RTX 3060 Ti vs RX 6700 XT in 2023: Don't buy the wrong GPU!

if you're buying graphics card a while after launch you should not go by launch reviews because for example the 6700 XT reference model which I have here came out at 479 dollars the RTX 3060 TI Founders Edition that I have right here came out with a 399 MSRP however this is still hard to find it that MSRP it's usually higher and this one is now significantly below its MSRP and not only that it's actually cheaper than the 36 DTI not only that but performance changes over time with Graphics drivers updates Games come out new games new game engines also I've enabled smart access memory and resizable bar Nvidia now has some resizable bar support in certain titles that have been whitelisted whereas they didn't when these cards launched let's jump into tests of the latest games on the latest drivers with and without Ray tracing with upscaling on off all of that tons of benchmarks Head to Head and the 1080P and 1440p and then at the end I'll give you some final thoughts on which GPU I think you should buy for updated 2023 testing I thought we'd start out with Unreal Engine 5.1 and go pretty in-depth here because so many new games are going to be using Unreal Engine 5 however for now we are limited to fortnite for testing the new features like Lumen and nanite and virtual Shadow Maps because epic develops fortnite and Unreal Engine 5 so their game is the first one to get all of these features implemented here we are looking at 1080p at the Epic settings however I've not yet enabled Hardware accelerated Ray tracing the Lumen lighting system is a software-based ray tracing system but can be Hardware accelerated to improve accuracy although with a hit to Performance cost here with Hardware RT off we're seeing the 6700 XT with a 14 lead over the 3060 ti so AMD having a good showing here if you're looking at the frame rate counters at the one on the left is the current frame rate the one in the middle is the average for the duration of The Benchmark run and the one on the right is the one percent lows so what we can do though is turn on the hardware acceleration portion of the ray tracing and see how much amd's performance falls off when this is enabled because that is one of the advantages for nvidia's architecture over amds is they lose less performance when enabling Hardware accelerated Ray tracing which is what we see here and now the gpus are pretty much tied for the averages although I will note that if you watch the one percent lows the AMD GPU is a little bit of a lead here and actually if you watch the frame time graphs for the smoothness it's a little bit less spiky for the AMD GPU which is interesting now I will mention that the hardware accelerated Ray tracing in Unreal Engine 5 is not particularly demanding it it so the AMD gpus don't lose as much performance relative to Nvidia as they do in more demanding titles which we'll look at at a future portion in this video but this is basically I mean not basically but I mean this is maximum settings 1080p epic settings with the hardware RT on now neither of them were getting a 60 FPS lock there at those settings so let's adjust the settings a little bit here if we go down to the high preset we still have Lumen nanite and virtual Shadow Maps enabled um it's just that Lumen and virtual Shadow Maps get turned down to the high setting rather than the Epic setting at these settings both gpus are well over 60 the 3060i is over 80 FPS the 6700 XT is closing in on 100 FPS average and the 6700 XT has actually increased its lead to 21 over the 36 DTI and I think this is more how most people would actually want to use these gpus in this game although there's enough Headroom to enable the hardware accelerated Ray tracing setting again when we do that the 6700 XT again loses about 15 of its performance lead but since it had a larger lead at these settings Baseline that means it is still actually winning by five percent overall on the averages and if we look at the overall frame rates both gpus are doing well here with a 76 FPS average on the 36 DTI and an 80 FPS average on the 6700 XT the one percent lows on the 6700 XT up around 68 with a 58 on the 36 DTI now let's jump up to 1440p because these gpus certainly had a lot of Headroom at 1080p maybe not at Absolute Max settings but at good settings and here notice that the lighting looks slightly different I'm using the replay feature in in fortnite to Benchmark it and I think the sun position was not locked which is annoying uh we're seeing the 3060 TI with the six percent lead here this is the 1440p Epic settings with Hardware Ray tracing on so completely maxed out with the hardware accelerated Ray tracing at 1440p the 3060 TI has a 60 lead although I don't think you'd want to use either GPU at these settings uh both of them averaging in the mid 30 FPS range with one percent lows dipping into the upper 20s so I think this is just a sign that you're not going to be absolutely maxing out every game at 1440p on these gpus in Unreal Engine 5. now if we go down to the high settings at 1440p and we turn the hardware accelerated array tracing off which still keeps us lumen and at the with the software-based solution the 6700 XT now has a 12 lead over the 3060 TI and it's averaging in the mid 60 FPS range well the 3060 TI is averaging in the upper 50s so not getting that 60 FPS lock if you look at the one percent lows there's a even bigger Gap there with a 56 on the 6700 XT and 46 on the 3060 TI for