Big Navi is here, and AMD is finally giving Nvidia some real competition in PC gamer market. Everyone and their dog wanted to get Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 3080 when it released back in September, but supply shortages have made it hard to find. AMD's arrival on the scene with its own high-end graphics card might mean that stymied potential Nvidia customers will look towards Big Navi to solve their next-gen gaming woes.
But should they? That's the question asked by Digital Foundry as they compare AMD's Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT GPUs to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 graphics cards. And as it turns out, which card is best largely depends on which game you're playing and at what resolution.
In general, AMD’s beefier VRAM count allows for greater resolutions in some games, but not all of them. For example, Borderlands 3 when played at 4K sees the Radeon RX 6800 soundly trounce the RTX 3070, averaging more than 10 frames per second in benchmarks. Meanwhile, the RX 6800 XT renders 2.5% more frames than the RTX 3080 and at a lower MSRP.
But switch over to Control and the story is reversed. Here, GeForce reigns supreme with the RTX 3070 beating out the RX 6800 and the RTX 3080 getting way more frames than the RX 6800 XT at 4K resolutions. At times, the 3080 would get almost 20 extra fps compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Then get swapped back for Doom Eternal. Here, the RX 6800 beats the RTX 3070, while the RTX 3080 leads the RX 6800 XT. Drop resolutions down to 1440p, however, and the RX 6800 XT closes in on the RTX 3080's performance but doesn't quite beat the Nvidia powerhouse.
Death Stranding has much the same story as Doom Eternal on 4K, but swap down to 1440p and both Radeon cards beat out their Nvidia counterparts handily.
Generally, the pecking order seems to be RTX 3080, RX 6800 XT, RX 6800, and RTX 3070, but that’s not always the case depending on the game. To make it even more complicated, AMD plans to release features for current Big Navi video cards sometime after launch that might change the order again.
Take a look at Digital Foundry’s video above to see how each game compares on each video card.
Source: Digital Foundry