Benchmarks AMD RX 6800 vs RTX 3070 4K Testing In Best 10 new PC Games @ Navi RX 6800 vs 3070
0MD has just announced the RDNA2 line up of GPUs. Finally, there’s competition at the top of the GPU market with AMD’s new offerings claiming to go head to head with the Ampere GPUs from Nvidia at each key market segment and price point.
The RX 6800 is pitched directly at the RTX 3070. Both of these cards aim to provide excellent 1440p gaming performance and 60FPS at 4K resolution. Both claim to exceed the capabilities of last generations range-topper the RTX 2080 Ti.
The RX 6800 is slated for launch on the 18th November so let’s dig into the specs and see which card will be best suited for your next build or upgrade. Whilst we now have confirmation from AMD that the RX 6800 possesses 3840 Shader units, 96 ROPS and 60 compute units and RT cores, we haven’t included them in the comparison chart above because they aren’t directly comparable to Nvidias Ampere architecture. As such it’s impossible to speculate about ‘relative’ performance based on those numbers. Similarly, ‘boost clocks’ are meaningless in isolation because what each architecture can achieve in each clock cycle differs so massively. We can’t make assumptions about these numbers. What we can base our analysis off, for now, is the claims made by AMD in the announcement itself.
AMD showed their own metrics comparing the RX 6800 to the RTX 2080ti – we can take this as a proxy for the RTX 3070 since both perform very similarly.
At 4K AMD laid out their market stall with the slide heading ‘4K60’ meaning they intend this card to achieve 60FPS in 4K gaming. The precise settings they used to generate this graphic aren’t clear, but using the RTX 2080ti as a yardstick we can see that the RX 6800 appears to deliver around $80 worth more value than the RTX 3070, beating it in all titles under test and achieving at least 60FPS. One interesting detail here is the ‘+smart access memory’ footnote – these results are achieved using a Zen 3 CPU allowing better communication between CPU and GPU VRAM over PCIe 4.0. Nonetheless these results are impressive and show that if you’re a 4K gamer on a budget, the RX6800 deserves serious consideration.
At 1440p and again with ‘smart access memory’ the RX 6800 really does shine achieving well over 100FPS across the board even in demanding titles like Battlefield V and Borderlands 3 and with settings at ‘Ultra’. At this resolution, you’re getting the full benefit of detailed rendering at high visual settings along with high FPS. Given the price point of this GPU, we consider 1440p or 1440p ultrawide the best resolutions for the RX 6800 providing a fantastic balance of framerate and visual fidelity.
The RX 6800 has a huge 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, doubling the amount of it’s competitor the RTX 3070. There’s also 128MB of what AMD call ‘Infinity Cache’ which is very fast memory directly accessible by the GPU core. This memory can hold frequently accessed data critical to processing performance and accelerate the GPU’s overall capabilities. Whilst the core specifications of the VRAM are the same with both using GRRD6, AMD has achieved higher bandwidth and claim this Infinity cache has triple the bandwidth of the conventional memory.
The utility of 16Gb VRAM for gaming is arguable: So long as there’s enough VRAM the game won’t perform any better with more, it simply goes unused. However, the RTX 3070 certainly looked a little miserly with ‘just’ 8GB on a $500 current Gen GPU and AMD have taken this opportunity to clearly beat that metric by doubling available VRAM. If you’re looking to game at 4K or wish to modify games with higher resolution textures there’s no doubt you’ll want as much VRAM as possible and the RX 6800 offers that at the most affordable price point yet. It’s likely that this doubling of VRAM accounts for much of the price difference between the RX 6800 and RTX 3070.