 It's obvious that Nvidia GPUs are just plain better. I mean, look how few people are buying Radeon cards and if everyone's doing it, it must be right. Right? Ha. Wrong. Actually, when you look at the price and performance of AMD GPUs right now, on paper, they're the obvious choice. You can get a 6700 XT, which delivers near RTX 3070 performance for just about the price of an RTX 3060. And we just got our hands on a one-click tuning software from Monosmus, the creator of ClockTuner for Ryzen, that he claims will put a 6800 XT, this isn't it, a 6800 XT in the same performance class as a 3090 Ti, a GPU that costs twice as much. Now, obviously a claim like that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But if there is even any free performance on the table, it's worth investigating to make sure that you don't get taken for a ride. A ride to this message from our sponsor. Enlisted. Enlisted is a free to play multiplayer World War II shooter. Jump into large scale battles with authentic moments in history like the invasion of Normandy. Check it out by following the link in the description. The truth is, I'm at least partly to blame for the current situation. After some very bad experiences with AMD GPU drivers that delayed our video production almost every time we tried to use them, we switched to almost exclusively using Nvidia GPUs in our showcase builds and in our test rigs. I mean, during a review for a new card from AMD, we would often find that it was pretty okay, some instability or bugs notwithstanding, but then it would invariably sit on the shelf until it was needed as a point of comparison for some other review. For me, the experience that turned me off of AMD was a bit more personal. Back in 2015, I was swayed by the please by this person to vote for competition with your wallet. I used my incredibly hard-earned cash, I was a student at the time, to buy a Radeon R9 380. My favorite game at the time was Dirt Rally and it had an AMD splash screen at the start. Well, it should be fine, right? Yeah, you would think so. Turns out not only was AMD's performance subpar, but due to driver issues, the AMD GPUs couldn't properly render foliage and shadows, in effect making my experience barely better than the anemic GT 740 I had before, it had DDR3 RAM in it, in a game with AMD's logo on the splash screen. It was a similar story in many of my favorite games too. You can tell how over it he is by how red his face is right now. However, there is good reason to think that things have changed. Back in July of this year, AMD completely rewrote their DirectX 11 drivers, apparently dramatically increasing stability and performance at the same time. So to unscientifically test this, Harrison and Alex from the writing team switched to Team Red for two weeks and played video games like they normally would, to see if anything wonky happened. I wasn't informed, people were just taking GPUs home, but okay. You're in Hawaii and it was fine. The point is that after I made the switch and installed AMD's drivers, I honestly just completely forgot that I'd swapped the GPU until this morning when I looked at the script again. I didn't even have to adjust any of my in-game settings, going from an RTX 3080 to an RX 6800 XT. I could have easily just saved like $200 by going Team Red. Of course, you guys deserve a more scientific approach to testing, so we handed the cards that we'll be looking at today over to our labs team to whip up some charts and graphs that I assume you're pouring over in detail right now. If you're not super detail oriented, don't worry about that. The bottom line is this, AMD is at or near the performance of Nvidia in traditionally rendered, so not ray traced, games at anywhere from a hundred to $200 cheaper. And that's before we pull out our secret weapon. When Asma sent us an early preview of what he's calling Hydra 1.2, a user-friendly tool for RDNA 2 architecture Radeon cards that can be used to easily improve both performance and power consumption. Alex is going to show us how it works. To get Hydra right now, you have to subscribe to One Usmas's Patreon, but this tool will be free once it's, you know, not broken and stuff. Speaking of which, if you have an Intel CPU, it won't work unless you have an F model. So right now the IGPU will take priority when you boot it up and it just doesn't work. I'm sure that's very easy to fix, but we have an i9-12900KF in here. So that solved that problem. First of all, a warning, you can destroy your processors by using the software. If you do something really, really bad, it's probably fine. Most of the time you'll just crash your stuff, but you know, you need the warning right there. So this is your basic overclocking dashboard. Your sort of main stuff is all in here. So we have like this eraser, deletes all of your stuff and restores it all back to your factory defaults. You can also come back in here so that you change your core frequency. You can save it right there. Boom, it's saved. Now that save button only applies it to, you know, this. It doesn't actually apply it to the GPU. So what this is basically doing is changing stuff within the GPU drivers itself. The power play table. And that's what's doing your overclocking. You do that with this little lightning bolt. Then driver resets and you're good to go. Now all this stuff right here is just your basic manual overclocking, but why would you overclock something yourself when you can have just the robots do it for you? Let's go over the diagnostic window. GPU, there we go. This allows us to change what kind of a test we're doing. So we can change it from this right here is open GL. You can go to whatever you want, it's fine. The duration is how long it's going to test for stability. Right now it's 90 seconds. That's okay. But if this was my personal rig and I was going to use the GPU like day in day out, I would increase this by quite a bit. It's a sort of thing. You don't want your computer to crash in the middle of a ranked game. Below that we have the do overclocking window. This right here is the real meat and potatoes of Hydro 1.2. Basically what this does is move your whole voltage frequency curve. So your GPU is going to have something that looks