RTX 4070 vs RX 6950 XT: The Ultimate Comparison!!!

these gpus are not even remotely the same size and do not draw even remotely the same amount of power uh they're coming from different Generations why am I comparing them because they cost the same and until AMD releases something from the 7000 series in the 600 price class all I can do is look at the actual Market what sells for around six hundred dollars the RX 6950xt at least in the United States I realize around the world markets might be different the RTX 4070 has just launched at 600 I would imagine the founders Edition will be available for that price we'll see for how long and then we'll see what the partner cards are actually available for uh as well anyway just to show you that it really is like I could go buy a 6950 XD for 610 right now with that promo code at Newegg uh the model I'm testing in this video is XFX Speedster Merc 319 at 650 I'm running it at its out of the box settings same with this one I do have Smart access memory and Sam uh sorry and resizable bar enabled let's hop into the benchmarks and give you a whole bunch more final thoughts at the end right let's start our benchmarks with Unreal Engine five so many games in the upcoming near future will be Unreal Engine 5 Games with features like Lumen and nanite and virtual Shadow maps all making for an excellent engine but right now all we have to test is fortnite because it's developed by the developers who make the Unreal Engine 5. anyway uh in this at 1440p Epic settings we are seeing the RX 6950xt ahead by 12 an average frame rate and 17 in the one percent lows the RDX 4070 is averaging a little over 60 FPS and the 6950 XT is closer to 70 FPS although currently at 69 nice FPS and so it is definitely a win here although we can see some other stats up there do you see the wattage on the Top Line near the right but not but not the fan speeds the one to the left of that with Little W yeah the 6950 XT is drawing over 300 watts and the 4070 is under 200 so that is a massive difference and that is definitely something that people would need to keep in mind when buying these gpus now also there's Ray tracing performance so Lumen is a software-based ray tracing system but it can be Hardware accelerated increasing its accuracy but also taking a bit of a performance hit although not a massive one this is the 1440p Epic settings with Hardware accelerated Ray tracing turned on and now we're seeing the gpus basically tied the 6950 XD is still slightly ahead by two percent you wouldn't really notice it one percent lows by seven percent would still be pretty hard to notice but maybe more noticeable and again they're both averaging pretty close to 60 FPS although the 6950 XT is just a bit closer dropping down to the high settings you can see that these gpus are capable of delivering a high refresh rate 1440px experience in Unreal Engine 5 with very good settings it's just that the Epic settings are extremely demanding here we're seeing the 40 70 around 100 FPS a little bit less with the 6950 XD over 114 115 FPS it ends up being a 18 average FPS lead for the 6950 XT although the one percent lows are a 28 lead which is a bit more noticeable here so it seems like at the lower settings we're seeing even better results for the 6950 XT now moving up to 4K resolution at the Epic settings we see a nine percent lead for the 6950 XT on the averages and a 12 lead in the one percent lows neither GPU is absolutely crushing it here or anything um so 4K epic settings in Unreal Engine 5 look like they're gonna be incredibly demanding and I doubt by the end of the uh this GPU generation that fortnite will end up being the most demanding game at 4K epic settings in Unreal Engine 5. we're basically looking at low 30s versus mid 30s anyway we could use dlss upscaling on the 4070. this current build of fortnite does not feature FSR but it has unreal engines 5's TSR which is a similar temporal upscaling super resolution technology both at the Quality setting here which is a 1440p baseline resolution and trying to reconstruct a 4K image I do think the image quality of dlss does look better than TSR and the gpu's performance is tied now um literally the same average FPS and a tiny three percent lead in the one percent lows for the 6950xd but again an image quality lead for the uh 4070 although that did have Ray tracing enabled in that test explaining why they were more tied uh dropping down to 1080p if we look at the Epic preset without Hardware acceleration on the ray tracing we are at a 13 lead for this 6950 XT and 23 leading the one percent lows with the 6950 XD just averaging a little under 100 FPS with the 470 more in the mid 80s so they're both able to do high refresh rate uh 1080p gaming at the Epic settings in Unreal Engine 5. but they're not um uh I mean they're performing so well here I guess is what I was going to say that we could have some Headroom to enable Ray tracing so we turn on the hardware accelerated Ray tracing we now see uh the 6950 XT drop to only a three percent lead and a 13 lead in the one percent lows which is maybe a bit more noticeable um so honestly don't take uh too much