If you want to know about then you need to read the post. Cutting in a conversation may lead to misunderstanding.
Yes it is about RT.
Ahem. Your first post bringing this up said the following:
@W1zzard out of curiosity. The 3070 and 3070 Ti are so damn slow at 4k with FarCry6 and Doom. Is that the memory capacity problem or something else?
No mention of RT there. Hence my question. This isn't because I'm "cutting into a conversation", it's because I was curious about the premise of said conversation, as it was unclear. You literally didn't say.
as you mentioned still playable and doom maxed out would be around 70 which is perfect. With FarCry6 you can always drop some detail and play 60 no problem if mid 50 is not what you'd expect. Memory constraints prevent that. That is why I said handicapped card. Same goes for the 3070 Ti as well. You could use both those cards to play 4k with RT on no problem with both games mentioned. Due to lack of memory they can't. New feature for DLSS. Enabling handicapped GPUs to play at 4K due to low memory. I hope that is the case. Something tells me, since RT is booming, more RAM will be required as time goes by so we will see more of those situations, card cant run 4k even though they have enough core performance.
I disagree with you. If it had the 10GB RAM it would have been capable of 4K no problem. So by design they are not capable off that due to memory. It is like you pay cash and you have to play what it is design for even though you could have played higher res. For me a handicap not a feature.
As for this, we'll have to disagree on that. While this "problem" will no doubt become more noticeable in the future, at the same time its absolute compute performance (whether rasterization or RT) will simultaneously decrease relative to the demands put on it by games, meaning that by the point where this is a dominating issue (rather than an extreme niche case, like today), those GPUs likely wouldn't produce playable framerates even if they had infinite VRAM. Remember, Doom Eternal is just about the easiest-to-run AAA shooter out there in terms of its compute requirements (and it can likely run more than fine at 2160p RT on a 3070 if you lower the texture quality or some other memory-heavy setting to the second highest setting). And it's not like these two games are even remotely representative of RT loads today - heck, nothing is, given that performance for the 3090 Ti at 2160p varies from ~137fps to ~24fps. The span is too wide. So, using these two edge cases as a predictor for the future is nit-picking and statistically insignificant. So again, calling the cards "handicapped" here is ... well, you're picking out an extreme edge case and using it in a way that I think is overblown. You can't expect universal 2160p60 RT from
any GPU today, so why would you do so with an upper mid-range/lower high end GPU? That just doesn't make sense. Every GPU has its limitations, and these ones clearly have their limitations most specifically in memory-intensive RT at 2160p - the most extreme use case possible. That is a
really small limitation. Calling that a "handicap" is making a mountain out of a molehill.
You know how one GPU utilize the given resources? The power consumption and performance are not linear? At some point you need to give more power to achieve certain performance level. That is what you see here. The GPU has more resources than 6900xt you have mentioned. It clocks lower as well so power drops significantly for 3090Ti while 6900xt has to use more resources and that comes with a power usage. Also, 6900 XT has a power limit as you know preventing the situation like 3090 Ti going above 450W.
I hope that is what you have been wondering about. At least that is how I see it.
That is a way too simplistic solution to this conundrum. As a 6900XT owner using it on a 1440p60 display, I know just how low that GPU will clock and how efficiently it will run if it doesn't need the power (that 75W figure I gave for Elden Ring isn't too exceptional). I've also run an undervolted, underclocked profile at ~2100MHz which never exceeded 190W no matter what I threw at it. The point being: RDNA2 has no problem clocking down and reducing power if needed. And, to remind you, in the game used for power testing here, the 6900XT matches the performance of the 3080Ti and 3090 at 1440p
while consuming less power. Despite its higher clocks, even at peak. And, of course, all of these GPUs will reduce their clocks roughly equally, given an equal reduction in the workload. Yet what we're seemingly seeing here is a dramatic difference in said reductions, to the tune of a massive reversal of power efficiency.
So, while you're right that power consumption and performance scaling are not linear, and that a wide-and-slow GPU will generally be more efficient than a fast-and-narrow one, your application of these principles here ignores a massive variable: architectural and node differences. We know that RDNA2 on TSMC 7nm is more efficient than Ampere on Samsung 8nm, even at ~500MHz higher clocks. This is true pretty much true across the AMD-Nvidia product stacks, though with some fluctuations. And it's not like the 3090Ti is meaningfully wider than a 3090 (the increase in compute resources is
tiny), and by extension not a 6900XT either. You could argue that the 3080Ti and 3090 are wider than the 6900 XT, and they certainly clock lower - but that runs counter to your argument, as they then ought to be
more efficient at peak performance, not less. This tells us that AMD simply has the architecture and node advantage to clock higher yet still win out in terms of efficiency. Thus, there doesn't seem to be any reason why these GPUs wouldn't also clock down and reduce their power to similar degrees, despite their differing starting points. Now, performance scaling per frequency for any single GPU or architecutre isn't entirely linear either, but it is close to linear within the reasonable operating frequency ranges of most GPUs. Meaning that if two GPUs produce ~X performance, one at 2GHz and one at 2.5GHz, the drop in clock speeds needed to reach X/2 performance should be similar, not in MHz but in relative % to their starting frequencies. Not the same, but sufficiently similar for the difference not to matter much. And as power and clock speeds follow each other, even if non-linear, the power drop across the two GPUs should also be similar. Yet here we're seeing one GPU drop
drastically more than the other - if we're comparing 3090 to 6900 XT, we're talking a 66% drop vs. a 46% drop. That's a rather dramatic difference considering that they started out at the same level of absolute performance.
One possible explanation: That the Ampere cards are actually
really CPU limited at 1080p in CP2077, and would dramatically outperform the 6900XT there if not held back. This would require the same to
not be true at 1440p, as the Ampere GPUs run at peak power there, indicating no significant bottleneck elsewhere. This would then require power measurements of the Ampere cards at 1080p without Vsync to check. Another possible explanation is that Nvidia is
drastically pushing these cards beyond their efficiency sweet spot in a way AMD isn't - but given the massive clock speeds of RDNA2, that is also unlikely - both architectures seem to be pushed roughly equally (outside of the 3090 Ti, which is ridiculous in this regard). It could also just be some weird architectural quirk, where Ampere is suddenly
drastically more efficient below a certain, quite low clock threshold (significantly lower than any of its GPUs clock in regular use). This would require power testing at ever-decreasing clocks to test.
Either way, these measurements are sufficiently weird to have me curious.
I'm just depressed a card I would like to eventually upgrade to is already over 60% slower than this.
60% slower? You're looking at a 3050 as an upgrade to a 980 Ti?