- The most powerful
gaming CPU on the planet. Is it enough to play modern games on a massive 8K OLED TV like this Z10 88 inch from LG? And what graphics card
could possibly be worthy? To find out, we have the two absolute fastest top of the line GPU's
from both AMD and Nvidia. Representing team red and weighing in at a cool 1500 US Dollars is the ROG Strix Radeon RX 6900 XT liquid-cooled edition and for team green, we've got the $2,000 MSI Nvidia RTX 3090 SUPRIM X. Either one of them alone costs more than an Xbox Series S, Series X and PlayStation 5 combined and is capable of consuming an excess of 700 Watts of power under heavy load at stock speeds and today we'll be
overclocking both of them to their absolute limits. Fortunately, our sponsor Seasonic has got us covered with their TX-1000 80+
Titanium power supply. It's efficient, quiet, fully modular and comes with a 12 year warranty. Let's make this poor thing hurt, shall we? (upbeat music) The MSI RTX 3090UPRIM X is a powerful card to be sure and at least on paper, it is well ahead of its competitor the Radeon RX 6900 XT thanks in part to its super fast GDDR6X memory but here's the thing, AMD pulled off a pretty major surprise when the RX 6900 X team
managed to hold his own against this monster in traditional rendering at 4K, thanks in large part to it's even faster but much smaller Infinity Cache. Also the built-in water cooling on this version of the card can't hurt its chances. Actually, both of these are
among the best available in their class, featuring overkill cooling a factory overclock, triple 8-pin power connectors. Oh, and of course, RGB for that extra FPS and the Radeon actually has another trick up its sleeve that Nvidia
doesn't have support for yet, Smart Access Memory. Also known as Resizable BAR support allows the CPU on our system because we're using a Ryzen 5900XT to access all of the GPS memory at once rather than in the traditional
256 megabyte chunks. This would ordinarily speed up memory intensive games sometimes by a lot but whether that advantage translates to 8K remains to be seen just like my sick Limited
Edition Foil GPU shirt from LTDstore.com. Like these GPUs, we can only make a limited number of this by the way we are expecting them to sell out fast. So go. Anyway, in the meantime,
our GPU bench is ready to freaking go here with the aforementioned
Ryzen 5950X 16-Core CPU, a fresh install of windows and of course our Seasonic Prime TX 1080
Plus Titanium power supply. Again, that's to be sure that we're not bottle-necking ourselves in any meaningful way. We're also gonna be using these tools from Nvidia right here to monitor our power consumption in real time as we run our tests. So that's pretty fun. There's no way to please
everyone these days, hey, they want you to test in a closed case so that you don't give a thermal advantage to some card designs over others but the thing about closed
cases that it's like you can't access the IO when you have the power measurement stuff looked up and everything before we actually overclock the cards we're doing some baseline testing at their stock speeds to see how they competed 8K like AMD technically has the VRM for it way more than the RTX
3080 but it's slower. So like that's tough, hey, - [Anthony] That's like
almost half the speed. - Yeah, it seems like it'd be fine for working on large projects, like as a pro-sumer card but for actual gaming, then again, we will try
to overclock it later. That's actually not terrible, it's like 50 Plus FPS and remember this is a
G-Sync capable display, so.. - [Anthony] It is not currently enabled. Oh, did you not enable it? - [Anthony] It's best to
disable it for benchmarking. - That's true. Still in terms of the gaming experience 55 FPS with adaptive sync, not bad, - [Anthony] Certainly like on a console you wouldn't complain about that. - Nope. On a PC, I wouldn't complain about that. Yeah. Maybe not in this game, in this game I'd like to
have a little bit more. Oh, we're definitely
getting some judder though. You can really see it in those panning shots. - Yeah, with the G-Sync, that wouldn't be such a big deal though. - I wanna get out into a more open area but I'm getting like
75-80 FPS in here, man. This game is so well optimized, it could probably run on like a toaster if you really needed to, how are we doing for power
consumption, Anthony? - It looks like we've peaked at 461 Watts and we're averaging about 420. - Nice. Something to note here though, is that while the game is never dropping below 60 FPS, Anthony, do you see that? judder and those microbes? - Oh yeah. It's like hitching every, I dunno like every 10 seconds. Yeah. - So hopefully overclocking will help us a little bit with that. Let's see. Oh, it's hot. - [Anthony] Yeah. That back plate is used
actually for cooling. - Yeah, no kidding. Geez. Well it's handling it actually, it looks like Nvidia might not
have the only 8K gaming card on the market. - [Anthony] What does the
frame rate display show? - It shows 55. - Oh wow, that's okay. - Very similar and you know what? I need to get out into
a more open area first but it actually doesn't
feel quite as juddery. How's our power consumption? - Power consumption has
peaked so far at 384 and we're in around 311 average - And to be clear, that's just the GPU of the numbers we're talking about, not the entire system. - [Anthony] So yeah, like a hundred Watts less for similar (indistinct) performance? - It's a lower FPS reported by the game but it's actually a little
