6900xt vs RTX 3080

[Sleepy_Lazarus]

Hey everyone,

 

I am ready to buy my new pc and at the last minute I am starting to second guess the graphics card choice. I was originally gonna go with the rtx 3080 10 gb which in my country is priced at 850 euros(its about the same in dollars) while the 6900xt is price at 820 euros, I do know that in pure rasterization performance the 6900xt is superior but a lot  of people have stated that the frame times and the drivers are quite bad (given the reviews at the time of its release since I could not find a more recent one).So, what do you recommend I do ?I don't particularly care for ray tracing, I just care about the best possible performance and frame times to have the smoothest experience possible at 1080p/1440p.Please keep in mind that the chosen graphics card will be paired with a ryzen 7 5800x.

 

All responses will be massively appreciated!Looking forward to all the comments.

 

Thank you.

[Middcore]

The 6900 XT drivers are fine. 

 

If you're not into ray tracing then the 6900 XT is a slam dunk, significantly better performance for less money. 

[dizmo]

I didn't enjoy my time with the 6700XT I had, and sold it rather quickly. Which is a shame; the hardware is beautiful, and the performance was great.

I had:

• Games that would refuse to run at all (ran fine on Nvidia)
• Crashes to desktop
• Crashes of desktop

It was frustrating, as I really wanted the card to work out.

As long as you're willing to deal with the slight hickups you might encounter, then the 6900XT is definitely the stronger card.

 

[RONOTHAN##]

24 minutes ago, Sleepy_Lazarus said:

but a lot  of people have stated that the frame times and the drivers are quite bad (given the reviews at the time of its release since I could not find a more recent one)

I've used both as of pretty recent, the drivers on Nvidia are better but not significantly better. Both are definitely usable, the AMD drivers just have a few quirks with them (in driver update utility was broken last time I checked, the driver has the tendency to crash if you have an unstable overclock, etc.). 

 

If you don't need any of the Nvidia specific features (NVENC, CUDA, etc.), I'd be using the 6900 XT. In my testing with both the cards at 4K (I daily a 4K panel so it was the testing relevant to me at the time), with both cards running a maxed out overclocked (the 6900 XT has a fair bit of overclocking headroom on it, got an extra 10-12% performance with an overclock) and about 6 months ago (driver revision affects performance a lot in some games, so figured it was worth mentioning), the 6900 XT was at worst, 5% behind, and at best was closer to 10% ahead. That includes ray tracing as well, where for the most part a heavily overclocked 6900 XT was about on par with the 3080. When you step down in resolution, RDNA2 tends to do even better, so if you're playing at 1440P I'd expect those numbers to look a better for the AMD card. Haven't really noticed frame times be significantly better or worse on one or the other, so I'd just take that to mean AMD's drivers were a little rough for the first month or two (that does tend to happen with AMD cards).

 

You can't go wrong with either of these cards, they're both phenomenal GPUs, but the 6900 XT is the one that IMO makes the most sense here. It would be the fastest card at the resolution you're planning to play at, and it's a little cheaper as well. The one I ended up keeping was the AMD card (it's in the system I'm currently typing this up on), so take that for what you will. 

[WereCat]

Honestly, you will be dealing with driver issues on both sides so just pick the card that makes most sense to you. The 6900X is definitely a lot better card for gaming than RTX 3080 as long as you don't care about RT and some of the NVIDIA features.

 

However I wouldn't get an AMD card if you do any work that's GPU accelerated (except video encoding) since most SW just uses CUDA and AMD has been doing some work to improve things but in this aspect they are still quite behind.

 

I've been on NVIDA since the 700 series on my main PC and I haven't had so many issues as I did in the last year. The Forza Horizon is still broken (texture issues), MWII update makes the game flicker like crazy, we had videos in browser glitching (still have this issue unless I force the browser to use OpenGL... since November of last year...), GSync was broken in some cases, Dolby Atmos was broken for months, etc...

[Sleepy_Lazarus]

Thank you so much to everyone who replied. You gave me the confidence boost I needed to go amd.