the most powerful gaming CPU on the planet is it enough to play modern games
on a massive 8k OLED tv like this z1088
from lg and what graphics card could possibly be worthy to find out we have
the two absolute fastest top-of-the-line
gpus from both AMD and NVIDIA
representing team red and weighing in at a cool
1500 us dollars is the rog strix Radeon
rx 6900 xt liquid cooled edition and for
team green we've got the 2 000
MSI NVIDIA rtx 3090 supreme x
either one of them alone costs more than an xbox series s series x and
playstation 5 combined and is capable of
consuming in excess of 700 watts of power under heavy load at stock speeds
and today we'll be overclocking both of them to
their absolute limits fortunately our sponsor seasonic has got
us covered with their tx 1000 80 plus titanium power supply it's efficient
quiet fully modular and comes with a 12 year warranty let's make this poor thing
hurt shall we
the MSI rtx 3090 supreme x is a powerful
card to be sure and at least on paper it is well ahead of its competitor the
Radeon 6900xt thanks in part to its
super fast GDDR 6x memory
but here's the thing AMD pulled off a pretty major surprise
when the rx 6900xt managed to hold its
own against this monster in traditional rendering at 4k thanks in large part to
its even faster but much smaller infinity cache also
the built-in water cooling on this version of the card can't hurt its
chances actually both of these are among the best available in their class
featuring overkill cooling a factory overclock triple eight pin power
connectors oh and of course RGB for that
extra FPS and the Radeon actually has another
trick up its sleeve that NVIDIA doesn't have support for yet
smart access memory also known as resizable bar support allows the CPU in
our system because we're using a ryzen 5900 xt to access all of the GPU's
memory at once rather than in the traditional 256 megabyte chunks this
would ordinarily speed up memory intensive games sometimes by a lot but
whether that advantage translates to 8k
remains to be seen just like my sick limited edition foil
GPU shirt from ltdstore.com like these gpus we can only make a
limited number of these by the way and we are expecting them to sell out fast
so go go go anyway meantime
our GPU bench is ready to freaking go
here with the aforementioned ryzen 5950x
16 core CPU a fresh install of Windows and of course our seasonic prime tx 1000
80 plus titanium power supply again that's to be sure that we're not
bottlenecking ourselves in any meaningful way we're also going to be
using these tools from NVIDIA right here to monitor our power consumption in real
time as we run our tests so that's pretty fun there's no way to please
everyone these days hey they want you to test in a closed case so that you don't
give a thermal advantage to some card designs over others but
the thing about a closed case is that it's like you can't access the i o when
you have the power measurement stuff hooked up and everything before we
actually overclock the cards we're doing some baseline testing at their stock
speeds to see how they compete at 8k
like AMD technically has the vram for it
way more than the rtx 3080 but it's slower so like
that's tough hey yeah it's like almost half the speed yeah it seems like it'd
be fine for you know working on large projects like as a prosumer card but for
actual gaming then again we will try to overclock it
later that's actually not terrible it's like 50 plus FPS and
remember this is a g-sync capable display so
it is not currently enabled oh did you not enable it it's best to disable it
for uh benchmarking that's true still in terms of the gaming experience 55 FPS
with adaptive sync not bad certainly like on a console you wouldn't
complain about that nope on a pc i wouldn't complain about that yeah maybe
not in this game in this game i'd like to have a little bit more oh we're
definitely getting some judder though you can really see it in those panning
shots yeah with the g-sync that wouldn't be such a big deal though yeah i want to
get out into a more open area but i'm getting like 75 80 FPS in here man this
game is so well optimized it could probably run on like a toaster if you
really needed to how are we doing for power consumption Anthony looks like
we've peaked at uh 461 watts and we're
averaging about 420. nice something to note here though is
that while the game is never dropping below 60 FPS
Anthony do you see that judder and those micro stutters oh yeah yeah it's like
hitching every i don't know like every time
maybe yeah yeah so
hopefully overclocking will help us a little bit with that let's see
oh it's hot oh it's hot yeah yeah yeah yeah always yeah that
backplate is used actually for cooling yeah no kidding jeez
well it's handling it actually looks like NVIDIA might not have the only 8k
gaming card on the market what does the frame rate display show uh
it shows 55. oh wow that's okay
very similar and you know what i need to get out into a more open area first but
it actually doesn't feel quite as juddery how's our power consumption
power consumption has peaked so far at 384 and we're in around 311 average
and to be clear that's just the GPU the numbers we're talking about there not
the entire system so yeah like 100 watts less for
similar questions performance