of of this game as a ray tracing Benchmark we'll look at some heavier Duty ray tracing later in this video um but it is really nice to see that the the Lumen Hardware acceleration isn't really too demanding and it does bring these gpus pretty close together in performance now in this video I really want to focus on the the latest games uh as for most of the benchmarks and The Last of Us Part One has been giving a lot of people trouble but a large part of that is due to vram and um the 4070 does have 12 gigabytes of vram so here at the 1440p ultra settings uh it has enough vram um and so well uh gpus that don't have enough vram would be really struggling here but both of these are actually performing well and actually the 4070 is nine percent ahead of the 6950 XT uh in the averages and eight percent ahead in the one percent lows Now by moving up to 4K Ultra uh we actually see the 6950 XT pull ahead although I would still call this basically a tie it's a three percent lead on average FPS and tied on the one percent lows so not that um big of a lead also I think the 4070 is actually spilling over its vram capacity if you look at the allocate so the usage on the 6950 XT it's at about 13 gigabytes and the 4070s rank system RAM usage is higher indicating their spillover from vram into system Ram uh by dropping down to 1080p Ultra this is further confirming that I think that the 4K results the 4070 was held back by its vram spillover because at 1080p where neither GPU like even the 6950 XT is which has 16 gigabytes of ERM available is only showing 10 and a half gigabytes of actual usage and 11 of allocation we see the 4070 actually had by 27 here and the average is and was seven seven percent in the one percent lows 21 in the averages um so good results here very good for the 4070 when it's not held back um by any vram spilling over now another very recent game that's giving a lot of people trouble is Resident Evil 4 remake which at the max preset on PC does include some light Ray tracing workload um and a big part of the problem people are having in this game though is once again a vram issue and the 12 gigabytes of vram does seem to be enough here the 6950 XT is using 12. um and they were basically tied in performance there now when we go up to 4K Max preset in this game you can see the 6950 XT is using closer to 13 gigabytes which the 4070 doesn't have and now we're seeing a 23 lead for the 6950 XT in average FPS and 24 in the one percent lows so this indicates that at 4K here the 4070 probably could have performed a little bit faster if it had a little bit more vram or at least that's how I would interpret uh what I'm seeing there especially because by dropping down to 1080p we're once again seeing the gpus delivering very similar performance on average two percent lead for the 69 50 XT and a nine percent lead in the one percent lows now keep in mind this is a ray tracing workload however it's a light Ray tracing workload again we'll explore Ray tracing throughout this video but you'll see that in the lighter Ray tracing workloads the um uh the AMD gpus fall off in performance relatively but not massively whereas in heavier Ray tracing workloads we would see a larger drop off now I think the best looking recent game is a plague tail Requiem this game from a Sobo Studios using their own in-house engine looks amazing and at 1440p Ultra the 6950xd is delivering 13 faster average 14 one percent lows both gpus delivering over 60 FPS though uh so good to go in 1440p Ultra here this is a game that doesn't worry about old generation consoles it's just the current gen PS5 series X and S all of that by going up to 4K Ultra this pushes both of these gpus hard neither one is is delivering anywhere near 60fps but the 6950 XD is leading by 15 on the averages and 13 in the one at one percent lows there's not a huge amount of vram usage in this game unless you turn on Ray tracing which I'm not doing here I'm just going with the ultra preset the game did get patched quite a a while after launch with some raytrace Shadows which aren't part of the ultra preset so I didn't enable it and honestly I'm not that impressed by raytrace Shadows a 1080p Ultra we're seeing the 6950 XT only leading by eight percent and six percent in the one percent lows uh both gpus are delivering over a hundred FPS much of the time and you know at least over 80 or 90 FPS almost all the time so at this point they're both just doing a good job fairly similar performance with the 6950 XD ahead also the the lower the resolution goes the more you can run into system uh like other parts of the system bottlenecking performance now looking at Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 at the 1440p balanced preset not the extreme preset because it's a competitive game people would usually turn down settings I think it's a more realistic test we're seeing the 6950 XD actually leading by 28 here and 27 in the one percent lows delivering around 200 FPS with the 40 70 closer to 150 FPS both of them doing extremely well but this is certainly an outside Advanced outsized Advantage for this 950 XT and by going to 4K resolution that Advantage