoiler alert they didn't
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during episode two of AMD's where gaming begins event AMD introduced us to their
three new big navi gpus the rx 6800 rx
6800 xt and rx 6900 xt nice all of which
feature ray accelerators in each compute unit for ray tracing support as well as
16 gigabytes of gddr6 memory and a new
infinity cache that promises to significantly improve memory performance
without the additional cost associated with gddr6x
not only that but AMD also announced a technology that they're calling smart
access memory which lets compatible cpus
access the GPU's entire memory space at once rather than in small 256 megabyte
chunks as before offering a significant performance boost
it's because of that last feature that we're using a top-end ryzen 5000 series
CPU for our testing which along with offering leading gaming performance is
the only CPU platform that currently supports this feature
before you get too concerned about being left out though both AMD and NVIDIA have
told us that it's pretty much a fancy marketing name for resizable bar support
which is something that microsoft is pushing for and that NVIDIA claims will
be supported on their gpus soon i'd also
be surprised if we don't see Intel ad platform support in the future but the
future's the future let's see how things look today shadow of the tomb raider was
one of the first titles to support ray tracing and with it disabled NVIDIA
stands no chance against AMD unless we enabled dlss and that's a big
deal but there is an asterisk here when
we turn on ray tracing Radeon performance suffers tremendously with
the 6800 xt sitting 13 frames per second
below the rtx 3080. we wanted to test the same thing in
wolfenstein youngblood but unfortunately that game hasn't been updated yet with
vulcan ray tracing support for AMD so we'll have to settle for a traditional
rendering where the 6800 xt is once again trailing the rtx 3080 with another
asterisk with smart access memory enabled AMD
retakes the lead in this traditional rendering scenario with a single digit
but measurable performance improvement more good news follows with microsoft
flight simulator where AMD managed the same or better performance than NVIDIA
across the board although here we see a scenario where smart access memory has
no tangible benefit so your mileage
quite literally can vary game to game
cs go gives us one scenario where NVIDIA pulls ahead in traditional rasterized
rendering but look at the difference in minimum frame rates
smart access memory makes a huge difference for AMD here and arguably
that's even more important for esports titles like this than the average frame
rate would be finally there's minecraft rtx and it's
well it's a mess on AMD even without dlss the 6800 xt only gets
half the average FPS compared to the rtx
3080 and even the rtx 3070 is 50 faster
than the 6800 this really highlights the
weakness of AMD's first generation ray accelerators compared to NVIDIA's more
mature second gen rt cores a note on dlss before we continue
dlss is a contentious thing because it's
an upscaler the scene is rendered at a lower resolution and then intelligently
scaled up using NVIDIA's tensor course some would call measuring performance
with dlss cheating but whether it's cheating or whether it's not it looks
pretty darn good and it's something real gamers are using that AMD doesn't yet
have an answer for if fidelityfx super resolution which is
their analogous feature were ready in time for launch then we might have had
playable frame rates in minecraft with ray tracing enabled but instead we'll
need to wait for the rx 6900 xt get
subscribed by the way so you don't miss our coverage of that card when it
launches in december now productivity used to be an area that Radeon excelled
but it seems that AMD had to make some sacrifices to catch up in gaming
in opencl versus cuda Radeon outperforms
g-force in longer renders while the opposite is true for shorter renders
like bmw Radeon doesn't currently support
ray-accelerated rendering which puts NVIDIA light years ahead with their
optics renderer and it's worth noting that while there is a plug-in for Radeon
prorender that is accelerated the output
is rough and looks nothing like what it should
similarly we couldn't even run luxmark or rather we could but the end result
was so mangled that it wasn't even recognizable let alone usable
this led to a problem for us in terms of productivity testing because most
productivity software that takes advantage of the GPU is optimized for
cuda and opencl implementations are getting old enough now that they're
beginning to break we did find a renderer that supports
both opencl and cuda indigo but
NVIDIA had the lead in it anyway spec view perf gave us some blow trading
though with 3ds max performing better on radeons while katia and creo were much
better on GeForce and the memory intensive energy medical and siemens nx
workloads heavily favored Radeon thanks to the infinity cache
mayan solidworks on the other hand once again fell to NVIDIA's faster compute
engine as AMD predicted when we asked about its
impact on productivity smart access memory made no difference here just like
our new keyboard shirts won't make you a better typist they just make you look
cooler lttestore.com it looks like AMD's expanded vapor