it's a lower FPS reported by the game
but it's actually a little bit smoother feeling in terms of the frame delivery
which is not what i actually expected
uh freesync is anon right i could check that
ah i don't know i see tearing i don't think so
okay so back to the same thing with the pillars look how much smoother that is i
think we're gonna need to run some more testing and get the peeps some some real
numbers here the rest of our games went about as you'd expect with AMD trailing NVIDIA
significantly at about three quarters of the performance to shadow the tomb
raider and it's even worse with ray tracing enabled and that doesn't even
consider dlss NVIDIA's deep learning super sampling that runs the game at a
lower resolution then uses machine learning to upscale it
it's a great feature and in supported games honestly NVIDIA is just
untouchable red dead redemption 2 has a similar
story in minimum frame rates but the average closes the gap somewhat while
forza horizon brings us much closer at roughly a 10 performance difference
finally ha would you look at that
cs go has AMD winning at stock speeds
very interesting this simpler title lends credence to the
notion that AMD's raw raster performance may be higher than NVIDIA's regardless
of memory throughput and f1 2020 gives
us another win for team red dang i was worried this wasn't going to
be much of a like ultimate showdown but
turns out we've got a battle on our heads now let's get to overclocking NVIDIA's
newer versions of GeForce experience provide a way to automatically do
overclock scanning and set power targets unfortunately adjusting the voltage or
power target made the oc scan crash the system and MSI afterburner similarly
either crashed or settled on an unstable overclock whenever performing an oc scan
for a while there we thought our card might already just be at peak
performance but manually overclocking we were able to
bump the core by about 100 megahertz and
800 megahertz on the memory before we started losing stability and performance
to down clocking and error correction in order to do that though of course we
have to raise our power limit
and apply as for your core voltage honestly
increasing it might work against you as much as for you because you'll be more
likely to hit your power limit so Anthony says he actually got about the
same results with it cranked as with it just to at nothing so
whatever you know what you only live once all right crank it yolo yolo
something to watch out for here is that those gddr6x memory chips get extremely
hot even under normal circumstances and they are going to get even hotter now so
the back plate of this card is necessary for keeping them cool so far this
actually doesn't really seem any better we're getting about
70 65 to 75 FPS which is
pretty much what we saw before i'm also feeling a bit more stuttering
than i did on AMD that's something that based on the measurements we took ahead of time we
were not expecting yeah there's definitely a judder yeah
see that did it look worse than the Radeon card to you i feel like the Radeon
didn't have as severe stuttering
at least based on what i'm seeing here and what's in my memory uh maybe i'm
just crazy but it looks worse here that does not look like 70 frames per
second period yeah it looks kind of like 45 or
50. yeah if that and not a smooth 50. yeah it almost reminds me like the
microstarter you'd get from multi GPU yeah frame rate high consistency low how are
we doing for power 500 peak
and the average looks like it's floating in around
440 450 so we're up a lot higher yep
that's higher all right half our power supply dedicated just to
the GPU and this tool does not measure
fine enough time increments to see these like micro spikes that can take place
from time to time now we'll throw the AMD card back in and i'll try not to
punk myself here and touch the back plate
we expect it to be even hotter than last time AMD's Radeon software offers
overclocking controls directly setting the card to 2600 megahertz seems to be
about as high as we can go out of the
gate any higher and it'll throttle to this speed anyway
just add full voltage and a power target and then the memory we were actually
able to set as high as possible and it's
possible we could have even gone farther if we had a bit more control over memory
frequency okay so let's try cranking the power limit for one thing
uh main frequency you can leave max frequency 2600
and RAM just you can go advanced control just to see
how much that is uh yeah 2150. okay
apply changes okay it was not my imagination last time this is noticeably
smoother than the NVIDIA experience although if the numbers are anything to
go by it's a bit of an outlier what's also a better experience compared
to NVIDIA though is the overclocking headroom on this card
at the low end we still only got about uh five percent improvement but on the
high end we were looking at up to 15 16
faster performance so that's
pretty cool this might be my imagination
but it seems like it is far smoother than before um i think it is smoother i
don't know if i would describe it as far smoother it's definitely smoother though
we're getting 60 to 70 mid FPS we were
getting like 50 to 60 before weren't we actually that's true isn't it