a little bit like this. Given a frequency, you will have a certain voltage to make sure that it doesn't crash there. Now, AMD doesn't want to have this like right on the edge of crashing all the time. So they're a little bit conservative with their values. What Hydra is doing is just moving this curve over a tiny bit, seeing if it crashes. If it's all good, then it just moves over a little bit more. Once it gets instability, pushes it back a little bit, you're good to go. And that is exactly what we're doing right here. So you can see our start offset. That is negative 43.75 millivolts. So we'll be starting with the curve moved over by that much. And then the step offset is 6.25. So every time that it does an iteration, it's going to be decreasing the voltage by another 6.25 millivolts. So that's how you can see for the same amount of power, you're going to be getting it going faster because let's say default, we have this amount of voltage, this frequency. You get it. You get it. GP goes faster. The last field here is the power offset. This is if you want to increase your power so that you have a custom water cooler, you can just crank your power rate up. So say right now it's 15, that increased our TDP from 255 watts to 292. I'm just going to set that back to zero. Additional power tune up here is where some things get a little bit strange. So all the do overclocking is concerned about your GPU core. Whereas additional power tuning is focused a little bit more on the memory. On some GPUs, if you get really good RAM, you can actually drop your thermals by a lot while also overclocking the GPU core if you're able to drop the voltage of your memory chips. Now, with some of the other ones, it doesn't work at all. Just hope you get lucky. Well, Brandon, should we run it? Let's go. Here we have MSI combustor. It's not crashing. So that's good. And now we wait. Okay. The diagnostic process successfully completed. So we have a core curve offset of negative 68.75 millivolts. Should have been 0.025 more. We'll fix that later. Anyway, our total board power has stayed exactly the same. Our core frequency has only increased, what is that? 72 megahertz. So that's not a whole lot. Oh wait, average FPS in MSI combustor went up by one. So it's not incredible. That didn't do too much. But what we did see is about a three to 5% increase in games after we had done this. So not too bad. To be clear, what we're doing isn't black magic. Nvidia, and AMD for that matter, are running these kinds of optimizations constantly on their GPUs to try to squeeze as much performance out as possible. We're just using the excellent access that AMD provides to overclockers to fly a little closer to the sun. To be clear, three to 5%, it's not a ton of extra performance. But as I like to say, it's better than a kick in the teeth. And given that it didn't cost us anything but 15 to 20 minutes of our time, and it didn't even increase power consumption or heat, I'd say it's kind of a no brainer. Not everyone has 15 minutes though. Thankfully, there's an easier way. Linusmus created a one button overclocking tool that he calls Monster Profiles. And it's with one of these that he claims we should be able to beat a 3090 Ti for half the price. Let's give it a shot. For the RX 6800 XT and RX 6700 XT, they are Radeon Monster Profiles. So all we have to do is click this profile button right here. So we have 355 good bin and bad bin. Those are coming soon. We don't actually have those. And given this cooler, that would not work anyway. We also have our 305 watt good bin and 255. So that's stock power, good bin. We're going to try the 305 watt good bin. Use it. Apply. Radeon Monster Profile enabled. This is where we should be able to beat a 3090 Ti. This guy right here in Time Spy got us a score of 21,425. Can we beat it? Well, I'm not going to let the whole thing run because I already ran it and I'm just going to spoil it for you. We did not beat the 3090 Ti. The score of our 6800 XT was 21,255. Just missed it. Under 200 points off. But that still is damn close for a GPU that's half as much money. This thing works really quite well. Although honestly, in real games outside of synthetic benchmarks, it's not quite as impressive but at the same time, it's free performance. You can just put it on here. Your card goes faster. The Monster Profile doesn't always work out great though. Our 6700 XT, this one right here, absolutely refused to work with any of them. Even the bad bin profile caused it to immediately crash. The good news though is that Hydra's automated tuning process, you know, the one that takes about 15, 20 minutes, did work for this card and we actually managed a similar performance improvement by fine tuning the voltage frequency curve, just like on our 6800 XT, which puts this card comfortably in competition with Nvidia's 3070 and 3070 Ti for a hundred or in some cases, well over a hundred dollars less. So the 3090 Ti slaying claims were a little optimistic. But hey, free performance is free performance. And I've got to say that our experience with these cards, both on the bench and for the writers at home, lends credibility to AMD's claims of much better drivers. Though there are some inconvenient details in all of this. Nvidia has some feature benefits over AMD that simply cannot be ignored. Although AMD did recently improve their AMF encoder to include B-frames, it still isn't quite at the same level as Nvidia's NVENC. And if the games that you enjoy support real-time ray traced lighting and you wish to enable said ray tracing feature, Nvidia has a pretty clear performance advantage. And that's before you enable their excellent DLSS machine learning powered image upscaling technology. AMD of course has their own version of DLSS called FSR, but frankly it isn't as good, at least not yet. By the time we released this video though, the story may have changed because AMD will have announced their upcoming lineup of RDNA 3 GPUs, hopefully with decent pricing and an even more competitive feature set. But with how affordable and tunable RDNA 2 is today, I think these cards are going to stay relevant for quite some time. Like our sponsor! Enlisted! 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