 The most powerful gaming CPU on the planet. Is it enough to play modern games on a massive 8K OLED TV like this Z10 88 inch from LG? And what graphics card could possibly be worthy? To find out, we have the two absolute fastest top-of-the-line GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA. Representing Team Red and weighing in at a cool $1,500 US dollars is the ROG Strix Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled Edition. And for Team Green, we've got the $2,000 MSI NVIDIA RTX 3090 Supreme X. Either one of them alone costs more than an Xbox Series S, Series X, and PlayStation 5 combined. And is capable of consuming in excess of 700 watts of power under heavy load at stock speeds. And today, we'll be overclocking both of them to their absolute limits. Fortunately, our sponsor, Csonic, has got us covered with their TX 1080 plus Titanium power supply. It's efficient, quiet, fully modular, and comes with a 12-year warranty. Let's make this poor thing hurt, shall we? The MSI RTX 3090 Supreme X is a powerful card to be sure, and at least on paper, it is well ahead of its competitor, the Radeon 6900 XT. Thanks in part to its super fast GDDR6X memory. But here's the thing, AMD pulled off a pretty major surprise when the RX 6900 XT managed to hold its own against this monster in traditional rendering at 4K. Thanks in large part to its even faster, but much smaller, Infinity Cache. Also, the built-in water cooling on this version of the card can't hurt its chances. Actually, both of these are among the best available in their class, featuring overkill cooling, a factory overclock, triple 8-pin power connectors, and of course, RGB for that extra FPS. And the Radeon actually has another trick up its sleeve that Nvidia doesn't have support for yet. Smart Access Memory, also known as Resizable Bar Support, allows the CPU in our system, because we're using a Ryzen 5900 XT, to access all of the GPU's memory at once, rather than in the traditional 256 megabyte chunks. This would ordinarily speed up memory-intensive games, sometimes by a lot, but whether that advantage translates to 8K remains to be seen. Just like my sick limited edition foil GPU shirt from LTDStore.com! Like these GPU's, we can only make a limited number of these, by the way, and we are expecting them to sell out fast, so go, go, go. Anyway, in the meantime, our GPU bench is ready to freaking go here, with the aforementioned Ryzen 5950X 16-core CPU, a fresh install of Windows, and of course, our Seasonic Prime TX 1080-plus Titanium power supply. Again, that's to be sure that we're not bottlenecking ourselves in any meaningful way. We're also going to be using these tools from Nvidia right here, to monitor our power consumption in real time, as we run our tests. So that's pretty fun. There's no way to please everyone these days, hey? They want you to test in a closed case, so that you don't give a thermal advantage to some card designs over others, but the thing about a closed case is that it's, like, you can't access the I.O. when you have the power measurement stuff hooked up in there. It's not going to happen, everything. Before we actually overclock the cards, we're doing some baseline testing at their stock speeds to see how they compete at 8K. Like, AMD technically has the VRAM for it, way more than the RTX 3080, but it's slower, so like, that's tough, hey? Yeah, it's like almost half the speed. Yeah, it seems like it'd be fine for, you know, working on large projects, like as a prosumer card, but for actual gaming? And then again, we will try to overclock it later. That's actually not terrible. It's like 50 plus FPS, and remember, this is a G-Sync capable display, so... It is not currently enabled. Oh, did you not enable it? It's best to disable it for benchmarking. Oh, that's true. Still, in terms of the gaming experience, 55 FPS with adaptive sync? Not bad. Certainly, like, on a console, you wouldn't complain about that? Nope, on a PC, I wouldn't complain about that. Yeah, maybe not in this game. In this game, I'd like to have a little bit more. Oh, we're definitely getting some judder, though. You can really see it in those panning shots. Yeah, with G-Sync, that wouldn't be such a big deal, though. Yeah, I want to get out into a more open area, but I'm getting like 75, 80 FPS in here. Man, this game is so well optimized. It could probably run on, like, a toaster if you really needed to. How are we doing for power consumption, Anthony? Looks like we've peaked at 461 watts, and we're averaging about 420. Haha, nice. Something to note here, though, is that while the game is never dropping below 60 FPS, Anthony, do you see that judder and those micro-studders? