Toe to toe - 6800/6800XT reviews out

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Lower end will be even worse probably. Buy im still liiking to hear about the 6700/xt

EDIT: I mean stock wise, not perf wise.

[thechinchinsong]

Customers have to ask themselves, which is the higher priority, better normal raster performance, performance per watt, and price, OR better software ecosystem and better drivers. The 50 dollars between the XT and the 3080 seems to be a small amount to pay for what many people consider to be important features (CUDA, DLSS, Raytracing, NVENC, Shadowplay, etc.). Even if each individual feature that the RTX series has over the Navi GPUs seem small, they add up to a pretty big difference later on. Personally I would still go with an RX-6800xt for the better performance per watt since I'm interested in SFF, but in any other (literal) case, I would probably go for an RTX-3080.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

They don't want to be seen as the value option anymore.

 

They have come back as a premium option.

Overall? I don't know what numbers you've seen but the numbers I've seen show the 6800XT mostly edging out the 3080 and sometimes the 3090.

Again I don't know where you've got those numbers but that doesn'y line up at all with what I've seen.

From the video.  The 6800xt is apparently $50 cheaper than the 3080.  I’m saying I don’t think it was quite enough.  $80 cheaper might have done it though.

Edited November 18, 2020 by Bombastinator

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

The 6800xt is apparently $50 cheaper than the 3080.

The 6800XT being $50 cheaper doesn't make it a value option though.

 

They're both premium high end graphics cards.

[Bombastinator]

Just now, AluminiumTech said:

The 6800XT being $50 cheaper doesn't make it a value option though.

 

They're both premium high end graphics cards.

So?  Value is value

[GDRRiley]

4 hours ago, tim0901 said:

 

This is the still from the ltt video (captured using the snipping tool which may add a bit of artifacting):

 

 

As you can see, the AMD Encoder looks like it's taking the OBS output through a bad JPEG algorithm a few times. I am intrigued as to why they didn't test 1080p as well, but I can't imagine it improves things much. Might have to do with 720p being the resolution recommended by Twitch for people to start streaming at?

biggest thing I see is that bitrate is way to low. most stream at 5-6k

their isn't enough info there so I'd wait for better testing

 

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

So?  Value is value

Idk. Tbh I think that if people have a problem with it at $649 then they've already made up in their mind that one brand is superior or they weren't in the market for that level of GPU.

 

If we're being charitable to Nvidia:

• the 3080 isn't slower than the 6800XT in at least some games at a resolution that a small number of people play at
• the 3080 has better Ray Tracing in the tiny number of games that support it
• the 3080 has a way of lowering resolution to increase performance (DLSS) whilst making it look okay but only when ray tracing is involved
• Ampere NVENC may or may not look better than the AMD Encoder depending on your subjective taste - but both of them are worse than x264.

 

Meanwhile,

• AMD has more VRAM
• AMD's 3080 competitor is $50 cheaper
• AMD has a shared architecture with the game consoles for better optimisation and compatibility
• AMD has better performance in many games at 1080p and 1440p.
• Lowering graphics settings on RDNA2 will give you a bigger perf boost than on Ampere
• AMD has shown better commitment to low latency
• AMD Freesync is substantially cheaper than G-Sync whilst providing most of the quality
• AMD Freesync Premium is cheaper than G-Sync whilst providing the same quality.
• AMD's Radeon Software is objectively better than Nvidia Control Panel and also objectively better than GeForce Experience.
• AMD has a better history of providing driver updates to old video cards.
• AMD has better cross operating system support
• AMD has more open source software and projects and overall is more committed to open source.

[AlTech]

4 hours ago, tim0901 said:

 

This is the still from the ltt video (captured using the snipping tool which may add a bit of artifacting):

 

 

As you can see, the AMD Encoder looks like it's taking the OBS output through a bad JPEG algorithm a few times. I am intrigued as to why they didn't test 1080p as well, but I can't imagine it improves things much. Might have to do with 720p being the resolution recommended by Twitch for people to start streaming at?

