AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Raytracing Performance Leaked

[Raevenlord]

It's only tomorrow that reviewers will take the lids off AMD's latest and greatest Navi-powered graphics cards, but it's hard to keep a secret such as this... well... secret. Case in point: Videocardz has accessed some leaked slides from the presentation AMD has given to its partners, and these shed some light on what raytracing performance users can expect from AMD's RX 6800 XT, the card that's meant to bring the fight to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 graphics card. AMD's RDNA2 features support for hardware-accelerated raytracing from the get go, with every CU receiving on additional hardware piece: a Ray Accelerator. As such, the RX 6800 XT, with its 72 enabled CUs, features 72 Ray Accelerators; the RX 6800, with its 60 CUs, features 60 of these Ray Accelerators.

The RX 6800 XT was tested in five titles: Battlefield V, Call of Duty MW, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 1440p resolution with Ultra Settings and DXR options enabled according to the game, AMD claims an RX 6800 XT paired with their Ryzen 9 5900X can deliver an average of 70 FPS on Battlefield V; 95 FPS on Call of Duty MW; 90 FPS in Crysis Remastered; 67 FPS in Metro Exodus; and 82 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These results are, obviously, not comparable to our own results in previous NVIDIA RTX reviews; there's just too many variables in the system to make that a worthwhile comparison. You'll just have to wait for our own review in our normalized test bench so you can see where exactly does AMD's latest stand against NVIDIA.



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[Shou Miko]

Nice, I really wish I can get my hands on a card

 

[Chrispy_]

So does that mean AMD has already worked with these developers to add AMD raytracing support, or were these "RTX" titles just using regular DXR with no Nvidia special sauce?

It bodes well for rapid backfilling of all the RTX-enabled titles for consoles and buyers of the 6800-series.

 

[W1zzard]

So does that mean AMD has already worked with these developers to add AMD raytracing support, or were these "RTX" titles just using regular DXR with no Nvidia special sauce?

It bodes well for rapid backfilling of all the RTX-enabled titles for consoles and buyers of the 6800-series.

It's just regular DXR

 

[INSTG8R]

So does that mean AMD has already worked with these developers to add AMD raytracing support, or were these "RTX" titles just using regular DXR with no Nvidia special sauce?

It bodes well for rapid backfilling of all the RTX-enabled titles for consoles and buyers of the 6800-series.

RTX is still DXR. RTX is just “special sauce”

 

[W1zzard]

umm.. they seriously listed Crysis Remastered as DXR title?

 

[Chrispy_]

umm.. they seriously listed Crysis Remastered as DXR title?

Apparently Ubisoft said yes.

What's more interesting is that these are 1440p results, even though the cards are billed as 4K cards. If you can afford $650 graphics cards, you either have a 1440p144Hz monitor, or you're looking for 4K results. 67-95fps is certainly respectable but just like Nvidia, Raytracing is missing the mark with the typical monitor of a wealthy enthusiast who has bought a decent gaming monitor to match their high-end rig.

It's just regular DXR

RTX is still DXR. RTX is just “special sauce”

But Jensen said....

 

[Vayra86]

The line gets real blurry when it comes to 'what is RT'...

and before we know it, all it really is, is yet another approximation rather than the 'real deal' it was supposed to be. Gosh... totally didn't see that coming. A little GI here, a shadow there... your guess is as good as anyone's as to what you're really looking at.

But at least now we can all tell each other 'we're doing RT' now. Cool. Thx for the performance hit!

 

[jabbadap]

It's just regular DXR

Crysis Remastered uses Nvidia's vulkan VKRay, not sure what extension though.

 

[Mysteoa]

So does that mean AMD has already worked with these developers to add AMD raytracing support, or were these "RTX" titles just using regular DXR with no Nvidia special sauce?

It bodes well for rapid backfilling of all the RTX-enabled titles for consoles and buyers of the 6800-series.

Only Quake II RTX and Wolfenstein: Youngblood will not be supported because they use Nvidia RTX implementation.

 

[Chrispy_]

The line gets real blurry when it comes to 'what is RT'...

and before we know it, all it really is, is yet another approximation rather than the 'real deal' it was supposed to be. Gosh... totally didn't see that coming. A little GI here, a shadow there... your guess is as good as anyone's as to what you're really looking at.

But at least now we can all tell each other 'we're doing RT' now. Cool. Thx for the performance hit!

Quake II RTX is about as close to "real" raytracing as it gets, and on my 2070 super the performance was staggeringly awful.