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's like hitching every, I don't know, like, half a second. Every tenth frame, maybe? Yeah. Yeah. So, hopefully, overclocking will help us a little bit with that. Let's see. Oh, it's hot. Oh, it's hot. Ow-wee. Ow-wee. Yeah, that backplate is used actually for cooling. Ah, yeah, no kidding. Jeez. Well, it's handling it, actually. Looks like Nvidia might not have the only 8K gaming card on the market. What does the frame rate display show? Uh, it shows 55. Oh, wow, that's... Okay. Very similar, and you know what? I need to get out into a more open area first, but it actually doesn't feel quite as juddery. How's our power consumption? Power consumption has peaked so far at 384, and we're in around 311 average. And to be clear, that's just the GPU, the numbers we're talking about there, not the entire system. So, yeah, like 100 watts less for similar? Yeah, similar-ish. It's a lower FPS reported by the game, but it's actually a little bit smoother feeling in terms of the frame delivery. Hmm. Which is not what I actually expected. Uh, FreeSync isn't on, right? I could check that. Uh, I don't know, I see tearing, I don't think so. Okay, so back to the same thing with the pillars. Look how much smoother that is. I think we're gonna need to run some more testing and get the peeps some real numbers here. The rest of our games went about as you'd expect, with AMD trailing Nvidia significantly at about three quarters of the performance of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and it's even worse with ray tracing enabled. And that doesn't even consider DLSS, Nvidia's deep learning super sampling that runs the game at a lower resolution, then uses machine learning to upscale it. It's a great feature, and in supported games, honestly, Nvidia is just untouchable. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a similar story in minimum frame rates, but the average closes the gap somewhat, while Forza Horizon brings us much closer at roughly a 10% performance difference. Finally, huh, would you look at that? CSGO has AMD winning at stock speeds. Very interesting. This simpler title lends credence to the notion that AMD's raw raster performance may be higher than Nvidia's, regardless of memory throughput, and F1 2020 gives us another win for Team Red. Dang, I was worried this wasn't gonna be much of a, like, ultimate showdown, but... Turns out we've got a battle on our hands. Now let's get to overclocking. Nvidia's newer versions of GeForce Experience provide a way to automatically do overclock scanning and set power targets. Unfortunately, adjusting the voltage or power target made the OC scan crash the system, and MSI Afterburner similarly either crashed or settled on an unstable overclock whenever performing an OC scan. For a while there, we thought our card might already just be at peak performance, but manually overclocking, we were able to bump the core by about 100 megahertz and 800 megahertz on the memory before we started losing stability and performance to downclocking and error correction. In order to do that though, of course, we have to raise our power limit... And apply. As for your core voltage, honestly, increasing it might work against you as much as for you because you'll be more likely to hit your power limit. So Anthony says he actually got about the same results with it cranked as with it just to at nothing. Whatever, you know what, you only live once. I don't know, crank it. YOLO. YOLO. Something to watch out for here is that those GDDR6X memory chips get extremely hot even under normal circumstances, and they are going to get even hotter now. So the backplate of this card is necessary for keeping them cool. So far, this actually doesn't really seem any better. We're getting about 70, 65 to 75 FPS, which is pretty much what we saw before. I'm also feeling a bit more stuttering than I did on AMD. That's something that based on the measurements we took ahead of time, we were not expecting. Yeah, there's definitely a judder. Yeah. See that? Did it look worse than the Radeon card to you? I feel like the Radeon didn't have as severe stuttering, at least based on what I'm seeing here and what's in my memory. Maybe I'm just crazy, but it looks worse here. That does not look like 70 frames per second, period. Yeah, it looks kind of like 45 or 50. Yeah, if that, and not a smooth 50. Yeah, it almost reminds me of the micro-stutter you'd get from multi-GPU. Yeah. Frame rate high, consistency low. How are we doing for power? 500 peak, and the average looks like it's floating in around 440, 450. So we're up a lot higher. Yep, that's higher, all right. Half our power supply dedicated just to the GPU, and this tool does not measure fine enough time increments to see these micro-spikes that can take place from time to time. Now we'll throw the AMD card back in, and I'll try not to punk myself here and touch the back plate. We expect it to be even hotter than last time. AMD's Radeon software offers overclocking controls directly. Setting the card to 2600 megahertz seems to be about as high as we can go out of the gate, any higher, and it'll throttle to this speed anyway. Just add full voltage and a power target, and then the memory, we were actually able to set as high as possible, and it's possible we could have even gone farther if we had a bit more control over memory frequency. Okay, so let's try cranking the power limit for one thing. Main frequency you can leave, max frequency, 2600, and RAM just, whoop, you can go advanced control just to see how much that is. Yeah, 2150. Okay, apply changes. Okay, it was not my imagination last time. This is noticeably smoother than the Nvidia experience, although if the numbers are anything to go by, it's a bit of an outlier. What's also a better experience compared to Nvidia though is the overclocking headroom on this card. At the low end, we still only got about a 5% improvement, but on the high end, we were looking at up to 15, 16% faster performance. So that's pretty cool. This might be my imagination, but it seems like it is far smoother than before. I think it is smoother. I don't know if I would describe it as far smoother. It's definitely smoother though. We're getting 60 to 70 mid-FPS. We were getting like 50 to 60 