I've used both Nvidia and AMD encoders in the past and both look really bad at anything below 20Mbps.

 

Both need ideally 50Mbps to look great.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, ONOTech said:

better GPU rendering

You talking about CUDA and application support?

 

1 hour ago, ONOTech said:

NVIDIA just has better ray-tracing performance

Well they are both bad, I've only seen two games tested on the 6800XT for Ray Tracing (Hardware Unboxed) and it was about a 2080 Ti or the other game much better. Either way not a feature I'll be using for a while. As a feature just not impressive enough in games yet so overall no point using it, maybe in 1-2 years from now.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, tim0901 said:

As you can see, the AMD Encoder looks like it's taking the OBS output through a bad JPEG algorithm a few times

tbh they are both awful and I wouldn't watch a stream of either lol

[eeeee1]

my question is who wins in 1440p because if i am to upgrade my monitor i would be looking at 1440p

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, eeeee1 said:

my question is who wins in 1440p because if i am to upgrade my monitor i would be looking at 1440p

6800XT, sometimes by a lot. At 4k I suspect the cache is not quite big enough and the reduced main GDDR6 memory bandwidth is limiting the performance. Not watched any 6800 reviews yet so can't comment on it vs the 3070.

[eeeee1]

Just now, leadeater said:

6800XT, sometimes by a lot. At 4k I suspect the cache is not quite big enough and the reduced main GDDR6 memory bandwidth is limiting the performance. Not watched any 6800 reviews yet so can't comment on it vs the 3070.

I see. very interesting. looks like not everything in 2020 was bad. 

[Belgarathian]

Interestingly in New Zealand, the 6800XT is priced below the 3070. So..... It's a no-brainer really.

 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Idk. Tbh I think that if people have a problem with it at $649 then they've already made up in their mind that one brand is superior or they weren't in the market for that level of GPU.

 

If we're being charitable to Nvidia:

• the 3080 isn't slower than the 6800XT in at least some games at a resolution that a small number of people play at
• the 3080 has better Ray Tracing in the tiny number of games that support it
• the 3080 has a way of lowering resolution to increase performance (DLSS) whilst making it look okay but only when ray tracing is involved
• Ampere NVENC may or may not look better than the AMD Encoder depending on your subjective taste - but both of them are worse than x264.

 

Meanwhile,

• AMD has more VRAM
• AMD's 3080 competitor is $50 cheaper
• AMD has a shared architecture with the game consoles for better optimisation and compatibility
• AMD has better performance in many games at 1080p and 1440p.
• Lowering graphics settings on RDNA2 will give you a bigger perf boost than on Ampere
• AMD has shown better commitment to low latency
• AMD Freesync is substantially cheaper than G-Sync whilst providing most of the quality
• AMD Freesync Premium is cheaper than G-Sync whilst providing the same quality.
• AMD's Radeon Software is objectively better than Nvidia Control Panel and also objectively better than GeForce Experience.
• AMD has a better history of providing driver updates to old video cards.
• AMD has better cross operating system support
• AMD has more open source software and projects and overall is more committed to open source.

You're listing a lot of AMD benefits twice. 

I also think you're misusing the word "objectively" a lot, and are using a lot of assumptions in your arguments that may not be true. 

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, Belgarathian said:

Interestingly in New Zealand, the 6800XT is priced below the 3070. So..... It's a no-brainer really.

LOL! What? Winning

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, eeeee1 said:

my question is who wins in 1440p because if i am to upgrade my monitor i would be looking at 1440p

I just watched a hardware unboxed video and the impression I got was the 6800xt was stronger at 1440p than the 3080 was while the 3080 was ever so slightly stronger at 4k than the 6800xt was. Both of them had cpu limitation issues at 1080p which in itself is kind of wild.  

Edited November 18, 2020 by Bombastinator

[Belgarathian]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

LOL! What? Winning

It's a full $500+ to go from a 6800XT to a 3080 

[Bombastinator]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

LOL! What? Winning

Yeah, 6800xt vs 3070 won’t even be close.  3080 seems to be close but with the 3070 it won’t be.