is pushed even further with a 35 lead in the averages and 33 and the one percent lows and it's basically you know 125 FPS versus you know 92 FPS much of the time uh in The Benchmark run so both of them doing well and I'm not sure how many people are playing you know focused on competitive games on a 4K screen but you might uh you know not exclusively play competitive games have a 4K screen but still want to play them sometimes anyway dropping out a 1080p balance which I think is a reasonable thing to look at people might buy high-end gpos gpus to focus on Competitive Gaming here we see 6950xe leading by 24 and 26 the one percent lows I will mention that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 does seem to favor amd's architecture uh over and videos architecture it usually does kind of have a bit of a better than average result um relatively uh in this game now for spoken is a maybe not super popular but it is a demanding PS5 exclusive um on console that it has a PC version which we're looking at here I went to the highest preset which does include some Ray tracing uh here we're seeing the 47 the four percent ahead which I could basically call it tie the one percent lows were kind of disrupted by the fact this Benchmark run has load screens that destroy the one percent loads lows while it's loading so we won't really look at that here moving up to 4K we're actually seeing the 6950 XD ahead This Time by five percent but again I think anything within five percent is pretty much a tie you wouldn't really notice the difference while you're playing it other than I will point out the power draw once again uh 300 watts versus less than 200 watts is a pretty big difference uh and so there is always that now dropping down to 1080p we're really seeing basically a tie here it's a one percent lead for the 40 70. uh both of them delivering good performance so once again we're seeing a game with a fairly light Ray tracing implementation bringing these gpus to basically a tie similar to what we saw in um in Resident Evil 4 as long as we're no vram issues in the Lumen Hardware acceleration that we saw in Unreal Engine 5 with fortnite now moving on to Unreal Engine 4 we're looking at returnal which is at its 1440p epic settings giving a 20 lead to the 6950 XT and a five percent lead in the one percent lows although both gpus are delivering excellent experience here the 4070 is only a little bit under 100 FPS average and we got a 115 FPS average for the 6950 XT which means these gpus have some Headroom for 4K at 4K the 6950 XT is winning by 18 and the average is and 15 in the one percent lows the 4070 is averaging a bit under 60 in the mid 50s and the 6950 XD is averaging in the mid 60s so both of them giving a good experience here but one of them's you know averaging over 60 FPS and the other one isn't so certainly something to take note of if you're thinking about 4K gaming on these let's move into a different Unreal Engine 5 game uh and so it's not not in real engine 5g's Unreal Engine 4 game with the Callisto protocol I think this is the best looking Unreal Engine 4 game I've seen it's pretty recent one uh this is The Game's built-in Benchmark and it is very demanding on the one percent lows um so yeah those are pretty bad uh 10 lead in the one percent lows for 6950 XD and 18 lead overall in the average FPS and both gpus delivering a good average FPS with uh you know around 100 on the 6950 XT and in the upper 80s on the 40 70 both of them with bad one percent lows but like I said this Benchmark run in this in this game just crushes one percent lows on like every GPU moving up to 4K Ultra we are seeing a 23 lead for the 6950 XT and the averages and the 19 and the one percent lows uh the one percent lows are just bad overall for both of them though and if you look at that frame time graph it is not very smooth on either of them um that being said the 6950 XT is able to average uh closer to that 60 FPS Mark uh with the 40 70 way more noticeably below it closer to the 50 FPS Mark um in the easier parts of the Benchmark it does bring the average up a little bit but definitely a noticeable win here at 4K for the 6950 XT coming in at quite a bit of power draw though dropping into 1080p Ultra we're now seeing a 17 lead for the 6950 XT and in both the average FPS and in the one percent lows um monitoring the GPU utilization I feel like you do see the 40 70 um I was going to say I thought I saw it drop yeah a little below 100 in in a couple of spots here more so than the 6950 XT it does like you saw it right there going through that corner it's not enough to affect the results too much overall um but I it is not noticeable that when you do hit a CPU limitation at really high frame rates Nvidia usually gets Limited at a lower a lower mark because I think their um driver overhead has more CPU overhead that's just a little side note while we had time to talk about it now God of War is not quite as new as some of the other games we're looking at here but I wanted to test a DirectX 11 game everything else we've been looking at is DirectX 12. here we see 6950xc winning by 17 in the averages and 25 