okay yeah and it is noticeably smoother to operate
i'm surprised AMD comes out with a pretty clear win at least in do maternal
although you know what Anthony i am seeing more stuttering now that we've
overclocked it or judder rather
see that how it'll go smoothly for a little bit and then it'll like
like the NVIDIA card how's our power consumption looks like
415 watts maximum uh we're averaging around 360 362 watts
as far as you know not too shabby overall neither card had
terribly impressive overclocking headroom but that's not a huge surprise
considering that both of them already had factory overclocks applied
for our results we did eek out a frame or two here and there on both cards in
shadow of the tomb raider but ray tracing remains a pain point for AMD
with minimums that are still in the single digits red dead redemption 2 and
forza horizon meanwhile put AMD a couple of percentage points closer to NVIDIA
than stock which in forza puts the 6900
xt within the 10 mark and as we might
expect cs go improved by a significant margin maintaining AMD spot well ahead
of NVIDIA but this time in every measurable way
the tldr then is this AMD's best puts up a valiant effort for
the 500 price difference against the 3090 sometimes coming close or even
beating it at 8k but only sometimes it still falls short
in more demanding titles even with its greater overclocking headroom which only
serves to further highlight the importance of technologies like dlss and
how much not having it is holding AMD back right now and not just in ray
tracing either outside of doom eternal which surprisingly was quite a bit
smoother on AMD gddr6 seems to be
helping NVIDIA out tremendously because remember ak is four times the number of
pixels as 4k just the frame buffer alone
that is each frame displayed on the screen is nearly
128 megabytes which is exactly enough to
hobble the 6000 series 128 megabytes of
ridiculously fast infinity cache leaving them with memory that's just over half
as fast as ampere's for everything else with that said if AMD had a dlss analog
to reduce this memory footprint AMD might have been more competitive more
often so it seems reasonable to suggest that if AMD had equipped the 6900xt with
gddr6x things might look quite a bit different
which makes me wonder how much of a bottleneck it would have been for NVIDIA
if they had stuck with pci express gen 3 this time around
get subscribed for our video because we are going to be exploring that by the
way so then is 8k gaming a lie
well it's complicated while i participated in some of NVIDIA's
early promotion for 8k gaming on the rtx
3090 and it does work in the same way that a
primitive hammer can pound in a nail
it's clear that it's not practical for every game today and as more visually
elaborate titles trickle out over the next few years new hammers will be much
more appropriate tools to handle them at this resolution but this was still an
interesting exercise for a couple of reasons first because of how demanding
it is gaming at 8k can give us a glimpse into how a card's performance might
evolve over time AMD famously squeezed several years of
life and performance improvements out of its Radeon 7970
and it looks like compared to NVIDIA they may have a bit more headroom here
again oops AMD cards over there and second while you might roll your
eyes and say who cares nobody has an 8k monitor
the same was true for 4k a short while ago and even if you only use a 4k
display super sampling or running at a higher
resolution than native then down scaling it is still the best way to reduce
shimmering and other artifacts while preserving 100 of the detail in an image
and 4x super sampling at 4k means
rendering at 8k fun fact to close this out dlss NVIDIA's
killer app that allowed them to market this card as an 8k gaming solution with
a straight face is currently used to render at a lower
resolution and then blow it up to your display's native res but that wasn't how
it was first introduced it was a form of anti-aliasing hence the super sampling
in the name and it's very good at this task
so good in fact that its second iteration it now legitimately enables
high impact features like ray tracing to run at a lower resolution while
preserving most of the sharpness and detail of native rendering this point is
especially painful for AMD whose ray accelerators already significantly lag
behind NVIDIA's rt cores anyway the main takeaway is that neither
AMD nor NVIDIA is even close to creating
a GPU that can natively run 8k
maxed out aaa games and that upscaling tricks are
here to stay and by the way one more takeaway is that
unless your screen is this big 8k has a much smaller impact on your
gaming experience than say HDR or
running at a higher refresh rate for smoother animations and that last one
you can actually check out our whole video about that here on the subject of smoothless smoothness
big shout out to sonic for keeping our test benches running smoothly as can be
they have observed these gpus both of them actually spiking north of a
thousand watts for very very short durations which can wreak havoc on over
current protections and our tx1000 handled them like a champ you can check
it out at the link in the video description and of course they've got lots of other power supplies to fit any
budget