With the official unveiling of AMD's RDNA 2 powered RX 6000 Series graphics cards happening in less than a week, alleged benchmarks are starting to appear which compare the flagship Big Navi GPU against Nvidia's flagship RTX 3080. To the surprise of many, the leaks suggest that AMD will not only manage to compete with the RTX 3080, but may surpass it in some aspects.
The leaks come from a manufacturing partner of AMD, who has revealed 3DMark benchmarks from an early engineering board to hardware website Wccftech. The reported scores show that the Big Navi GPU outperforms the RTX 3080 by 22% in the 4K Firestrike Ultra benchmark, and just over 3% in the 4K TimeSpy Extreme benchmark. However the RTX 3080 does score significantly higher in the ray tracing based 4K Port Royal benchmark, beating the Big Navi card by 22%.
If accurate, these scores mean that the Big Navi GPU will be notably faster than the previous generation champion, the RTX 2080 Ti. AMD's card beats it by over 56% in 4K Firestrike Ultra benchmarks, and 18.7% in 4K Time Spy Extreme benchmarks, and by 4% in the ray tracing based Port Royal benchmark. Similar benchmarks from known leaker KittyYYuko show fairly comparable results, with Big Navi beating even the RTX 3090 in Firestrike Ultra and Extreme benchmarks, and performing slightly slower than the RTX 3080 on TimeSpy and TimeSpy Extreme.
The card is referred to in the main benchmarks as the RX 6800 XT, which is expected to be a slightly cut down version of the RX 6900 XT, featuring 72 Compute Units rather than the full 80. KittyYYuko's benchmarks refer to an 80 Compute Unit card, which is likely to mean the more expensive RX 6900 XT. However, both sets of rumored benchmarks suggest the same thing; AMD will be unveiling cards that truly can compete with Nvidia's incredibly popular RTX 3080.
With Nvidia and its partners struggling to get even a small percentage of ordered RTX 3080 graphics cards manufactured and shipped, AMD has a big opportunity to get gamers to switch. The leaked benchmarks suggest that Big Navi will be largely equivalent to an RTX 3080, but with slower RTX 2080 Ti ray tracing performance. If it can price the cards competitively, AMD might soon experience the same rush of custom that has surprised its main competitor. Particularly as all the Big Navi based graphics cards are expected to ship with more memory than both the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.
Not only that, but given the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S are using similar RDNA 2 based graphics hardware for 4K ray tracing, gamers can expect that the optimization of ray tracing for the RX 6000 Series will rapidly improve.
AMD's RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT are expected to launch on November 5.
Source: Wccftech