percent the one percent lows although both of them are delivering over 100 FPS average so both of them delivering an excellent 1440p experience here and once again the main reason we're looking at God of War is it uh as our dx11 game uh moving up to 4K Ultra we're seeing a 13 lead in the averages for the 6950 XT and a one and a 13 um also in the one percent lows with the 40 70 averaging around 69 FPS nice and 77 FPS on the 6950 XT um and so yeah both of them delivering a very good uh 4K experience in this game as well so you know if you think about the 4070 for 4K it's certainly something you can consider we saw in the latest titles though that it's certainly going to be struggling but there's definitely games like this where it can deliver great experience there moving down to 1080p we're seeing a 17 lead for the 6950 XT on average but a 33 in the one percent lows I'm curious if that's at all affected by any kind of CPU over uh limitation or overhead um just because we're at such high frame rates now uh that it's more likely that the the rest of the system could uh start to introduce some issues especially in the one percent lows but anyway let's move on to a Vulcan game so I wanted to look at Red Dead Redemption 2 uh running in the Vulcan API uh again because not everything's dx12 so we got some dx11 with God of War some DX uh some Vulcan here 22 lead for the 6950 XD on average I'm not calculating the one percent lows um on my afterburner stats this time because this game has really long load screens during its built-in benchmarks so I'm just using the built-in benchmarks average reported FPS here for this game now moving on to the 4K Max we do see the 4070 over 60 FPS much of the time with the 6950 XT closer to 80 FPS or more much of the time both gpus delivering a very good 4K experience at the maximum preset in this game with a 21 lead for the 6950 XT over the 4070s so definitely a win here um once again not tracking the one percent lows just using the numbers from the end of The Benchmark run to uh compare average results uh dropping down to 1080p it is looking like the GPU utilization on the 4070 is sometimes a little bit lower than what we're seeing on the 1650 XD so once again I'm curious if we're seeing a little bit of CPU limitation entering the numbers here at these high frame rates at 1080p but anyway um based on what we've got we do have an 18 lead on average for the 6950 XT at Fort sorry at 1080p maximum preset in this game so great results overall at all resolutions honestly they were all very playable in Red Dead Redemption 2. let's move on to cyberpunk and I'm gonna mostly use this as a ray Trace 1440p Ray tracing Benchmark but I did want to show its uh its results without Ray tracing enabled at 1440p before we did that where we see a 6950 XT with a 24 lead on average 22 in the one percent low 6950 XD averaging around 100 FPS with the 40 70 averaging closer to 80 FPS so it's important to note that the 6950 XD has this higher Baseline performance by 24 because when we enable Ray tracing the 6950 XT drops performance at a higher rate than the 40 70D does bringing its its lead down relatively but you can see it Ray tracing low uh the 6950 XD actually still has a 10 lead over the 4070 and a nine percent lead in the one percent lows both gpus delivering a very good experience here and while I'm using the ray tracing low preset I am turning off the upscaling that it enables by default so this is native 1440p Ray tracing uh the low setting though like I said it's just the local Shadows no sun Shadows no bounce lighting uh no Reflections so it's not the most impressive Ray tracing implementation but both gpus are giving a high enough frame rate here that you could consider enabling it but like I said by any enabling Ray tracing the AMD GPU lost more performance relative to the 4070 but still has a lead um so we're going to look at the medium Ray tracing next and you'll see that the the Gap continues to change here by going to the medium preset once again adjusting it back to Native resolution though we're seeing the 40 70 leading by 15 on average and in the one percent lows both gpus are struggling now although not unplayable with the 4070 in the mid 40s in this bar scene and the 6950 XT more in the upper mid 30s so um neither GPU delivering an amazing Spirit experience with this level of Ray tracing at a native 1440p of course upscaling is available and we will test that when we look at the ultra preset um now the ray tracing medium keeps the local shadows and it adds in Sun shadows and it adds in some of the bounce lighting although not pushing it as far as it could go and I'm not even talking about RT overdrive um but more meaningful Ray tracing here than what we saw at low and that does bring the 4070 ahead like I said by 15 so we can see the heavier the ray tracing implementation uh the more the the AMD gpus performance falls off and so it not only loses its lead but then starts um you know losing by a wider margin the heavier the ray tracing gets by going to the ray tracing Ultra preset not to be confused with the ray tracing overdrive preset which is a path tracing that is