the one percent lows which definitely matter in a game like this and if you watch the frame time graph it does just look a bit smoother on the 6700 XT I don't think this is related to the vram capacity though because um if you look at the vram the memory allocation versus usage neither of those things are going over the eight gigabyte limit on the 3060 TI now I did want to look at okay so what if the 36 DTI did want to get over 60 FPS at 1440p here well that's where you could kick on dlss so here at the 1440p high settings and we had enough Headroom that I did enable the hardware accelerated Ray tracing this time and using dlss at the Quality setting which looks pretty good here the 3060 TI is now averaging in the upper 70s and on the 6700 XT I used TSR temporal super resolution which is the Unreal Engine 5 a temporal upscaler this game doesn't have FSR implemented implemented at this point and at those settings the 6700 XT matches the performance although I do think the image quality of dlss is superior to TSR here but again very similar performance although the one percent lows were still a lead for the 6700 XT but let's do a more in-depth look at Ray tracing I like to use cyberpunk 2077 as my main Ray tracing Benchmark because as a variety of presets we're starting here at the ray tracing low settings which are just enabling local Shadows so this is basically the ultra preset but then with um the local Shadows enabled also the presets enable upscaling by default and I have turned that off so this is native 1080p with Ray tracing low preset and here the gpus are basically tied although the 3060 TI does have a three percent lead I think we have less than a five percent lead one way or the other you're really not going to be able to notice the performance difference in actual use case when you're not running a frame rate counter so I would basically call it a tie and this is also what we were seeing in Unreal Engine 5 which is that when we Hardware accelerated the Lumen Ray tracing we saw these gpus come out roughly tied so in lighter Ray tracing workloads the 6700 XT does seem to come out even with the 36 DTI however when we kick up to the ray tracing medium preset we see a completely different story with the 3060 TI now at a 26 lead over the 6700 XT in cyberpunk this preset in keeps the local Shadows but also enables Ray traced Sun shadows and it enables the lighting to the medium setting so we get more of the ray traced bounce lighting happening here and it does look quite nice although the performance impact overall to both gpus is quite significant with the 3060 TI now well under 50 FPS much of the time with one percent lows around 40. and the 6700 XT now averaging below 40 FPS with one percent lows around 31. so not a great situation for either of them and this is where you have to question how much the ray tracing lead matters when the overall performance drops pretty low although upscaling is an option although at 1080p I personally don't really prefer to do that however I did test that out here when we went up to the ray tracing Ultra preset so Ray tracing Ultra keeps the local Shadows Sun Shadows adds in Reflections and it cranks the lighting up to the ultra setting rather than the medium settings so lots of Ray tracing going on here and now at the 1080p native the 3060 TI has a 44 lead over the 6700 XT but it's only averaging you know in the mid to Upper 30 FPS range whereas the 6700 XT is actually averaging well below 30 FPS so you couldn't even do a 30 FPS lock uh at the native 1080p on the 6700 XT if we enable upscaling with dlss or fsr2 I'm using the respective upscalers here at the Quality setting because I think that's how people would actually use them uh the 3060 TI has a 40 lead and is now averaging over 60 FPS so very very playable with the 6700 XD in the mid 40s so the thing here is that the 3060 TI is going to be very usable with heavy Ray tracing at 1080p if you're willing to upscale the question is are you willing to upscale at 1080p I think many people would be although personally I feel like it doesn't look great and I would seriously consider just turning off Ray tracing and playing it native 1080p Ultra which is what we're going to look at now at Native 1080p Ultra we're seeing the gpus again basically tied although the 6700 XD has a five percent lead which like I said I would usually consider pretty much a tie because without running a frame rate counter you're probably going to have a very similar experience and would be tough to tell the difference so we're not seeing as large of a lead without Ray tracing on here as we saw in games like uh in Unreal Engine 5 with fortnite so um you know different games different engines get us different results and in this one we're definitely seeing a much closer result for both gpus also if you're watching the temperatures these are this is the reference model 6700 XT and the Nvidia Founders Edition 3060 ti so neither one of them has an amazing cooler so the temps are a little bit High uh on mod both of these GPU models uh when I wanted to test out 1440p I decided to show you guys I did test out ultra settings but I thought I'd show you the high settings because I think they've made more sense at the ultra settings neither GPU was averaging 60fps which in a first person shooter I thought was pretty relevant at 1440p at the high settings though uh the 3060 TI does average around 60 FPS and the 6700 XT is more up into the mid 60 range with a six percent lead over the 