chamber cooler design though is roughly comparable to NVIDIA's with both the rx
6800 gpus closely matching their team green counterparts with the curious
exception of the tail end of the test where specvuperf's medical and siemens
nx benchmarks happen to fall as you might recall that's one of the areas
where AMD absolutely spanked NVIDIA
as far as clock stability goes it looks like AMD is slightly less consistently
running at maximum boost clock but it's pretty similar across the board
you might expect that with clocks going as low as they do at idle power
consumption would be lower than NVIDIA's when you're not doing anything
unfortunately that's not so still power consumption on the whole
appears lower with some exceptions so you can again see that dip for NVIDIA
here suggesting a bottleneck with medical and siemens nx that AMD isn't
experiencing you can't see it on this graph unfortunately but we recorded a
spike as high as 270 watts for the rx 6800 and an eye watering 411 watts for
the 6800 xt thankfully that's not all the time so
it's not really a problem in practice that is as long as you've got a quality
power supply that won't trip its over current protection under a momentary
spike like that the main trouble with the rx 6800 series
aside from the last gen ray tracing performance which is becoming more
important day by day is its lack of truly useful features in
comparison to NVIDIA not only do they not yet have a dlss
equivalent that's ready to help out their weaker ray accelerators they're
not even apologetic about it here's what they told us when we asked about the ray
tracing performance and why they weren't comparing with NVIDIA even for press
briefings super resolution techniques like dlss do not produce the same visual
quality as native rendering especially with motion
i mean yeah that's true but it's gotten pretty
good and that fact alone doesn't change that NVIDIA has it and AMD doesn't and
that was literally the difference between playable ray tracing and sub 60
frame rates in our testing also AMD if you really thought it was that garbage
why are you working on an analogous feature like we weren't expecting AMD to blow us
away with their first gen ray tracing support it's just that this fox and the
grapes response is a little bit tone deaf
of course AMD has a point not everyone cares about upscaling or ray tracing but
then AMD's hardware video encoder is still frankly rubbish with what looks
like significant chroma subsampling and macroblock artifacts compared to NVIDIA
at the same resolution in bitrate and x264
it's basically unwatchable and on the subject of media NVIDIA is also rolling
features like rtx voice background noise cancellation ai camera background
removal and more that are accelerated by their tensor cores
AMD currently has no equivalent machine
learning hardware in the Radeon 6000 series this puts streamers and content
creators and frankly even work from home professionals who like to game in their
off hours at a disadvantage with Radeon compared to if they had bought GeForce
instead speaking personally those features
really are enough to compel me to go GeForce even if i didn't give two hoots
about ray tracing AMD is trying to make up for this somewhat though by focusing
more on game enhancements via variable rate shading mesh shading and fidelity
effects but these are up to the developer to include you can't just turn on the
ambient occlusion feature on any game that you want this combined with enhanced media
decoding support and support for full fat HDMI 2.1 with freesync
well they merely bring AMD up to date rather than allowing them to leap over
NVIDIA who already has mesh shading variable rate shading ambient occlusion
sharpening on top of all the other things that AMD's missing out on here
so i'm not disappointed by the rx 6800
series AMD delivered on everything they promised in their keynote but if you
were hoping that there was going to be some extra dazzle you know one more
thing then you might feel a bit let down
what you see is what you get and at
these prices they're just a little tough to recommend
the rx 6800 xt is just fifty dollars
less than the rtx 3080 and gets you roughly similar performance in
traditional gaming with a big l in almost every other area the rx 6800 well
honestly it's even tougher at 80 dollars more than the competing rtx 3070 well it
competes well until you turn on ray tracing
or start streaming but it's also only 70 dollars more for
the significantly faster xt model which doesn't seem like a lot more by the time
you're already spending 600 on a freaking graphics card
so maybe the 6800 exists mostly as like
a kicker sku and we'll see some crazy promotions on it or something
all in all a plus for effort but anyone
who wanted to see NVIDIA get absolutely embarrassed this generation is just
gonna have to wait for AMD's next crack at top tier gaming performance
though AMD's probably still gonna move a lot of these given that you can't
actually buy an rtx card at the moment now that i think about it
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go check out our coverage of AMD's where gaming begins to get a little more
background on today's launch we decided to focus this video more on just like
the performance and feature analysis let us know if you like that approach