even more demanding uh we see the 4070 ahead by 35 on the averages and 36 percent in the one percent lows um so this is definitely uh showing um you know how how big of an advantage you can get the heavier you push the ray tracing however that being said the 4070 is struggling here it's it's only averaging in the upper 30s and the 1650 XT is only averaging in the upper 20s so it's certainly more playable on the 4070 but these kinds of frame rates aren't really the experience I think most people are looking for when spending 600 or more dollars on a graphics card uh the ray tracing Ultra preset here adds in RT Reflections and bumps up the lighting to have you know the to the ultra setting but it also has the local shadows and the sun Shadows so a lot of Ray tracing going on uh with the ray tracing Ultra here even though we're not doing the RT overdrive now because frame rates were low a lot of people when you push a heavy Ray tracing workload are going to want to upscale in order to help make up for that performance loss so the 4070 I'm using dlss quality and on the uh AMD GPU I'm using fsr2 quality they both render from the same base resolution and try to Output a 4K like image although I think image quality wise dlss does a better job it looks a little bit sharper looks a little bit more like native although fsr2 quality is usable and looks pretty good um now when I'm comparing the the performance number here is I'm comparing those without frame generation the 40 70 is 28 ahead in the averages 24 the one percent lows you can also enable frame generation pushing in over 100 FPS but look at the bot very bottom of the screen where it says average PC latency notice that uh the there's increase to the latency when you enable frame generation whereas usually when you increase frame rate latency drops so there's some downsides to frame generation but watch my full video on frame generation for more info so which one should you buy if they cost the same and I do hope they end up actually costing the same and the 4070 actually does sell for around six hundred dollars uh we'll have to see what happens I wouldn't be surprised if they sell out at launch at that price and then hopefully they do come back in stock at around 600 I would love to see them at 500 but I don't think we'll be seeing that anytime soon anyway but the point is if these do actually end up costing the same on the actual Market which one would you buy I have a feeling in the comment section on this video is going to be very entertaining to read if you like that sort of thing um because I okay I actually think there's an argument to be made for both of these gpus and I think a lot of you were gonna expect me to just say the 4070 uh is slower and costs the Same by a 6950 XT well first of all what case and power supply do you have is your case even able to fit a 6950 XT most of them are huge and the 40 70 is actually a reasonably sized dual Slot 2 fan cooler and can fit in almost anybody's case also what power supply do you have because your power supply might not actually be able to support a 6950 XT but almost everyone's power supply is going to be able to support an RTX 4070 if you haven't actually built your PC yet and you're building new right now you could take those things into consideration but buying a larger case and a bigger power supply while those might actually just help future proof your build and and better longevity overall anyway that can add upfront cost to the build making them maybe not actually be costing the same right so in other words some people should just buy the 40 70 because you literally can't fit a 6950 XD in your case or support it with the power supply also I think some people are just interested in Energy Efficiency their overall power bill over time and all of that so maybe even if you could support it and run it right running at well under 200 Watts usually while gaming versus well over to 300 watts usually while gaming is a noticeable energy difference and some people are definitely going to factor that into their buying decision in addition to that let's talk about features the 4070 is from a newer generation of Technology with some newer features we have things like av1 encoding which is going to matter to some people but for straight up gaming av1 encoding is not relevant but if you stream your gaming record your gaming that kind of a thing do some types of video production all of that then av1 encoding could matter to you if you are gaming then frame generation might matter to you frame generation I think is really cool and they're an i i game on a 40 90 and there have been times when I've even wanted to use frame generation on my 4090 I liked it in plaguetail Requiem quite a bit I've been playing with the RT overdrive mode in cyberpunk and frame generation is a great way to make that a lot more playable of an experience don't confuse the frame rate numbers in frame generation to normal frames 100 FPS using frame generation does not feel the same as 100 FPS without using frame generation but it looks about the same so it really does help your motion fluidity and if you have a high enough