3060 ti so we will call this one a you know a win for the 6700 XT but a very small one it did pass up my uh somewhat arbitrary it's better than five percent lead uh number um but anyway I think that both of these gpus are usable at 1440p but like I said reducing settings down to high and or upscaling is usually going to be the way to go um when you're using these gpus at 1440p and graphically demanding titles but in some new graphically demanding titles you might run into a vram issue now I have not seen a lot of this but I thought I'd bring it up and you know you'll see this testing looks a little bit different here because I didn't have time to rerun these these benchmarks this is taken from my day one coverage of Hogwarts Legacy on a variety of gpus but it's a 360 TI on the left the 6700 XT on the right and while I haven't synced up the footage perfectly they're both running up and down the same street in hogsmeade but you'll notice that while the 36 DTI can average in the mid 60s like the 6700 XT does watch the frame rate counter um drop down to 30 FPS right here and then kind of come back up and what seems to be happening here is the vram spilling over and this is an issue in Hogwarts Legacy it's not an issue in a lot of other games but something to keep keep in mind is that that eight gigabytes of vram versus 12 could cause issues in certain games that use a lot of vram however other bright brand new games coming uh straight from PS5 exclusive like returnal here don't seem to be showing excessive amounts of vram usage this is return on the 1080p epic settings and here again they're basically tied with the five percent lead going to the 6700 XT I really like return on by the way I'm gonna just plug this and say uh if you're at all interested in roguelike games meaning when you die your progress resets and the maps are somewhat randomly generated but there is some permanent progress progression in terms of item unlocks and things like that I think this is a really good game that just didn't seem to get a lot of interest or sales but anyway just throwing that out there if we go up to the 1440p Epic settings we once again see basically a tie with a five percent lead going to the 6700 XT but once again I don't think if you turn the frame rate counters off you had two PCS side by side uh one with each GPU you'd really notice which one you were using um the averages are in the uh mid 60 range so you know by this point in The Benchmark round by the way you'll notice the progress counter I'm not showing you guys the full Benchmark around this is a fairly long Benchmark run but in another plug for this game um it has a really good Benchmark and it gives you really good stats at the end um it's it's really cool and it's showing us the vram usage Ram utilization all of that it's pretty interesting stuff anyway the 3060 TI averaging around 66 and the 6700 XT averaging around 69 nice FPS um but let's jump up to a game where there is a more noticeable performance difference between the two gpus with Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2. now I test out this game at the balanced settings rather than the extreme settings because this is a competitive multiplayer game and I think most people who play competitive multiplayer Shooters reduce settings from the maximum in order to gain a frame rate Advantage for that Competitive Edge so I think this represents realistic use case more than if I left it at the extreme settings at in this game at 1080p balanced we're seeing a 22 percent lead for the 3060 ti so definitely our best showing so far and this is not uncommon in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 when testing AMD versus Nvidia this game tends to be an outlier in the favor of AMD but I include it in my testing because while it's an outlier to the average performance it's a popular game that many people will compare care about their performance in and a lot of people who play competitive games have one game that they spend pretty much all of their game time playing and if you are somebody who's playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 or Warzone 2 which uses the same engine but the Battle Royale version is harder to test this is the built-in Benchmark run that the game offers that we're showing here at 1440p balanced we actually see the 6700 XD slightly increase its lead to 25 over the 36 DTI so very interesting stuff here and again I can't tell you why this game favors AMD so heavily but this is consistent um across all of my testing whenever I'm comparing two gpus that usually perform similarly uh the lead goes to AMD in this title which I think you know in a competitive game where frames win games that is definitely something to take of note and so if you're spending most of your time in Modern Warfare 2 or war zone two that might help your GPU purchasing decision right there however if we jump to a plague tail Requiem at 1080p Ultra this is not an Unreal Engine game this one is an in-house engine developed by a Sobo Studios and this game looks great honestly we're seeing here the face work on the characters is one of the least impressive parts of the game the overall lighting looks great uh here we see a basic tie the 3060 TI with a three percent lead and both of them um averaging in the mid 70s through that Benchmark run although in actual gameplay you'll be much closer to 60 FPS and even dropping Below in the more demanding scenes this game can be very demanding if we jump up to 1440p I