- (chuckles) Look at this guy. Do you feel old yet? Cause I sure do. That was me. The last time AMD had a truly competitive top tier Radeon and graphics card. That was over seven years ago. And this is me the last
time AMD sat on top as the single GPU king
with the Radeon HD7970. And that is why the excitement
around the RX 6800 series is so high and why it
would be so devastating if AMD let us all down again. Thankfully, spoiler alert, they didn't. Watch on. And watch what apps are
stealing your bandwidth using our sponsor GlassWire. It's an easy way to
diagnose and fix issues like poor video quality
in online meetings. Get 25% off today using offer code Linus at the link down below. (upbeat dance music) During episode two of AMD's
Where Gaming Begins event, AMD introduced us to their
three new big navvy GPU's the RX 6800, RX 6000 XT and RX 6900 XT. Nice. All of which feature Ray
accelerators in each compute unit for Ray tracing support
as well as 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory and a new infinity cache that promises to significantly
improve memory performance without the additional cost
associated with GDDR6X. Not only that, but AMD
also announced a technology that they're calling smart access memory, which lets compatible
CPU's access the GPU's entire memory space at
once rather than in small 256 megabyte chunks as before, offering a significant performance boost. It's because of that last feature
that we're using a top end Ryzen 5000 series CPU for our testing, which along with offering
leading gaming performance is the only CPU platform that currently supports this feature. Before you get too concerned
about being left out though, both AMD and Nvidia have
told us that it's pretty much a fancy marketing name
for resizable BAR support, which is something that
Microsoft is pushing for and that Nvidia claims will be supported on their GPU's soon. I'd also be surprised if we
don't see Intel add platform support in the future, but
the future is the future. Let's see how things look today. Shadow the Tomb Raider was
one of the first titles to support ray tracing and
with it disabled Nvidia stands no chance against AMD,
unless we enable DLSS. And that's a big deal. But, there is an asterisk here. When we turn on ray
tracing Radeon performance suffers tremendously with the 6800 XT sitting 13 frames per
second below the RTX 3080. We wanted to test the same
thing in Wolfestein Youngblood, but unfortunately that game
hasn't been updated yet with Vulcan Ray Tracing support for AMD. So we'll have to settle
for a traditional rendering where the 6800 XT is once
again, trailing the RTX 3080 with another asterisk. With smart access memory
enabled AMD retakes the lead in this traditional
rendering scenario with a single digit, but
measurable performance improvement. More good news follows with
Microsoft Flight Simulator where AMD managed the same or
better performance than Nvidia across the board. Although here we see a scenario
where smart access memory has no tangible benefit. So your mileage quite literally
can vary game to game. CS GO gives us one scenario
where Nvidia pulls ahead in traditional rasterized rendering. But, look at the difference
in minimum frame rates. Smart access memory makes a
huge difference for AMD here and arguably that's even more important for Esports titles like this than the average frame rate would be. Finally there's Minecraft RTX and it's, well, it's a mess on AMD. Even without DLSS the
6800 XT only gets half the average FPS compared to the RTX 3080, and even the RTX 3070 is
50% faster than the 6800. This really highlights
the weakness of AMD's first generation ray accelerators compared to NVIDIA's more mature
second gen RT cores. A note on DLSS before we continue. DLSS is a contentious thing
because it's an upscaling. The scene is rendered
at a lower resolution and then intelligently
scaled up using NVIDIA's tensor cores. Some would call measuring
performance with DLSS cheating, but whether it's cheating
or whether it's not, it looks pretty darn good and
it's something real gamers are using that AMD doesn't
yet have an answer for. If FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is their analogous
feature were ready in time for launch then
we might have had playable frame rates in Minecraft
with ray tracing enabled. But instead we'll need to
wait for the RX 6900 XT. Get subscribed by the way so
you don't miss our coverage of that card when it launches in December. Now productivity used to be
an area that Radeon excelled, but it seems that AMD had
to make some sacrifices to catch up in gaming. In OpenCL versus CUDA
Radeon outperforms GeForce in longer renders while
the opposite is true for shorter renders like BMW. Radeon doesn't currently support
ray accelerated rendering which puts Nvidia light years ahead with their optics renderer. And it's worth noting that
while there is a plugin for Radeon ProRender that is accelerated, the output is rough and looks
nothing like what it should. Similarly, we couldn't even run Lexmark or rather we could, but the
end result was so mangled that it wasn't even
recognizable, let alone usable. This led to a problem for
us in terms of productivity testing because most productivity software that takes advantage of the GPU is optimized for CUDA and
OpenCL implementations are getting old enough now that
they're beginning to break. We did find a renderer that
supports both OpenCL and CUDA, Indigo, but Nvidia had
the lead in it anyway. SPECviewperf gave us
some blow trading though with 3DS Max performing better on Radeons while CATIA and Creo were
much better on GeForce and the memory intensive energy, medical and Siemens NX workloads
heavily favored Radeon thanks to the infinity cache. Maya and SolidWorks on the other hand, once again fell to Nvidia's
faster compute engine. As AMD predicted, when we asked about its impact on productivity,
the smart access memory made no difference here. Just like our new keyboard shirts won't make you a better typist. They just make you look
