AMD’s new Big Navi GPU benchmarks suggest Nvidia could be in more trouble than we thought

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AMD has shared some fresh benchmarks for its incoming Big Navi graphics cards, and they’ll likely have Nvidia worrying even more about the RX 6000 series.

The new benchmarks shared on AMD’s website are drawn from 10 games, and show performance at both 4K and 1440p, with the full PC spec provided. The testbed rig was powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X processor (in an X570 motherboard) with 16GB of DDR4-3200 system RAM.

It should be noted that AMD Smart Access Memory was enabled, a technology which allows RX 6000 GPUs to work in tandem with Ryzen 5000 CPUs for a performance boost. So that’s a slight extra edge over Nvidia which those folks who haven’t upgraded to Ryzen 5000 won’t have.

The benchmarks themselves are seriously impressive for AMD, particularly at 1440p resolution, and of course 4K resolution remains a very niche proposition anyway (in fact, the vast majority still game at 1080p going by the Steam hardware survey).

At 1440p, the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT beats out Nvidia’s RTX 3090 in every game, except for two: Wolfenstein Youngblood, where the 3090 is champ, and Doom Eternal which is pretty much a dead heat.

Interestingly, the 6800 XT even outguns the RTX 3090 in Borderlands 3 – and by some way – and the vanilla RX 6800 is a match for the RTX 3080 in this game at 1440p.

The 6800 XT also owns the 3090 at Gears 5. And in Battlefield V, both the 6800 XT and vanilla 6800 beat out the RTX 3090, with the same being true (to an even greater extent) in Forza Horizon 4.

Further note that the RX 6800 easily bested Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti across all the benchmarks (which AMD was using for testing in lieu of an RTX 3070, apparently, because performance levels are about on par, as we observed in our review).

Remember that the 6800 XT is pitched at $649, which is less than the RTX 3080 which costs $699 – and of course the RTX 3090 is a staggering $1,499, with the RX 6900 XT way undercutting that at $999.

4K battleground

As for the 4K benchmarks, the RX 6900 XT beat the RTX 3090 in five of the benchmarks, meaning that Nvidia won the other five – it was effectively a draw.

AMD’s RX 6800 XT, however, beat the RTX 3080 in six benchmarks, with the Nvidia graphics card only winning in three instances – Shadow of the Tomb Raider was a draw. Indeed, the RX 6800 XT edged out the 3090 in Borderlands 3, Gears 5 and Forza Horizon 4 at 4K.

So, worrying stuff for Nvidia? It would seem so, although we must bear in mind that these are internal AMD benchmarks, so a bit of cherry-picking could be going on (and as we’ve already mentioned, Smart Access Memory tech is also being used to give the RX 6000 cards an upper hand).

The other point of concern for Nvidia right now must be its failure to get anything like a sufficient number of RTX 3000 graphics cards out there, a situation which apparently won’t change until 2021.

AMD has already hinted that inventory levels of RX 6000 graphics cards will be better than Nvidia managed, but then again, we have recently heard rumblings on the grapevine that Big Navi could have its own stock issues.

Nvidia can also take comfort in the fact that AMD isn’t talking about ray tracing, although purportedly work is underway at AMD on a similar tech to Nvidia’s DLSS to help with frame rates when it comes to turning on all the ray-traced bells and whistles.

Via Tom’s Hardware



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