Yesterday, AMD officially unveiled three graphics cards: Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT, based on the RDNA 2 architecture and 7nm technological process from TSMC. The manufacturer revealed the first specific information about performance in popular games and comparison to competing NVIDIA Ampere chips. Shortly after the conference, we got to know the full information related to the detailed specification of the NAVI graphics core 21 which all three announced graphics cards are based on. The subject of Ray Tracing turned out to be quite a mystery, which was practically not discussed at all during the speech of Dr. Lisa Su. In the end, however, the first DXR benchmark appeared, in which the NVIDIA Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 systems were tested. How are the Radeons fared?

The first test to check the Ray Tracing performance on the graphics card has appeared AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT with Ray Accelerators cores. RDNA 2 is on average 33% worse than the GeForce RTX 3080.

As we wrote yesterday, Radeon RX cards 6000 based on the RDNA 2 architecture have been equipped with dedicated Ray Tracing units. These are called Ray Accelerators and one RA is allocated for each block of Compute Units. The same is true of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 and GeForce RTX 6900 – there you will also find one RT core for each SM block. In the case of RDNA 2 chips we get 60 RA for Radeon RX 6800, 72 RA for Radeon RX 6800 XT and 80 RA for Radeon RX 6900 XT. So far, we didn’t know what to expect from AMD’s Ray Accelerators units. The manufacturer, however, revealed some information that should give us more or less clarity on what to expect from new graphics cards.

To check the performance in Ray Tracing, a tool called Procedural Geometry, which is part of the Microsoft DXR SDK, was used and can be used on virtually any graphics card supporting DXR. Maximum performance of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT card 471 FPS using hardware RA units and 34 FPS at the software level . The top Radeon RX 6900 XT card should therefore be a few (dozen) percent better. In the case of NVIDIA, we obtained the result of ASUS GeForce RTX non-reference card 3080 TUF Gaming, which obtained 630 FPS in the same test. So I am talking about the advantage of 33% over AMD. The top GeForce RTX 3090 achieved an even higher result 749 FPS, i.e. 59% better result compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT. Unfortunately, we don’t know how NVIDIA Turing cards fall in the same benchmark.

Source: VideoCardz