actually reduced all the way down to medium settings to get better frame rates and at these settings the gpus are actually tied and here I don't see any big differences in the one percent lows or anything like that either uh this game is an Nvidia sponsored title and it does have um Ray tracing Shadows available I just chose not to use the ray Trace shadows in the testing here given the performance was already fairly low and I'm honestly just not blown away by raytrace Shadows personally and we did a lot of uh in-depth Ray tracing testing already in this video now if we jump over to the Callisto protocol which is an AMD sponsored title uh interestingly we see the 3060 TI give one of its largest performance leads however with a 16 lead through this Benchmark run this is the built-in Benchmark the game offers and I will mention that this game does use Unreal Engine 4 which does tend to be a bit Nvidia favored performance wise off of the Baseline averages which is one of the reasons why I was so interested to see Unreal Engine 5 actually having a complete performance swing here where again without Ray tracing enabled like we are here we saw the 6700 XT with a noticeable lead whereas in this game we're seeing the 36 DTI with the noticeable lead although when I jumped to 1440p I reduced the settings down to medium in order to like have this like Corridor of death which just absolutely takes frame rate actually keep the frame rate somewhat reasonable and at these settings the 36 DTI only has a five percent lead so um kind of interesting there going up to the higher resolution but reduced settings uh seeing a pretty big change in the GPU performance relative uh one to the other so that's another thing where when you look at GP users like which one's better well you know depending on the game the workload the exact resolution settings you're using all of that we can see it just varies wildly if we jump into Forza Horizon 5 at the 1440p extreme settings we see basically a tie it's a one percent lead for the 6700 XT one reason I wanted to include this game in my testing despite it being not quite as new as some of the other games is because this is a big change from last time I tested these gpus where AMD had a large Advantage here because AMD has always supported smart access memory in this game whereas Nvidia had not originally whitelisted resizable bar support for their Nvidia gpus but I think it was back in October of 2022 where Nvidia got an update where more games including this one did get that resize bar white list and um it made a big difference and had them catch up in performance and speaking of basically tied performance but in a brand new game the newest game on my list is atomic heart which I think looks great um the dialogue is less great but well I mean maybe you know if you are into the maybe Duke Nukem style of humor you would you would enjoy it but whatever the gpus are what we're testing here not the game and uh the 30 60i has a three percent lead at 1080p Atomic which is the max settings and both gpus getting a good frame rate average here with around 80 for the 30 60 TI and around 78 on the 6700 XT if we increase it to 1440p at the atomic settings we're now seeing it actually exactly tied if you look at you know the one percent lows there might be like a one FPS difference not that big of a deal and they're both averaging right around 62 FPS through this intro scene I think this game looks quite good considering the performance that it offers here um so yeah I wish more games were optimized like this one let's talk about which one you should buy so the 6700 XT is about 360 dollars right now on the cheapest models and there's multiple available 370 dollars if you take a step up on several more models the 3060 TI by the way I'm using PC part picker uh just to look at they survey the and I'm sorting prices low to high and this is what I could buy right now they survey a lot of the major retailers so it's giving you a good idea of what the new pricing of these gpus would be if I wanted to buy them today and if I wanted to buy a 36 DTI today brand new new it would cost around 420 dollars for the cheapest models and go up to 450 quickly after that so it does look like the 6700 XT is significantly cheaper and I also want to point out that in the meantime AMD has actually refreshed the 6700 XT with a 6750 XT which I did not review in this video because I don't actually own one but those are currently coming in with the cheapest models at 380 dollars now a lot of times they're coming in at 400 or more which is why I don't usually recommend them however well let me mention why because it's only about five to eight percent faster depending on which review you look at compared to the base model 6700 XT so if the price is 10 percent more or more than 10 percent more than a base model 6700 XD then it just doesn't make much sense from a price to Performance standpoint however if it's 370 versus the base model's um 360 then I do think it's worth it so I do want to mention that today those was a price close enough that you would seriously consider the 6750 XT but I don't think that's always or even usually the case anyway just throwing that out there so throw that into the mix if you add on a five to eight percent uh performance uh tick up on all my 6700 XT results in this video that's roughly what the 6750 XD would do it's just a 6700 XT with slightly faster memory basically anyway so which one should you buy well first let's just say which