It is time to continue talking about the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series, specifically the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and its RayTracing performance linked to the Ray Accelerator (RA) units that it incorporates. It should be noted that during the event AMD did not stop talking about RayTracing, and we could already know the reason, is that in terms of performance it is not capable of competing with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics. Luckily, it’s not something that players care much about, why deny it.
The AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series see how each Compute Unit is accompanied by one of these RayTracing accelerators, which gives us 80 RAs in the Radeon RX 6900 XT, 72 RAs in the Radeon RX 6800 XT, and 60 RAs in the Radeon RX 6800, and now we can see the RayTracing performance of the 72 RAs of the Radeon RX 6800 XT versus the 68 RT Cores of the GeForce RTX 3080.
According to AMD:
“Measured by AMD Engineering Labs on 8/17/2020 on AMD RDNA 2-based graphics card, using Microsoft’s DirectX RayTracing SDK Procedural Geometry sample application, AMD RDNA 2-based graphics card achieves increased up to 13.8x speed (471 FPS) using Hardware-based RayTracing vs. using DirectX RayTracing Software backing layer (34 FPS) with the same frequencies. Performance may vary. RX-571 “.
This data reveals that the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT achieved a performance of 471 FPS in this RayTracing test. For reference, an Asus TUF GeForce RTX 3080 reaches 630 FPS (+33.8 percent extra) with 6% fewer cores dedicated to the acceleration of RayTracing, while an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 reaches 749 FPS, that is to say, It is 59% faster, although it is not its rival for the price, of course.
First of all, it has become clear that RayTracing is not a differentiating feature, something that the Nvidia DLSS is. Second, these benchmarks were made in mid-August, so some performance improvement is to be expected when we have the final drivers in hand.
