3080TI or RX 6900XT

[N3gan]

I am looking to upgrade my GPU. I currently have a 1080TI. 
I have my eye on a 3080TI and a RX 6900XT. The RX is slightly cheaper than the 3080TI, but is it better? 
From what I can see their performances are quite similar, so I do not know which to choose. All I care for is performance, primarily gaming and productivity wise.

 

I am also unsure of whether or not it is necessary for me to upgrade my CPU as well, to avoid too large of a bottleneck. My current CPU is a Ryzen 5 5600X. 
If so, what should I upgrade to, a 7 5800X?

 

Any advice is very much appreciated! ^^

[BetteBalterZen]

I would chose the 3080 Ti because of 1 thing: DLSS (and kinda the better Ray Tracing performance...)

[N3gan]

Alright, thanks. What about the CPU though? Should I upgrade that aswell?

3 minutes ago, BetteBalterZen said:

I would chose the 3080 Ti because of 1 thing: DLSS (and kinda the better Ray Tracing performance...)

 

[LAwLz]

1) Do you actually need to upgrade? The 1080 Ti is pretty high end still, and my guess is that it plays most if not all games you throw at it pretty well.

 

2) If the prices are roughly the same, and the performance in the games you care about is roughly the same, then I would go with the Nvidia card because it offers some benefits that may or may not matter to you.

• Better video encoding (for things like recording gameplay or streaming).
• CUDA, which may or may not help in some GPGPU workloads (for example Affinity Photo and Adobe After Effects can both use CUDA extensively).
• RTX Voice is fantastic if you ask me.
• DLSS is better than what AMD offers at this point in time.
• G-Sync support. Even if AMD has FreeSync, those monitors usually work with Nvidia as well. Might not matter to you, but why limit yourself?

 

3) If you just want to spend money to buy a new shiny toy, please be aware that according to rumors, Nvidia might release a new generation of GPUs soon(tm).

[BetteBalterZen]

Just now, N3gan said:

Alright, thanks. What about the CPU though? Should I upgrade that aswell?

 

Well honest, you are "okay" with the 5600X but you can certainly gain some performance by upgrading CPU aswell. I also use a 8700K@4.7GHz, it does work with a 3080 Ti but there are some performance to gain when using some of the latest highend CPUs. Not sure how much more performance you will get by going from 5600X to 5800X. Probably depends on the game. But lets see what others have to say

[N3gan]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

1) Do you actually need to upgrade? The 1080 Ti is pretty high end still, and my guess is that it plays most if not all games you throw at it pretty well.

 

2) If the prices are roughly the same, and the performance in the games you care about is roughly the same, then I would go with the Nvidia card because it offers some benefits that may or may not matter to you.

• Better video encoding (for things like recording gameplay or streaming).
• CUDA, which may or may not help in some GPGPU workloads (for example Affinity Photo and Adobe After Effects can both use CUDA extensively).
• RTX Voice is fantastic if you ask me.
• DLSS is better than what AMD offers at this point in time.
• G-Sync support. Even if AMD has FreeSync, those monitors usually work with Nvidia as well. Might not matter to you, but why limit yourself?

 

3) If you just want to spend money to buy a new shiny toy, please be aware that according to rumors, Nvidia might release a new generation of GPUs soon(tm).

To answer your question, well technically no. It is just a QOL upgrade. But I have been saving up for it for a while. I do do a bit of editing and photoshop, so another main reason was making that smoother, and reducing rendering times. So 3080TI it is I guess, thanks ^^

[N3gan]

4 minutes ago, BetteBalterZen said:

Well honest, you are "okay" with the 5600X but you can certainly gain some performance by upgrading CPU aswell. I also use a 8700K@4.7GHz, it does work with a 3080 Ti but there are some performance to gain when using some of the latest highend CPUs. Not sure how much more performance you will get by going from 5600X to 5800X. Probably depends on the game. But lets see what others have to say

Okay I see. Well the 5600X has 6 cores 12 threads, where as the 5800X has 8 cores 16 threads. The 5900X is about 100 bucks more than the 5800X for me. But I dont know if that is worth it. I just dont want my CPU to limit my GPU.

