 Haha, look at this guy. Do you feel old yet? Cause I sure do. That was me, the last time AMD had a truly competitive top tier Radeon graphics card. That was over seven years ago. And this is me, the last time AMD sat on top as the single GPU king with the Radeon HD 7970. And that is why the excitement around the RX 6800 series is so high and why it would be so devastating if AMD let us all down again. Thankfully, spoiler alert, they didn't. Watch on. And watch what apps are stealing your bandwidth using our sponsor, GlassWire. It's an easy way to diagnose and fix issues like poor video quality in online meetings. Get 25% off today using offer code Linus at the link down below. We'll be right back. Do you feel old yet? Cause I sure do. That was me, the last time AMD sat on top as the single GPU king with the Radeon HD 7970. And that is why the excitement around the RX 6800 series is so high and why it would be so devastating if AMD let us all down again. And watch what apps are stealing your bandwidth 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory and a new Infinity cache that promises to significantly improve memory performance without the additional cost associated with GDDR6X. Not only that, but AMD also announced a technology that they're calling Smart Access Memory, which lets compatible CPUs access the GPU's entire memory space at once, rather than in small 256 megabyte chunks as before, offering a significant performance boost. It's because of that last feature that we're using a top-end Ryzen 5000 series CPU for our testing, which along with offering leading gaming performance is the only CPU platform that currently supports this feature. Before you get too concerned about being left out though, both AMD and Nvidia have told us that it's pretty much a fancy marketing name for resizable bar support, which is something that Microsoft is pushing for and that Nvidia claims will be supported on their GPUs soon. I'd also be surprised if we don't see Intel ad platform support in the future, but the future's the future. Let's see how things look today. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was one of the first titles to support ray tracing, and with it disabled, Nvidia stands no chance against AMD, unless we enabled DLSS, and that's a big deal, but there is an asterisk here. When we turn on ray tracing, Radeon performance suffers tremendously, with the 6800 XT sitting 13 frames per second below the RTX 3080. We wanted to test the same thing in Wolfenstein Youngblood, but unfortunately that game hasn't been updated yet with Vulkan ray tracing support for AMD, so we'll have to settle for traditional rendering where the 6800 XT is once again trailing the RTX 3080, with another asterisk. With smart access memory enabled, AMD retakes the lead in this traditional rendering scenario with a single digit, but measurable performance improvement. More good news follows with Microsoft Flight Simulator, where AMD managed the same or better performance than Nvidia across the board, although here we see a scenario where smart access memory has no tangible benefit, so your mileage, quite literally, can vary game to game. CSGO gives us one scenario where Nvidia pulls ahead in traditional rasterized rendering, but look at the difference in minimum frame rates. Smart access memory makes a huge difference for AMD here, and arguably that's even more important for e-sports titles like this than the average frame rate would be. Finally, there's Minecraft RTX, and it's, well, it's a mess on AMD. Even without DLSS, the 6800 XT only gets half the average FPS compared to the RTX 3080, and even the RTX 3070 is 50% faster than the 6800. This really highlights the weakness of AMD's first-generation Ray accelerators compared to Nvidia's more mature second-gen RT cores. A note on DLSS before we continue. DLSS is a contentious thing because it's an upscaler. The scene is rendered at a lower resolution and then intelligently scaled up using Nvidia's tensor cores. Some would call measuring performance with DLSS cheating, but whether it's cheating or whether it's not, it looks pretty darn good, and it's something real gamers are using that AMD doesn't yet have an answer for. If FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is their analogous feature, were ready in time for launch, then we might have had playable frame rates in Minecraft with ray tracing enabled, but instead we'll need to wait for the RX 6900 XT. Get subscribed, by the way, so you don't miss our coverage of that card when it launches in December. Now, productivity used to be an area that Radeon excelled, but it seems that AMD had to make some sacrifices to catch up in gaming. In OpenCL versus CUDA, Radeon outperforms GeForce in longer renders, while the opposite is true for shorter renders like BMW. Radeon doesn't currently support ray-accelerated rendering, which puts Nvidia light years ahead with their optics renderer, and it's worth noting that while there is a plugin for Radeon ProRender that is accelerated, the output is rough and looks nothing like what it should. Similarly, we couldn't even run Luxmark, or rather we could, but the end result was so mangled that it wasn't even recognizable, let alone usable. This led to a problem for us in terms of productivity testing, because most productivity software that takes advantage of the GPU is optimized for CUDA, and OpenCL implementations are getting old enough now that they're beginning to break. We did find a renderer that supports both OpenCL and CUDA, Indigo, but Nvidia had the lead in it anyway. Specviewperf gave us some blow trading though, with 3DS Max performing better on Radeons, while Katia and Creo were much better on GeForce, and the memory-intensive Energy, Medical, and Siemens NX workloads heavily favored Radeon thanks to the Infinity Cache. Maya and SolidWorks on the other hand, once again fell to Nvidia's faster compute engine. As AMD predicted when we asked about its impact on productivity, smart access memory made no difference here, just like our new keyboard shirts