one would I rather have without factoring in the price and I think I have a different answer at different resolutions if I was buying these gpus for 1440p uh regardless of let's just say they cost the same I would rather have the 6700 XD even though uh even if they cost the same and if it's already cheaper then I think that just sweetens the deal now why is that the case because at 1440p I'm more concerned about the eight gigabytes of vram on the 3060 TI for one thing um having the extra four gigabytes or 50 percent more vram on the 6700 XT is more relevant at higher resolutions the higher resolution you're at the more vram the game uses it's that simple now that's not the only reason why I do prefer the 6700 XT at 1440p the other reason is because I don't care as much at Ray tracing uh at 1440p on these gpus because I think well the 36di has a ray tracing Advantage I think both of these gpus are weak enough at 1440p not unusable but weak enough at 1440p that I would rather turn down settings and maybe even use upscaling in order to reach frame rate targets that I would be happy with rather than cranking up the settings by enabling Ray tracing so I think the ray tracing lead is less relevant at 1440p because I'd be less likely to use it at 1440p so for those two reasons I would prefer the 6700 XT at 1440p um slightly faster at rasterization for the most part although tied a lot of the time more vram I'm not that likely to use Ray tracing the one Edge I'll give to the 360 TI at 1440p is I do think lss2 looks better than fsr2 so I think that's an advantage there and then there's all of the non-gaming reasons like productivity workloads where a lot of times Nvidia is better supported um things like that and then there's reputations for things like the drivers which is hard for a reviewer to quantify but you can read online all about uh people's thoughts on those now let's talk 1080p at 1080p even if these both cost the same I think I would rather have the 36 DTI and the reason is at 1080p I'm less concerned about eight gigabytes of vram now I'm not guaranteeing you that no game will ever require more than eight gigabytes you know at 1080p I think there will be games that might have issues with eight gigabytes maxed out at 1080p but I just think it's going to be much less frequent of an issue in any recent uh you know any games coming up in the next couple of years I'm not saying there won't be any but I don't think it'll be that common the other thing is I think at 1080p the performance is better than it is at 1440p which means there might be more frequently Headroom to use Ray tracing and if you're using Ray tracing then the 3060 TI usually has a noticeable advantage and when you're not using Ray tracing I think in many games the performance is pretty similar overall so you're not losing too much usually on the non-ray trace performance so and then Nvidia does like I said have other you know benefits regarding a lot of productivity apps are better supported on it things like that anyway my game video here is mostly focusing on the gaming performance so because I'd be more likely to use Ray tracing at 1080P and I'm less concerned about the vram uh I and then one other thing upscaling I mentioned that I think dlss2 looks better than fsr2 at 1440p but it's a small small difference at 1080p I think the difference is more more noticeable I don't really like upscaling at 1080p at all but when I do I find dlss to be much less bad looking if I want to put it that way um I think at the lower resolutions or more aggressive settings uh fsr2 falls off a bit compared to dlss and image quality so I think the rate the upscaling is more usable at 1080p the ray tracing is more likely to be used at 1080p so that Advantage is more worthwhile and I think the disadvantage in vram is less noticeable so if they cost the same I think I would rather have the 3060 TI at 1080p so I'd rather have the 6700 XT at 1440p I'd rather have the 3060 TI at 1080p but I'll be honest on both of those choices it's not a strong preference and I could see somebody wanting uh to go the other way on either of those and I don't think there's a bad choice either way but that's without factoring in the pricing if you then factor in the pricing the 6700 XT just costs less so with that in mind I think you might want to choose it anyway at both resolutions if price is more of an issue for you if price is less of an issue for you I mean honestly guys just buy the best GPU you can afford um and so I mean if you know Gaming's a big deal to you and you want the best you know performance on your gaming PC like these are throw more money at the GPU if it's not a big deal if money is a big deal to you then I think having you know what is it right now a 60 Advantage uh for the 6700 XT costing less here I think that's a pretty big deal and like I said right now even the 6750 XD is actually less than the 36 DTI and that adds on enough extra performance that I'd honestly probably just choose the 6750 XT at these current prices if you can get that one at 380. anyway what do you guys think like I said I think these are very close in performance with strengths and weaknesses 3060 TI better Ray tracing performance better upscaling um 6700 XT better price and more vram what do you guys think in the comments section I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 337,563

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Id: iHzcdr3wL3E

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023