[PDifolco]

Overall performances are similar between 3080Ti and 6900XT, but 6900XT is better at 1080p 3080Ti at 4K

 

Then for productivity Nvidia is clearly ahead, and has DLSS (but AMD just released FSR2 which seems pretty good)

 

So either get a 3080Ti or go for a 6950XT (those are same price) , depending on whether you want AMD raw performance or the NVidia advantages

 

 

 

[LAwLz]

As for the CPU question, it depends on what you do on your PC.

If you just play games then you will most likely not be bottlenecked by that 5600X, and buying a new CPU would just be a waste of money.

Most games can not effectively use more than 6 cores. Some would argue that a lot of modern games can barely use 4 cores effectively, and the 6 cores you got are about as fast as they can be already.

The slight performance increase you might get is not at all worth the additional cost.

 

In TechPowerUp's test, the difference between the 5600X and the 5900X when paired with an overclocked 2080 Ti was 0.3% when gaming at 4K.

In other words, you would spend ~400 dollars and only go from 300 FPS to 301 FPS.

[N3gan]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

As for the CPU question, it depends on what you do on your PC.

If you just play games then you will most likely not be bottlenecked by that 5600X, and buying a new CPU would just be a waste of money.

Most games can not effectively use more than 6 cores. Some would argue that a lot of modern games can barely use 4 cores effectively, and the 6 cores you got are about as fast as they can be already.

The slight performance increase you might get is not at all worth the additional cost.

 

In TechPowerUp's test, the difference between the 5600X and the 5900X when paired with an overclocked 2080 Ti was 0.3% when gaming at 4K.

In other words, you would spend ~400 dollars and only go from 300 FPS to 301 FPS.

Okay, yeah thats not worth it. But what about when it comes to productivity? Rendering, editing ect. Would it then be worth the upgrade to a 5800X?

[BetteBalterZen]

Just now, N3gan said:

Okay I see. Well the 5600X has 6 cores 12 threads, where as the 5800X has 8 cores 16 threads. The 5900X is about 100 bucks more than the 5800X for me. But I dont know if that is worth it. I just dont want my CPU to limit my GPU.

Well, take a look at the 12900K overclocked and see what it can pull out of the 3080 Ti, and compare it to a 5800X, or 5600X or my 8700K. Our CPU's and the 5800X probably will hold it back to some extent in some games. I guess you gotta research what games you play and take a look at CPU benchmarks. But trust me when I say this; I also went from a 1080 Ti to a 3080 Ti and there was a HUGE improvement - I do also play in almost 4K resolution. What I'm saying is, I'm 99% sure you will see a big improvement and will feel like it was worth it, but could you get some % more of the 3080 Ti if you went all out with a very high end overclocked CPU? Yeah, you could

[PDifolco]

Just now, N3gan said:

Okay, yeah thats not worth it. But what about when it comes to productivity? Rendering, editing ect. Would it then be worth the upgrade to a 5800X?

Well then get a 5900X... 

[N3gan]

3 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Overall performances are similar between 3080Ti and 6900XT, but 6900XT is better at 1080p 3080Ti at 4K

 

Then for productivity Nvidia is clearly ahead, and has DLSS (but AMD just released FSR2 which seems pretty good)

 

So either get a 3080Ti or go for a 6950XT (those are same price) , depending on whether you want AMD raw performance or the NVidia advantages

 

 

 

Yeah, I cant find any place in my area that sells a 6950XT though, so I'll just go with the 3080TI, seems it is better overall for my usage.

[N3gan]

1 minute ago, PDifolco said:

Well then get a 5900X... 

Yeah, but that is 100bucks more than the 5800X, and I'm not trying to make myself completely broke. (even though I am well on my way a 3080TI xD)

[LAwLz]

4 minutes ago, N3gan said:

To answer your question, well technically no. It is just a QOL upgrade. But I have been saving up for it for a while. I do do a bit of editing and photoshop, so another main reason was making that smoother, and reducing rendering times. So 3080TI it is I guess, thanks ^^

Render times in Photoshop? Please note that Photoshop does not use the GPU that much. Only a handful of things uses it, and I am not even sure it is enabled by default.