[AlTech]

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

You're listing a lot of AMD benefits twice. 

That's not my intention.

 

I may have mentioned similar sounding things next to each other.

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I also think you're misusing the word "objectively" a lot, and are using a lot of assumptions in your arguments that may not be true. 

Specifially regarding Nvidia Control Panel, it looks like it came straight out of 2005.

 

GeForce Experience has flaws like requiring an account and signin. AMD doesn't require it and their program has overclocking and tweaking tools as well.

[tim0901]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

You're listing a lot of AMD benefits twice. 

I also think you're misusing the word "objectively" a lot, and are using a lot of assumptions in your arguments that may not be true. 

And they're also ignoring some of benefits of Nvidia cards (some of which are a big deal):

 

• 3080 has superior performance at 4k on average, not "in some games". You can't claim AMD being better at 1080p and 1440p as a point in their favor without respecting that Nvidia winning at 4k is a point in theirs, even if to you personally it doesn't matter. And saying it's "a resolution nobody plays at" is kinda ignorant when its popularity is rising faster than that of 1440p (which is shrinking in popularity according to the steam hardware survey).
• CUDA - a huge deal for pretty much anyone that's not a pure gamer. AMD has OpenCL, which is open source which is nice, but pretty much all OpenCL software sucks ass these days in comparison as nobody works on it anymore.
• The RT cores actually work in rendering workloads and aren't a buggy mess right now - see LTT review.
• Tensor cores. Anyone interested in using these cards for ML (eg, universities, researchers, startups) will get a massive performance boost from using these. Even if AMD finally gets ROCm working on their RDNA-based cards, their performance in ML workloads is still going to suck in comparison due to the lack of tensor cores.
• Nvidia control panel may look like it's out of the 80s, but it's rock solid and works every time. I'll take functional but plain over flashy any day. Don't fix what's not broken.
• The rest of Nvidia's software stack. RTX Broadcast/Voice for example.

[porina]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

• the 3080 isn't slower than the 6800XT in at least some games at a resolution that a small number of people play at

As pointed out earlier, on average, outside of RT, they're near enough the same as each other. There is no decisive victory for AMD.

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

• the 3080 has a way of lowering resolution to increase performance (DLSS) whilst making it look okay but only when ray tracing is involved

DLSS can and has been implemented independently of RT.

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

• AMD has better performance in many games at 1080p and 1440p.

nvidia has better performance in many games at 1080p and 1440p. Which ones do you want to cherry pick?

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

• AMD has shown better commitment to low latency

Really? Please expand.

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

• AMD Freesync is substantially cheaper than G-Sync whilst providing most of the quality

nvidia can also use "Freesync" displays too. AMD can't use G-sync.

 

 

6800XT is a nice card, but there is no clear winner comparing it against a 3080 for gaming, unless you cherry pick specific scenarios. I think the quoted post very much puts it into a similar position of early Zen like I mentioned in a previous post. It does most of the things mostly good enough, but the more you look at it, the more areas of weakness there are. Throwing more resource in some areas doesn't always offset that. 

[strajk-]

So much for AMD representatives shitposting on twitter over availability, was as much of a horrendous launch as it was with their competitor.

[bossmonkey]

So I'm more confused now than when i started the day. When Nvidia announced the 3000 series i was all in for a 3070 but then the AMD announcement gave me pause. I had the ability to buy a 3070 FE last month (had it in my cart and everything) but decided to wait because the 6800 had twice the memory. I thought that it might last me a little longer long term since I'm not looking to upgrade again for another 5 or 6 years. The performance metrics show that the 3070 is in the same ballpark as the 6800 if not beating it though. Despite that, I have a hard time shaking the feeling that games might see more AMD optimization in a year or 2 because that is what the consoles are using. Ultimately though, I'm still on the fence between the two. Just a bummer of a day. 

[Trik'Stari]

But how much better at 4k is the 6800XT, compared to the 1080ti?