I mean, it didn't look terrible, but a lot of that was down to favourable nostalgia. I couldn't even hit 1440p60 at low settings and I was down in the 30's with all the raytracing settings on high and a reflection count of 2.

We need 100x more power to raytrace today's AAA games properly, and by the time we have that much power, today's games will be as dated as Quake II is to us today.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Nice, I really wish I can get my hands on a card

Good luck!

 

[londiste]

From what I can see these results seem to be slightly below what RTX 2080Ti does at the same settings.

So does that mean AMD has already worked with these developers to add AMD raytracing support, or were these "RTX" titles just using regular DXR with no Nvidia special sauce?
It bodes well for rapid backfilling of all the RTX-enabled titles for consoles and buyers of the 6800-series.

Games have been DXR from the beginning. And judging from Crysis Remastered, also VKRay ever since that was standardized. This has been said clearly and repeatedly since Turing was released two years ago.

AMD could have deployed DXR support for earlier cards if they wanted (similarly to what Nvidia did for Pascal and newer GTX cards). AMD chose not to for obvious reasons but there was nothing stopping them besides marketing and competition considerations.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

People seem to conflate DXR vs RTX. With Ray tracing part of the DirectX 12 API there is really no difference between RTX and DXR. RTX was just Nvidia implementation (Nvidia started experimenting with Ray tracing in their Volta compute cards, and then brought it to consumer GPUs in the RTX20xx cards) of it before Microsoft adopted it in the DirectX 12 API. Unless I'm wrong, now RTX is really just Nvidia's naming for cards that have their RT cores on it.

With Ray tracing in the DirectX 12 API, now its just up to AMD and Nvidia to develop cards that can utilize it. The only caveat is Vulkan, it doesn't have the Ray tracing extensions in its library, so games with Vulkan and Ray tracing will have some sort of Nvidia RTX extensions used.

Having looked at these numbers, im not that impressed. ( The 3080 gets 100fps in Metro Exodus with ray tracing on. EDIT: I guess its not comparable, but these aren't the only leaks I have seen. RDNA2 ray tracing performance will probably sit between Turing and Ampere. )

Pure rasterization for RDNA2 might be pretty damn awesome, but I am expecting the ray tracing performance to be somewhat disappointing.

Devs for the new Xbox and PS5 are already pretty hesitant to implement ray tracing in their upcoming games because the performance takes a massive hit.

 

[londiste]

RTX was just Nvidia implementation of it before Microsoft adopted it in the DirectX 12 API. Unless I'm wrong, now RTX is really just Nvidia's naming for cards that have their RT cores on it.

RTX is marketing term for Nvidia's hardware-ish implementation of DXR among other things. RTX being Nvidia's naming scheme for new and fancy stuff in RTX cards is probably closer to what it actually is.

With Ray tracing in the DirectX 12 API, now its just up to AMD and Nvidia to develop cards that can utilize it. The only caveat is Vulkan, it doesn't have the Ray tracing extensions in its library, so games with Vulkan and Ray tracing will have some sort of Nvidia RTX extensions used.

Vulkan has RT extensions since March 2020. Quake 2 RTX, Wolfenstein's RTX patch and JX3 implementations were done before that so these were created using NV extensions. Probably easy enough to get them moved over to Vulkan's extensions.

Ray Tracing In Vulkan

The Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) has developed and released a set of extensions that seamlessly integrate ray tracing functionality into the existing Vulkan framework. This blog summarizes how the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions were developed, and illustrates how they can be...

www.khronos.org

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

People seem to conflate DXR vs RTX. With Ray tracing part of the DirectX 12 API there is really no difference between RTX and DXR. RTX was just Nvidia implementation (Nvidia started experimenting with Ray tracing in their Volta compute cards, and then brought it to consumer GPUs in the RTX20xx cards) of it before Microsoft adopted it in the DirectX 12 API. Unless I'm wrong, now RTX is really just Nvidia's naming for cards that have their RT cores on it.

With Ray tracing in the DirectX 12 API, now its just up to AMD and Nvidia to develop cards that can utilize it. The only caveat is Vulkan, it doesn't have the Ray tracing extensions in its library, so games with Vulkan and Ray tracing will have some sort of Nvidia RTX extensions used.

Having looked at these numbers, im not that impressed. The 3080 gets 100fps in Metro Exodus with ray tracing on...

Pure rasterization for RDNA2 might be pretty damn awesome, but I am expecting the ray tracing performance to be somewhat disappointing.

Dx12R was announced a day maybe two before Rtx was announced to Use it.
Vulcan has a Ray implementation I am sure, I wouldn't doubt AMd has working extensions close to ready, if not ready.