bit smoother feeling in terms of the frame delivery which is not what I actually expected. - Pre-sync isn't on a right? - I could check that. I don't know. I see tearing. I don't think so. Okay, so back to the same
thing with the pillars look how much smoother that is. I think we're gonna need
to run some more testing and get the peeps some real numbers here. The rest of our games went about as you'd expect with AMD trailing Nvidia significantly
at about three quarters of the performance and shadow the Tomb Raider and it's even worse
with ray tracing enabled and that doesn't even consider DLSS, Nvidia's deep learning super sampling that runs the game at a lower resolution then uses machine learning to upscale it. It's a great feature and in supported games, honestly Nvidia is just untouchable, Red Dead Redemption 2 has a similar story in minimum frame rates but the average closes the gap somewhat, well Forza Horizon brings us much closer at roughly a 10% performance difference, finally, huh, would you look at that, CS GO has AMD winning at stock speeds. Very interesting. This simpler title lends
credence to the notion that AMD is raw raster
performance may be higher than invidious, regardless
of memory throughput and F1 2020 gives us
another win for team red. Yeah, dang. I was worried
this wasn't gonna be much of a like ultimate showdown but it turns out we've
got a battle on our hands. Now let's get to overclocking, Nvidia's newer versions of G-Force experience provide a way to automatically do overclock scanning and set power targets. Unfortunately adjusting the voltage or power target made the OSI scan crashed the system and MSI Afterburner similarly either crashed or settled on an unstable overclock whenever performing a no-see scan for a while there, we thought our card might already just be at peak performance but manually overclocking, we were able to bump the core by about 100 megahertz and 800 megahertz on the memory before we
started losing stability and performance to downclocking and Error Correction. In order to do that though, of course we have to raise our power limit and apply, as for your core voltage, honestly, increasing it might work against you as much as for you because you'll be more likely to hit your power limit. So Anthony says he actually got about the same results with it cranked as with it, just to add nothing. So you know what? You only live once. Crank it. - [Anthony] YOLO.
- YOLO. Something to watch out for here is that those GDTR six X memory chips get extremely hot even under normal circumstances and they're going to get even hotter now. So the back plate of this card is necessary for keeping them cool, so far this actually doesn't
really seem any better. We're getting about 65 to 75 FPS which is pretty much what we saw before. I'm also feeling a bit more stuttering than I did on AMD. That's something that based on the measurements we took ahead of time we were not expecting. - [Anthony] Yeah, there's
definitely a Judder. - Yeah. See that. Did it look worse than
the Radeon card too? - I feel like the Radeon didn't have as severe stuttering at least based on what I'm seeing here and what's in my memory maybe I'm just crazy but it looks worse here. - That does not look like
70 frames per second period. - [Anthony] Yeah, it looks
kind of like 45 or 50. - Yeah, if that and not a smooth 50. - [Anthony] Yeah, it almost reminds me of like the micro starter you'd get from multi GPU, frame rate,
high consistency, low. - How are we doing for power? - 500 peak and the average looks like it's floating in
around four 440, 450. So we're up a lot higher. - Yeap, top tire, all right. Half our power supply
dedicated just to the GPU and this tool does not measure fine enough time increments to see these like micro spikes that can take place from time to time. Now we'll throw the AMD card back in and I'll try not to plunk myself here and
touch the black plate. We expect it to be even
hotter than last time. AMD's Radeon and software offers overclocking controls directly setting the
card to 2,600 megahertz seems to be about as high as we can go out of the gate any higher and it'll throttle to this speed anyway, just add full voltage and a power target and then the memory, we're actually able to
set as high as possible and it's possible we could
have even gone farther if we had a bit more control over memory frequency. Okay. So let's try
cranking the power limit for one thing. - [Anthony] And then frequency
you leave max frequency 2,600 and Ram just whoop. You can go advanced control just to see how much that is. Yeah, 2150. - Okay, applied changes. Okay. It was not my imagination last time. This is noticeably smoother than the Nvidia experience. Although if the numbers
are anything to go by it's a bit of an outlier. What's also a better experience compared to Nvidia though is the overclocking headroom on this card at the low end we still only got about 5% improvement but on the high end we were looking at up to 15% faster performance. So that's pretty cool. - [Anthony] This might be my imagination but it seems like it is
far smoother than before. - I think it is smoother. I don't know if I would
describe it as far smoother. It's definitely smoother though. So we're getting 60 to 70 mid FPS. - [Anthony] We were getting
