Last week AMD presented the Radeon RX – 6000 – series in the form of three Models: The Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT. These should kick NVIDIA’s ampere cards hard on their feet and be at least as fast as their counterparts across the board. AMD delivered some benchmarks right at the start, which of course you shouldn’t trust completely, but which give a rough direction Hardware accommodating is not uncommon in such cases. In addition, a function called Smart Access Memory and Rage Mode were partially active in the benchmark comparisons – a stock vs. stock comparison looks different.
On a separate product page for the Radeon RX – 6000 – series, more benchmarks have now been published. Ten games (Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, The Division 2, DOOM Eternal, Forza Horizon 4, Gears 5, Resident Evil 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Wolfenstein: Youngblood) are played in two resolutions ( 3. 840 x 2. 160 and 2. 560 x 1. 160 pixels) each tested in one quality setting.
In terms of hardware, AMD compares the three new models Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT with each 16 GB against a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 11 GB (as a preliminary representative of the GeForce RTX 3070), a GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition with 10 GB and a GeForce RTX 3090 with 24 GB – here it is not known which model AMD used exactly. The test system consisted of a not yet officially available Ryzen 9 5900 X together with 16 GB of DDR4 – 3200 MHz on an X 570 – Reference platform.
In WQHD, AMD is in nine of ten benchmarks ahead of the competition – i.e. the Radeon RX 6900 XT before the GeForce RTX 3090, the Radeon RX 6800 XT before the GeForce RTX 3080 and the Radeon RX 6800 before the GeForce RTX 3070. Sometimes even the models of the Radeon RX – 6000 – series that are actually placed underneath are in front of the models of the GeForce RTX – 3000 – Series.
In 4K the picture usually looks as expected. AMD’s models are ahead of the competition – at least mostly. However, it should also be noted for these benchmarks that AMD has activated the function of the Smart Access Memory.
For the launch, we will certainly be testing the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT and later also the Radeon RX 6900 XT can present. Our test system uses a Core i9 – 10900 K, where Smart Access Memory will of course not be active. We will certainly also look at the performance of the cards with a Ryzen 3200 system in order to be able to take full advantage of the Ryzen platform . In addition to a neutral comparison, the options for Ryzen users should also be shown in full.
No ray tracing benchmarks so far
So far AMD held back when it came to ray tracing. Ray accelerators have already been mentioned, which are said to be several factors faster than a pure software solution, but there are still no figures on ray tracing performance in games. It is also not yet known how the special raytracing accelerators work.
Between the presentation and the market launch of the first two cards on 16. According to Frank Azor, Chief Gaming Architect at AMD, AMD wants to deliver corresponding values on November 1st. In addition to ray tracing, this applies to AI upscaling using FidelityFX, which is positioned as a counterpart to DLSS.
It is not known why AMD has so far not published figures. So far we can only speculate. There is talk of an unfinished driver to support DXR, but also of ray tracing performance that is not on the level of NVIDIA’s RT Cores. The RDNA-2 architecture supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, which is called ray tracing -API is set to DXR 1.1. The games published so far use DXR 1.0 across the board. As a result, AMD should be able to offer a corresponding hardware acceleration with the new cards.