 

[Punkenjoy]

Quake II RTX is about as close to "real" raytracing as it gets, and on my 2070 super the performance was staggeringly awful.

I mean, it didn't look terrible, but a lot of that was down to favourable nostalgia. I couldn't even hit 1440p60 at low settings and I was down in the 30's with all the raytracing settings on high and a reflection count of 2.

We need 100x more power to raytrace today's AAA games properly, and by the time we have that much power, today's games will be as dated as Quake II is to us today.

Indeed!

At some point, game will be full ray-traced for sure, it's a matter of time. But right now, we are in a situation where we do so much workaround for some of the stuff than using a technique that involve ray tracing make more sense for quality and performance.

By example, Screen space reflection vs ray traced reflection. The first one have many issue that can't be resolved easily (like the player not visible in reflection in first person game.) It have become very hard to increase visual quality these days. It just take so much power to do some of the effects.

Ray tracing is not a scam, it's just overhype as what it can do now. A little bit like the first shaders, at first, it was slow and the effects were not incredible, but overtime, all the graphic effects use them and nobody wouldn't want to run game that are just textured with no shaders.

It will be the same thing for ray tracing but we will need better hardware. Don't buy X card because it's slighly better in ray tracing thinking that will last you longer. All card in the market next years will be way underpowered quickly in that department. Buy the card that will give you the best performance in today games.

 

[B-Real]

Apparently Ubisoft said yes.

What's more interesting is that these are 1440p results, even though the cards are billed as 4K cards. If you can afford $650 graphics cards, you either have a 1440p144Hz monitor, or you're looking for 4K results. 67-95fps is certainly respectable but just like Nvidia, Raytracing is missing the mark with the typical monitor of a wealthy enthusiast who has bought a decent gaming monitor to match their high-end rig.



But Jensen said....

If you check the newest game benchmarks (Legion, Dirt 5, Valhalla) , you get 60ish fps with a 3090 without RTX, so in reality, you can actually forget RTX 4K even with 3090 if you don't use DLSS. So its more like 4K everyday and 1440p RTX even for the top tier card.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

If you check the newest game benchmarks (Legion, Dirt 5, Valhalla) , you get 60ish fps with a 3090 without RTX, so in reality, you can actually forget RTX 4K even with 3090 if you don't use DLSS. So its more like 4K everyday and 1440p RTX even for the top tier card.

The PlayStation 5 doesn't support 1440P, I think that informs the performance target they hope to hit with DxR and fidelity FX next ,,at 4k capable , even if while using their own frame scaling techniques.

Obviously Nvidia have Dlss2 to compete and make 4k DxR playable too.

 

[B-Real]

The PlayStation 5 doesn't support 1440P, I think that informs the performance target they hope to hit with DxR and fidelity FX next ,,at 4k capable , even if while using their own frame scaling techniques.

Obviously Nvidia have Dlss2 to compete and make 4k DxR playable too.

Yes, PS5 doesn't support 1440p, and in 4K RTX, it will target 30 fps (and I think MS as well). Just check Ratchet and Clank gameplay: it can't even hold 30 fps.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Yes, PS5 doesn't support 1440p, and in 4K RTX, it will target 30 fps (and I think MS as well). Just check Ratchet and Clank gameplay: it can't even hold 30 fps.

Well early game's don't tend to explore the limit's of the hardware to be fair and it's clear optimization work is still going ahead on a few platforms and technologies at the same time, tricky , I think given time things will get better.

Oh and the consoles are power constrained the consumer Rdna2 GPU less so.

 

[mechtech]

Meh, I'm into Terraria at the moment, I don't think it has raytracing

 

[phill]

I cannot wait to read about these.. I'm just sad that the AMD cards don't have the three DP connections and a HDMI... Triple screens are my life!! I'm not sure I could connect two and then one with another type of connection... My DCO....... (Yes I'm taking the mick, but I hope the partner and aftermarket cards have more connectivity on....)

 

[R-T-B]

Meh, I'm into Terraria at the moment, I don't think it has raytracing

Minecraft does though, for some reason...

 

[Gmr_Chick]

What stands out to me in this article are the supposed FPS in the games listed, among other things. First, I notice how the listed FPS were achieved using the 6800XT and a Ryzen 9 5900X. Aside from that pairings crazy price tag, it doesn't account for "lesser" CPUs and I'm hoping W1zwill be able to show performance differences when the 6800XT is paired with something like, say any gen Ryzen 5 and/or 7, as those are CPUs people are more likely to have.