There is a high risk that upgrading your PC will not have the effects you desire.

 

 

If you are just upgrading for the sake of upgrading (because let's be honest, buying new things is fun, even if we don't need them) then I would strongly recommend you wait for the next generation of GPUs. 

With prices being the way they are right now (terrible), and a new generation rumored to be announced in ~2 months, my guess is that you will end up regretting your purchase.

[N3gan]

Just now, LAwLz said:

Render times in Photoshop? Please note that Photoshop does not use the GPU that much. Only a handful of things uses it, and I am not even sure it is enabled by default.

There is a high risk that upgrading your PC will not have the effects you desire.

 

 

If you are just upgrading for the sake of upgrading (because let's be honest, buying new things is fun, even if we don't need them) then I would strongly recommend you wait for the next generation of GPUs. 

With prices being the way they are right now (terrible), and a new generation rumored to be announced in ~2 months, my guess is that you will end up regretting your purchase.

Haha no, my bad. I could've phrased that a little better. The rendering times I was talking about was for video editing. 
And yeah, I am aware of the god awful prices. But currently my local store sells a 3080TI on a huge sale. About 1K off. The sad reality is that that only takes it down to about MSRP, but I would rather have it at MSRP than I would for scalper prices. And since I've never seen it go that low, it is an offer hard to pass up.

[GreatnessRD]

Truth be told, in my opinion, you shouldn't be spending $1,000-$1300 for almost 2 year old GPUs. The newer models are supposedly going to be out in about 2 months (For Nvidia anyway) Your 1080 Ti is still a champ and I'd say you should use that until you at least get new information on the newer technology for later this year. At worst you save a couple hundred if you buy a 3080 Ti or 6900 XT down the line as prices should continue to drop for those cards unless we go into another Armageddon.

 

But to answer your question, if you're planning to play at 4K, grab the 3080 Ti. If you're at 2K res and down below, grab the 6900 XT (Which is also fine for 4K, no doubt about it) Or also my personal favorite. Whichever is cheaper, lmao. Good luck with your choice. 5600x should be fine with either. Or you can upgrade to the 5800X3D if you wanna flex your muscles I guess.

[BetteBalterZen]

1 minute ago, GreatnessRD said:

Truth be told, in my opinion, you shouldn't be spending $1,000-$1300 for almost 2 year old GPUs. The newer models are supposedly going to be out in about 2 months (For Nvidia anyway) Your 1080 Ti is still a champ and I'd say you should use that until you at least get new information on the newer technology for later this year. At worst you save a couple hundred if you buy a 3080 Ti or 6900 XT down the line as prices should continue to drop for those cards unless we go into another Armageddon.

Good point and very true!

[LAwLz]

7 minutes ago, N3gan said:

Okay, yeah thats not worth it. But what about when it comes to productivity? Rendering, editing ect. Would it then be worth the upgrade to a 5800X?

It depends on what programs you use and how you use them.

Programs like Blender scales really well with additional cores. The 5800X is about 25-30% faster than the 5600X for rendering in Blender in their tests (like BMW2.7), which is not a big surprise since it has 33% more cores.

 

What kind of projects do you work on and in which programs, where you feel like your hardware is holding you back?

Your processor is already very high end, so I suspect that this is another upgrade that you don't actually need, but rather you just wanting to spend money on buying a new and shiny thing.

[N3gan]

1 minute ago, GreatnessRD said:

Truth be told, in my opinion, you shouldn't be spending $1,000-$1300 for almost 2 year old GPUs. The newer models are supposedly going to be out in about 2 months (For Nvidia anyway) Your 1080 Ti is still a champ and I'd say you should use that until you at least get new information on the newer technology for later this year. At worst you save a couple hundred if you buy a 3080 Ti or 6900 XT down the line as prices should continue to drop for those cards unless we go into another Armageddon.