before, weren't we? Actually that's true, isn't it? Okay, yeah, and it is noticeably smoother to operate. I'm surprised. AMD comes out with a pretty clear win, at least in Doom Eternal. Although you know what, Anthony? I am seeing more stuttering now that we've overclocked it, or judder rather. See that how it'll go smoothly for a little bit and then it'll like, like the Nvidia card? How's our power consumption? Looks like 415 watts maximum. We're averaging around 360, 362 watts as far as, you know. Not too shabby. Overall, neither card had terribly impressive overclocking headroom, but that's not a huge surprise considering that both of them already had factory overclocks applied. For our results, we did eke out a frame or two here and there on both cards in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but ray tracing remains a pain point for AMD with minimums that are still in the single digits. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Forza Horizon, meanwhile, put AMD a couple of percentage points closer to Nvidia than stock, which in Forza puts the 6900 XT within the 10% mark. And as we might expect, CSGO improved by a significant margin, maintaining AMD's spot well ahead of Nvidia, but this time in every measurable way. The TLDR then is this, AMD's best puts up a valiant effort for the $500 price difference against the 3090, sometimes coming close or even beating it at 8K, but only sometimes. It still falls short in more demanding titles, even with its greater overclocking headroom, which only serves to further highlight the importance of technologies like DLSS and how much not having it is holding AMD back right now. And not just in ray tracing either. Outside of Doom Eternal, which surprisingly was quite a bit smoother on AMD, GDDR6 seems to be helping Nvidia out tremendously, because remember, 8K is four times the number of pixels as 4K. Just the frame buffer alone, that is, each frame displayed on the screen is nearly 128 megabytes, which is exactly enough to hobble the 6000 series 128 megabytes of ridiculously fast infinity cache, leaving them with memory that's just over half as fast as Ampere's for everything else. With that said, if AMD had a DLSS analog to reduce this memory footprint, AMD might have been more competitive more often. So it seems reasonable to suggest that if AMD had equipped the 6900 XT with GDDR6X, things might look quite a bit different, which makes me wonder how much of a bottleneck it would have been for Nvidia if they had stuck with PCI Express Gen 3 this time around. Get subscribed for our video, because we are going to be exploring that by the way. So then, is 8K gaming a lie? Well, it's complicated. While I participated in some of Nvidia's early promotion for 8K gaming on the RTX 3090, and it does work in the same way that a primitive hammer can pound in a nail, it's clear that it's not practical for every game today, and as more visually elaborate titles trickle out over the next few years, new hammers will be much more appropriate tools to handle them at this resolution. But this was still an interesting exercise for a couple of reasons. First, because of how demanding it is, gaming at 8K can give us a glimpse into how a card's performance might evolve over time. AMD famously squeezed several years of life and performance improvements out of its Radeon 7970, and it looks like compared to Nvidia, they may have a bit more headroom here again. Oops, AMD card's over there. And second, while you might roll your eyes and say, who cares, nobody has an 8K monitor, the same was true for 4K a short while ago, and even if you only use a 4K display, super sampling or running at a higher resolution than native, then downscaling it, is still the best way to reduce shimmering and other artifacts while preserving 100% of the detail in an image. And 4X super sampling at 4K means rendering at 8K. Fun fact to close this out, DLSS, Nvidia's killer app that allowed them to market this card as an 8K gaming solution with a straight face, is currently used to render at a lower resolution and then blow it up to your display's native res. But that wasn't how it was first introduced. It was a form of anti-aliasing, hence the super sampling in the name, and it's very good at this task. So good, in fact, that its second iteration, it now legitimately enables high impact features like ray tracing to run at a lower resolution while preserving most of the sharpness and detail of native rendering. This point is especially painful for AMD, whose ray accelerators already significantly lag behind Nvidia's RT cores. Anyway, the main takeaway is that neither AMD nor Nvidia is even close to creating a GPU that can natively run 8K maxed out AAA games. And that upscaling tricks are here to stay. And by the way, one more takeaway is that unless your screen is this big, 8K has a much smaller impact on your gaming experience than say, HDR or running at a higher refresh rate for smoother animations. And that last one, you can actually check out our whole video about that here. On the subject of smoothness, big shout out to Seasonic for keeping our test benches running smoothly as can be. They have observed these GPUs, both of them actually, spiking north of a thousand watts for very, very short durations, which can wreak havoc on overcurrent protections and our TX1000 handled them like a champ. You can check it out at the link in the video description. And of course, they've got lots of other power supplies to fit any budget.