Final words and conclusion

Final words

Interesting eh? I think most people would have thought that the Radeon RX 6800 (579 USD) would be close to the GeForce RTX 3070 (449 USD) in performance. Overall (with some differential in mind on some titles), the 6800 is the better choice when it comes to pure raw rasterization based gaming. Not just that, NVIDIA might have to reconfigure the lineup as the 16GB of graphic memory over the 8GB they offer, is a poor selling point now. The one thing the 6800 has against it, is that price differential, as this feels it should be a 499 USD product if I am brutally honest.  AMD is back to the table with a deck of cards that offers support for that full DirectX Ultimate feature set. Not just that, they've made some big bets with the architecture. The infinity cache definitely brings them where they need to be performance-wise. 

Performance

Ultimately everything and anything it's all about gaming price, performance, and, of course, rendering quality. Of course, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a product that ticks the mandatory boxes. The 6800 offers more value for money though as stated, it would have been a hit at 499USD.It will serve you well at WQHD. At Full HD, you'll be quite often bottlenecked and CPU limited. AMD's L3 cache brings them some exceptionally fast performance and it really shows in lower resolutions, but still works well at the highest ones. Competition wise you're looking at 3070 to 3080 levels of performance for the 6800 overall. Performance-wise we can safely state that this is a true Quad HD graphics card that is an Ultra HD capable one with current games. Lacking however is some sort of AI supersampling that is assisting Raytracing remarkably well, and here the benefit quickly goes to NVIDIA.  

What about Smart Access Memory? 

You will have noticed that AMD introduced SAM, smart Access memory. And it's a feature to keep an eye on as the results have shown IF it kicks in, it is able to boost your framerates significantly. Out of the three games tested only one kicked in, but extremely well; Assassins Creed: Valhalla absolutely loves this feature. As explained it does come with compromises, as SAM requires that CSM Support is turned off in the BIOS in order to enable above 4G Decode, which will allow Resizable Bar Support (SAM) to be enabled. The problem here is that if your Windows installation is configured as non-UEFI, Windows will be unable to boot from your currently installed SSD/HDD. Most PCs will be configured like that. The only solution is to disable CSM, and reinstall Windows 10 to get this feature-set supported. 

Raytracing

Looking at raytracing, we have to admit that AMD is performing reasonable at best, sometimes close and in line with NVIDIA but often at GTX 2080 / and maybe RTX 3070 performance levels at best. We had hoped for a bit more as RT wise you'll be playing at WQHD at best, and there is where ML supersampling could have benefit AMD. What helps them is the Infinity cache, so overall AMD is offering a fun first experience in Hybrid raytracing but we expected more. If we look at full path Raytracing, then AMD lags behind significantly as the competition is showing numbers much faster.

Compute performance

Generic compute performance in application like VRAY show a good boost in performance. OpenGL performance is lagging behind. AMD shines in D3D12 and Vulkan, less so on professional workloads.

Cooling & noise levels

In extremely stressed conditions, we did hit a close to 40 dBA though it took a while for the card to get there (warms up slowly); that is considered a normal acoustic level. Depending on the airflow level inside your chassis, expect the card to sit in the 60 running max 75 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions (depending on the airflow in your chassis). As FLIR imaging shows, the card's top and bottom side hardly shows heat bleeding. Overall, we're very satisfied with what we observe.

Energy

In the previous paragraph, I already mentioned this; your heat output and energy consumption are always closely related to each other as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 100 Watts in (consumption) often equals 100 Watts of heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. AMD is listing them at 250 to 300 Watts for the flagship product, which is okay for a graphics card in the year 2020 at this performance level. We measure numbers to be close to the advertised values for the 6800, see at roughly 240 Watts.

Coil whine

The reference cards do exhibit coil squeal. Is it annoying? It's at a level you can hear it. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived.