 

But to answer your question, if you're planning to play at 4K, grab the 3080 Ti. If you're at 2K res and down below, grab the 6900 XT (Which is also fine for 4K, no doubt about it) Or also my personal favorite. Whichever is cheaper, lmao. Good luck with your choice.

I dont play at 4K. I only play at 1080P..  Might wanna invest in a better monitor xD

[N3gan]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

It depends on what programs you use and how you use them.

Programs like Blender scales really well with additional cores. The 5800X is about 25-30% faster than the 5600X for rendering in Blender in their tests (like BMW2.7), which is not a big surprise since it has 33% more cores.

 

What kind of projects do you work on and in which programs, where you feel like your hardware is holding you back?

Your processor is already very high end, so I suspect that this is another upgrade that you don't actually need, but rather you just wanting to spend money on buying a new and shiny thing.

Well, as said I do video editing. And while my CPU is very capable of doing so, the rendering times can take a little while. Nothing too bad, but anything that could lower them would be nice, especially when working on multiple larger projects at once. But true, it is a QOL upgrade. Definitely not needed. The main reason for me wanting to upgrade my CPU is to not cause too large of a bottleneck with the new GPU.

[Pixelfie]

5 minutes ago, N3gan said:

I dont play at 4K. I only play at 1080P..  Might wanna invest in a better monitor xD

In that case 6900 XT is better. AMD gets more performance hit from higher resolutions than Nvidia. But honestly you shouldn't need more than the 1080 Ti you already have.

 

But there's still reasons to get the 3080 Ti:

- Ray tracing

- RTX voice (if you use a mic with a lot of background noise)

 

I think DLSS isn't really a reason to consider Nvidia. AMD's FSR 2 is just as good and things like this can change a lot in the future. But at this moment DLSS has more compatible games, but once again in the future that will probably change because FSR 2 runs on any GPU and DLSS doesn't. Another thing is that Nvenc isn't really better. Yes at H264 it has slightly better compression, but the difference is really not as big as people say (I compared my 5500 XT to my RTX 2060) and I think colors look better on AMD. And AMD has H265 encoding which is better for recording and streaming to Youtube (and maybe other platforms in the future too)

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Pixelfie said:

Another thing is that Nvenc isn't really better.

But it is... NVENC is way better.

 

1 hour ago, Pixelfie said:

Yes at H264 it has slightly better compression, but the difference is really not as big as people say (I compared my 5500 XT to my RTX 2060)

AMD's encoder is constantly 10 points or more away from NVENC when comparing VMAF.

AMD encoded video at 10,000 Kbps looks the same as Nvidia encoded videos at 7,500Kbps when comparing H.264. Roughly the same holds true when comparing HEVC.

AMD is behind. 

 

These comparisons were done on an AMD 6000 series card and an Nvidia 30 series card:

 

 

This is just one test of course, but all the tests I have seen shows AMD behind. Hell, in Epos Vox's test AMD's HEVC encoding could not even match Nvidia's H.264 encoding in terms of efficiency. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Pixelfie said:

I think colors look better on AMD

Then you are doing something wrong, because the colors should be the same on both encodes.

 

1 hour ago, Pixelfie said:

And AMD has H265 encoding which is better for recording and streaming to Youtube (and maybe other platforms in the future too)

1) Nvidia supports encoding and decoding H.265 as well, and Nvidia's H.265 encode is far superior to AMD's if we look at things like VMAF comparisons.

2) H.265 is not better for streaming to Youtube or other platforms because it is not supported, and won't be supported because of licensing issues. If you want to archive things then using HEVC is a good idea, but not for streaming. 

[Darknighterror]

2 hours ago, N3gan said:

I dont play at 4K. I only play at 1080P..  Might wanna invest in a better monitor xD

That sounds like you should buy a new monitor, instead of a cpu.

[PDifolco]

3 hours ago, N3gan said:

Yeah, but that is 100bucks more than the 5800X, and I'm not trying to make myself completely broke. (even though I am well on my way a 3080TI xD)

 

Yes but from a 5600X with 6 cores you'll gain only 2 cores with a 5800X at $300 , thats $150/extra core; with a 5900X at $400 you'll get +6 that's only $66/extra core, a bargain  !