won't make you a better typist, they just make you look cooler, lttstore.com. It looks like AMD's expanded vapor chamber cooler design though is roughly comparable to Nvidia's with both the RX 6800 GPUs closely matching their team green counterparts, with the curious exception of the tail end of the test, where Specviewperf's Medical and Siemens NX benchmarks happen to fall. As you might recall, that's one of the areas where AMD absolutely spanked Nvidia. As far as clock stability goes, it looks like AMD is slightly less consistently running at maximum boost clock, but it's pretty similar across the board. You might expect that with clocks going as low as they do at idle, power consumption would be lower than Nvidia's when you're not doing anything. Unfortunately, that's not so. Still, power consumption on the whole appears lower with some exceptions. So you can again see that dip for Nvidia here, suggesting a bottleneck with Medical and Siemens NX that AMD isn't experiencing. You can't see it on this graph unfortunately, but we recorded a spike as high as 270 watts for the RX 6800 and an eye-watering 411 watts for the 6800 XT. Thankfully, that's not all the time, so it's not really a problem in practice. That is, as long as you've got a quality power supply that won't trip its overcurrent protection under a momentary spike like that. The main trouble with the RX 6800 series, aside from the last-gen ray tracing performance, which is becoming more important day by day, is its lack of truly useful features in comparison to Nvidia. Not only do they not yet have a DLSS equivalent that's ready to help out their weaker ray accelerators, they're not even apologetic about it. Here's what they told us when we asked about the ray tracing performance and why they weren't comparing with Nvidia, even for press briefings. Super resolution techniques like DLSS do not produce the same visual quality as native rendering, especially with motion. I mean, yeah, that's true, but it's gotten pretty good, and that fact alone doesn't change that Nvidia has it and AMD doesn't. And that was literally the difference between playable ray tracing and sub-60 frame rates in our testing. Also, AMD, if you really thought it was that garbage, why are you working on an analogous feature? Like, we weren't expecting AMD to blow us away with their first-gen ray tracing support, it's just that this Fox and the Grapes response is a little bit tone deaf. Of course, AMD has a point. Not everyone cares about upscaling or ray tracing, but then AMD's hardware video encoder is still frankly rubbish with what looks like significant chroma subsampling and macro block artifacts compared to Nvidia at the same resolution and bit rate in X264. It's basically unwatchable. And on the subject of media, Nvidia is also rolling features like RTX voice background noise cancellation, AI camera background removal, and more that are accelerated by their tensor cores. AMD currently has no equivalent machine learning hardware in the Radeon 6000 series. This puts streamers and content creators, and frankly, even work-from-home professionals who like to game in their off hours, at a disadvantage with Radeon compared to if they had bought GeForce instead. Speaking personally, those features really are enough to compel me to go GeForce, even if I didn't give two hoots about ray tracing. AMD is trying to make up for this somewhat though by focusing more on game enhancements via variable rate shading, mesh shading, and fidelity effects. But these are up to the developer to include. You can't just turn on the ambient occlusion feature on any game that you want. This combined with enhanced media decoding support and support for full fat HDMI 2.1 with FreeSync, well, they merely bring AMD up to date rather than allowing them to leap over Nvidia who already has mesh shading, variable rate shading, ambient occlusion sharpening on top of all the other things that AMD is missing out on here. So I'm not disappointed by the RX 6800 series. AMD delivered on everything they promised in their keynote. But if you were hoping that there was gonna be some extra dazzle, you know, one more thing, then you might feel a bit let down. What you see is what you get. And at these prices, they're just a little tough to recommend. The RX 6800 XT is just $50 less than the RTX 3080 and gets you roughly similar performance in traditional gaming with a big L in almost every other area. The RX 6800, well, honestly, it's even tougher. At $80 more than the competing RTX 3070, well, it competes well until you turn on ray tracing or start streaming. But it's also only $70 more for the significantly faster XT model, which doesn't seem like a lot more by the time you're already spending $600 on a freaking graphics card. So maybe the 6800 exists mostly as like a kicker skew and we'll see some crazy promotions on it or something. All in all, A plus for effort. But anyone who wanted to see Nvidia get absolutely embarrassed this generation is just gonna have to wait for AMD's next crack at top tier gaming performance. Though AMD is probably still gonna move a lot of these given that you can't actually buy an RTX card at the moment now that I think about it. Just like I always think about our segues, get the best prices and best selection on PC hardware and technology at any of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. Micro Center's got new prices on the ninth generation eight core CPUs from Intel with the 9,700K at just 199 and 9,900K at 299. And you can save an additional 20 bucks when you bundle with a compatible eligible motherboard. And you can follow the link in the description for a free 32 gig flash drive and 32 gig micro SD card valid in store only. No purchase necessary. Really, no purchase necessary. How the hell does that work? Well, thanks for watching guys. Go check out our coverage of AMD's where gaming begins to get a little more background on today's launch. We decided to focus this video more on just like the performance and feature analysis. Let us know if you like that approach.