base frame rate it still feels pretty good it looks a lot smoother than if you weren't using it and if the base frame rate is high enough there's usually not a lot of visual artifacting that's noticeable because the difference between the two frames that it's kind of generating a frame between is small enough if you're at a high enough frame rate that there's not a lot of artifacting going on there so I think frame generation is very interesting technology and while AMD will probably eventually release an fsr3 that will probably support the 6950 XT that is not something that's out yet we don't know how long you'll have to wait and we also don't know how good it will be so there's certainly things going for the 40 70 there's a case to be made here um also uh you know you do have productivity applications there's a lot of productivity apps that are you know just designed for the larger market share which is NVIDIA so depending on your workflow you need to look up like I'm not reviewing all the productivity apps in the world in this video I'm focusing on gaming but if you use your GPU for more than just gaming you should look at the apps you use in your workflow and how well they support AMD versus Nvidia many apps work great on AMD but there are certainly some that barely work at all on AMD and are just programmed with Nvidia in mind there's a lot of um you know AI workloads things like that so stuff to consider that being said there's a big case to be made for the 6950 XT as well it has more vram we didn't see that causing a lot uh being a much of an advantage in our testing here but we did actually already see it become a bit of an advantage at least in Resident Evil 4. I think when we're running at 4K at the maximum preset I think the outsized advantage there for the 6950 XT was a direct result of it having more vram and so 12 gigabytes vram overall I think especially if you're playing at 1440p isn't really an issue right now the fact that we're already seeing some games pushing right up against that limit does make me think that in time uh maybe even just in a couple of years the time you would still own your gpus if you're buying right now um you know games tend to use more vram over time that is just always the case and so if there's already games bumping up against 12 gigabytes at 1440p um then over time I could see it more likely that you'd have to reduce settings or suffer the consequences of spilling over the vram so certainly something to think about 16 gigabytes of vram is more than 12 and I do imagine that within a couple of years we will already be seeing more into more examples although certainly not in every game where that becomes an advantage the 6950 XD is also just straight up faster in non-ray tracing workloads and because it's faster in non-ray tracing workloads uh in almost every example that we saw at least then when you do enable a light Ray tracing workload the AMD GPU falls off a larger fraction of its Baseline performance but because it started ahead it it can become at least tied if not still a little bit ahead of the 4070 with light Ray tracing workloads which is stuff like what we saw with Lumen with Hardware acceleration things like that and many of the other games um uh with the lighter Ray tracing workloads but we did see that when you push the ray tracing workloads a lot harder the 6950 XD is certainly slower than the 4070 at heavy Ray tracing workloads and the heavier the workload the larger the advantage for the 40 70. um if you're going to upscale to try to make up for that Gap in others you turn on Ray tracing a lot of times you also turn on upscaling then even when you're not enabling frame generation which is not really upscaling when you're upscaling with dlss super resolution you can upscale the with fsr2 as well but I do think dlss looks better than FSR especially if you use it at its more aggressive settings and I've reviewed this in other videos so I have other channels it's definitely the case so the 6950 XT has its advantages in speed and vram but other than that the 4070 wins in features Energy Efficiency and depending on your productivity workload it's going to win there so I think rather than me telling you which one you should buy I told you the situations where each one is better and I'm going to go ahead and let all this arguing take place in the comment section because I know it will there's going to be people saying that you would be absolutely stupid to buy a slower 12 gigabyte GPU when you could buy a faster 16 gigabyte GPU and they certainly have a point and there's going to be people saying that buying a Nvidia GPU with better features better productivity workload support um less vram but still a lot with 12 and you know things like frame generation and better Ray tracing workloads and all of that they're going to say you're stupid if you buy the AMD GPU and they have a point they both have a point you guys argued out in the comments section have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 311,343

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Id: z109Di2g5s8

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023