like 50 to 60 before, weren't we? - Actually that's true. Isn't it? Okay. Yeah and it is noticeably smoother to operate. I'm surprised AMD comes out with a pretty clear win at least in due maternal. Although, you know what, Anthony I am seeing more stuttering now that we've overclocked or judder rather. See that how it'll go
smoothly for a little bit and then it'll like,
(instructor groaning) like the Nvidia card, now what's our power consumption? - It's looks like 415 Watts maximum. We're averaging around 360, 362 Watts as far as you know. - Not too shabby, overall neither card
had terribly impressive overclocking headroom but that's not a huge surprise considering that both of them already had factory overclocks applied, for our results, we did eke out a framer to here and there on both cards in shadow of the Tomb Raider but Ray tracing remains a pain point for AMD with minimums that are still in the single digits, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Forza Horizon meanwhile put AMD couple
of percentage points closer to Nvidia then stock which in Forza puts the
6,900 XT within the 10% mark and as we might expect CS GO improved by a significant margin maintaining AMD spot well ahead of Nvidia but this time in every measurable way the TLDR then is this, AMD is best puts up a Valiant effort for the $500 price
difference against the 3090 sometimes coming close or even beating it at 8K but only sometimes
it still falls short in more demanding titles even with it's greater
overclocking headroom which only serves to further highlight the importance of technologies like DLSS and how much not having it is holding AMD back right now and not just in Ray tracing either outside of doing eternal which surprisingly was
quite a bit smoother on AMD, GDTR six seems to be helping Nvidia out tremendously because remember 8K is
four times the number of pixels as 4K. Just the frame buffer alone that is each frame displayed on the screen is nearly 128 megabytes, which is exactly enough to hobble the 6,000 series 128 megabytes of ridiculously fast Infinity Cache, leaving them with memory that's just over half as fast as ampheres for everything else, with that said, if AMD had a DLSS analog to reduce this memory footprint, AMD might have been more
competitive more often. So it seems reasonable to suggest that if AMD had equipped the 6900 XT with GDDR6X things might
look quite a bit different which makes me wonder how much of a bottleneck it would
have been for Nvidia. If they had stuck with PCI Express Gen 3 this time around, get subscribed for our video because we are going to be exploring that by the way. So then is 8K gaming a lie? Well, it's complicated while I participated in some of NVIDIA's early
promotion for 8K gaming on the RTX 3090 and it does work in the same way that a primitive hammer can pound in a nail. It's clear that it's not practical for every game today and as more visually
elaborate titles trickle out over the next few years, new hammers will be much
more appropriate tools to handle them at this resolution but this was still an interesting exercise for a couple of reasons, first because of how demanding it is. Gaming at 8K can give us a glimpse into how a card is performance might evolve over time. AMD famously squeezed
several years of life and performance improvements out of its Radeon 7970 and it looks like compared to Nvidia they may have a bit more
headroom here again. Oops, the AMD card is over there and second while you might roll your eyes and say, who cares? Nobody has an 8K monitor. The same was true for 4K a short while ago and even if you only use a 4K display super sampling or running at a higher
resolution than native then downscaling it is still the best way to reduce shimmering and other artifacts while preserving 100% of the detail in an image and Forex Super Sampling at 4K means rendering at 8K, fun fact to close this out, DLSS, Nvidia's killer
app that allowed them to market this card as
an 8K gaming solution with a straight face is
currently used to render at a lower resolution and then blow it up to
your displays native res but that wasn't how it
was first introduced. It was a form of anti-aliasing hence the super sampling in the name and it's very good at this task. So good in fact that its second iteration
it now legitimately enables high impact
features like Ray tracing to run at a lower resolution while preserving most of the sharpness and detail of native rendering. This point is especially painful for AMD whose Ray accelerators already significantly lagged
behind Nvidia's RT cards. Anyway, the main takeaway is that neither AMD nor Nvidia is even close to creating a GPU that can natively run
8K maxed-out AAA games and that upscaling tricks are here to stay and by the way, one more takeaway is that unless your screen is this big, 8K has a much smaller impact
your gaming experience than say HDR or running at a higher refresh rate for smoother animations and that last one, you can actually check out our whole video about that here. On the subject of smoothness, big shout out to Seasonic for keeping our test
benches running smoothly as can be. They have observed these GPU's, both of them actually spiking north of a thousand Watts for
very short durations which can wreak havoc on
over current protections and RTX 1000 handled them like a champ. You can check it out at the link in the video description and of course they've got lots of other power supplies to fit any budget.
tasty
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