cooler, lttstore.com. It looks like AMD's expanded
vapor chamber cooler design though is roughly comparable to Nvidia's with both the RX 6800
GPU's closely matching their team green counterparts
with the curious exception of the tail end of the test. Were SPECviewperf's medical
and Siemens NX benchmarks happen to fall. As you might recall,
that's one of the areas where AMD absolutely spanked Nvidia. As far as clock stability goes, it looks like AMD is slightly
less consistently running at maximum boost clock,
but it's pretty similar across the board. You might expect that
with clocks going as low as they do at idle power
consumption would be lower than Nvidia's when you're
not doing anything. Unfortunately that's not so. Still power consumption
on the whole appears lower with some exceptions. So you can again see
that dip for Nvidia here suggesting a bottleneck
with medical and Siemens NX that AMD isn't experiencing. You can't see it on this
graph, unfortunately, but we recorded a spike
as high as 270 Watts for the RX 6800 and an
eye watering 411 Watts for the 6800 XT. Thankfully that's not all the time so it's not really a problem in practice that is as long as you've
got a quality power supply that won't trip its
over current protection under a momentary spike like that. The main trouble with the RX 6800 series, aside from the last gen
ray tracing performance, which is becoming more
important day by day, is it's lack of truly useful features in comparison to Nvidia. Not only do they not yet
have a DLSS equivalent, that's ready to help out
their weaker ray accelerators, they're not even apologetic about it. Here's what they told us when
we asked about the ray tracing performance and why they
weren't comparing with Nvidia, even for press briefings. "Super resolution techniques like DLSS do not produce the same visual quality as native rendering,
especially with motion." I mean, yeah, that's true,
but it's gotten pretty good and that fact alone
doesn't change that Nvidia has it and AMD doesn't. And that was literally the difference between playable ray
tracing and sub 60 frame rates in our testing. Also AMD, if you really
thought it was that garbage, why are you working on
an analogous feature? Like we weren't expecting
AMD to blow us away with their first gen ray tracing support it's just that this Fox
and The Grapes response is all a little bit tone deaf. Of course, AMD has a point. Not everyone cares about
upscaling or ray tracing, but then AMD's hardware video encoder is still frankly rubbish
with what looks like significant chroma subsampling and macroblock artifacts
compared to Nvidia at the same resolution, bit rate at X264. It's basically unwatchable. And on the subject of media and Nvidia is also rolling features like
RTX voice background noise cancellation, AI camera,
background removal, and more that are accelerated
by their tensor cores. AMD currently has no equivalent
machine learning hardware in the Radeon 6000 series. This put streamers and content creators, and frankly even work
from home professionals who like to game in their
off hours at a disadvantage with Radeon compared to if they
had bought GeForce instead. Speaking personally, those
features really are enough to compel me to go GeForce,
even if I didn't give two hoots about ray tracing, AMD is trying to make up
for this somewhat though, by focusing more on game enhancements, via variable rate shading,
mesh shading and FidelityFX. But these are up to the
developer to include. You can't just turn on the
ambient occlusion feature on any game that you want. This combined with enhanced
media decoding support and support for full-fat
HDMI 2.1 with free sync, well, they merely bring AMD up to date rather than allowing
them to leap over Nvidia who already has mesh shading,
variable rate shading and ambien occlusion sharpening on top of all the other things that
AMD is missing out on here. So I'm not disappointed
by the RX 6800 series. AMD delivered on everything
they promised in their keynote. But if you were hoping
that there was gonna be some extra dazzle, you know, one more thing, then you
might feel a bit let down. What you see is what you get. And at these prices,
they just a little tough to recommend. The RX 6800 XT is just $50
less than the RTX 3080, and gets you roughly similar performance in traditional gaming with big
L in almost every other area. The RX 6800, well
honestly it's even tougher at $80 more than the competing RTX 3070, well it competes well, until
you turn on ray tracing or start streaming. But it's also only $70
more for the significantly faster XT model, which
doesn't seem like a lot more by the time you're already spending $600 on a freaking graphics card. So maybe the 6800 exists
mostly as like a kicker skew and we'll see some crazy
promotions on it or something. All in all A plus for effort. But, anyone who wanted to see Nvidia get absolutely embarrassed this generation is just gonna have to
wait for AMD's next crack at top tier gaming performance. Oh, AMD is probably still
gonna move a lot of these given that you can't actually
buy an RTX card at the moment. Now that I think about it. Just like I always
think about our Segways. Get the best prices and best
selection on PC hardware and technology at any of
Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. Micro Center has got new
prices on the 9th generation eight core CPU's from Intel with the 9700K at just 199 and 9900K at 299. And you can save an additional 20 bucks when you bundle with a
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link in the description for a free 32 gig flash drive
and 32 gig micro SD card valid in store only,
no purchase necessary. Really no purchase necessary. How the hell does that? Well, thanks for watching guys. Go check out our coverage of AMD's Where Gaming Begins to get
a little more background on today's launch. We decided to focus this video more on just like the performance
and feature analysis. Let us know if you liked that approach.