Pricing

Limited availability and nauseating price levels these days for a graphic card are becoming bothersome. I mean, even for us true hardcore PC gamers, it's getting more and more difficult to explain why people should put down this much money to be able to play computer games on a PC. I mean the spread is $999 for the 6900 XT, $649 for the 6800, and $579 for the cheapest 6800 model. Sure you can game at Ultra HD and get 16GB of GDDR6 memory but with the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony in mind sitting at a 500 USD marker for their GPU, CPU, Storage, and hey the console as a package we are getting more and more uncomfortable about the price levels for graphics cards. We do expect AIB cards to be more expensive, as that is a trend as of late.  We'll have to wait and see how that pans out, though, as everything is dependant on the actual volume availability of these cards.

Tweaking

Tweaking Big Navi GPUs has been a bit of a challenge. Sometimes confusing, other times easy. AMD does enforce a cap again on the memory as well as GPU clock frequency this round, we don't like that as we feel we could have gone a notch further. The tweaks on the clock frequency and memory run fine, but the performance was often lower than defaults. For the RX 6800 series, we'd expect you to reach ~17 GBps of effective bandwidth quite easily. Of course, increase the power limiter to the max, so your GPU gets (even) more energy budget. Why this huge differential these you might wonder? Well, you can clock the card even at 3 GHz, but when a power limiter kicks in, it'll always bring down that frequency to match your power budget. Results will vary per board, brand, and even card due to cooling (GDDR6/GPU/VRM), Frequency matters LESS these days as your power limiter will be the decisive and dominant factor, lowering that clock frequency to meets its assigned power budget. That's said, we reached 2450 MHz, and do expect some board to hit 2305 MHz. But all that tweaking and extra energy consumption will bring you a max of ~3% extra performance at best. AMD should really consider dropping the enforced limitations on GPU and memory clock, as they make little sense anymore.

Conclusion

The Radeon RX 6800 is offering thrilling shader performance for the vast majority of the time above RTX 3070 levels. That gets reversed when activating Raytracing. It's not bad at all, but could have been better. AMD massively is missing some sort of DLSS though, and that will always give GeForce RTX cards an edge. What AMD did extremely well was that L3 cache as well as making this a 16GB graphics memory-based product. These features combined with interesting technologies like SAM, make this card more interesting than GeForce RTX 3070. However, we do feel that 499 USD would have been the true sweet-spot. AMD might add ML supersampling at one point in time, but it will always run over the existing compute engine, and that will lower performance to some degree as that engine is already in use, so the workload is shared. NVIDIA has added dedicated hardware with Tensor cores to offload that render engine and thus that's a win, anytime. As time passes the discussion on Raytracing and technologies like DLSS/MLSS is getting more extreme. When comparing the latest gamers shaded or raytraced, most people find themselves in a situation where they can hardly see any distinction. See, for the past decade or two rasterization and shading have become extremely good and efficient at what it does, and there is a dilemma to be found. So if you don't care that much about RT/MLSS/DLSS then AMD has a properly good proposition at hand. Big Navi delivers that's a sure thing. Games show fantastic framerates on your monitor all the way-up-to Ultra HD. I however have stated this many times now, we do feel that overall graphics cards are too expensive. I mean the cheapest version 6800 costs $579, for less money you can purchase the new premium version Xbox. The big dilemma for me today is pricing. Would this have been a 499 USD product then I would easily recommend it over the RTX 3070 purely based on rasterization performance and that nice amount of graphics memory? NVIDIA really goofed up there giving the 3070 just 8GB. On the other hand, AMD did not add dedicated cores for some sort of machine learning supersampling, and that helps NVIDIA bigtime in assisted raytracing. And therein is the answer to be found, if you do not find RT to be a leading factor in your purchasing decision then the 6800 is a clear choice. However, it's not so easy when you look at it from the DXR side of things combined with ML Supersampling. You can't go wrong here though, I mean terrific shader performance combined with 16GB of graphics memory will ensure you'll use this graphics card for a long time to come. 

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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.