Radeon RX 6800 XT is 25% slower than GeForce RTX 3080 in hardware ray tracing
As part of yesterday’s presentation of the new Radeon RX 6000 series video cards, AMD did not go into details about the performance of its ray tracing technology, nevertheless, the manufacturer indicated some features that allow us to compare it with the performance of NVIDIA video cards of the Ampere generation.
The GPUs of the Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards include the so-called Ray Accelerators (RAs). They are part of the Compute Unit. Each of these blocks contains one RA accelerator.
The job of accelerators is to handle ray tracing in games. This hardware feature is also present in the graphics subsystem of the next-generation game consoles based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
The GPUs of the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 video cards contain 80, 72, and 60 execution units and the same number of ray tracing hardware units. Source VideoCardz excavated data on their performance: AMD has tested Radeon RX 6800 XT with RA 72 by the so-called procedural tool geometry (Procedural Geometry), which is part of Microsoft DXR SDK. This allowed us to compare the performance of hardware ray tracing in RDNA 2 with how NVIDIA graphics cards cope with such operations. And this comparison is not in favor of the AMD video card.
“Based on engineering measurements on August 17, 2020, and AMD RDNA 2-based graphics card in the Microsoft DXR SDK’s procedural geometry application was able to accelerate this process 13.8x faster with ray-processing hardware using ray processing hardware. As a result, the card showed a result of 471 frames per second. When using the software DXR, the result of the video card at the same operating frequencies was 34 frames per second. Performance may vary, ” VideoCardz quoted AMD as saying.
One of the users of the Reddit forum checked the ray tracing performance of his ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 TUF video card in the same test and got a result of 630 frames per second:
Resource VideoCardz also used Microsoft XDR SDK to test its GeForce RTX 3080 with the reference frequency values and get the result in 635 frames. From this, we can tentatively conclude that the Radeon RX 6800 XT handles ray tracing about 25% slower than the GeForce RTX 3080 in this particular test. However, important clarification needs to be made here. AMD did not specify at what resolution settings the XDR was tested, so the test for the GeForce RTX 3080 was carried out at standard settings.
According to results published by Wccftech editor Hassan Mujtaba, the reference GeForce RTX 3090 achieves 749 fps in the same test. This makes this card 59% faster in DXR than the Radeon RX 6800 XT.
