Conclusion

After several days of testing and hundreds of benchmark runs later, we get a fascinating overview of the performance from the Radeon RX 6800 versus the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. Both cards deliver excellent framerates that make them perfect weapons for gaming at 1440p with high-refresh rates above 60 Hz. They also achieve good FPS in most titles at 4K, though the most demanding games require you to reduce graphics settings a little bit.

On average, at 1440p, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is 0.8% slower than the Radeon RX 6800—impossible to notice in daily gaming. Even if you crank up the resolution, the difference is pretty much the same: 0.7% in favor of the RX 6800. Only at 1080p Full HD we see a reversal, here the Radeon is 0.6% slower than the GeForce—still unnoticeable.

Once we take a closer look at the individual benchmark results, things are completely different. One extreme data point is Star Wars Squadrons at Full HD, where the RX 6800 is 30% faster than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and the other extreme is Grand Theft Auto V at 4K, where the RTX 3070 Ti offers a 28% advantage. To make it easier for you to get a feel for the differences, we split our benchmarks into specific scenarios, like "DX12 and Vulkan Games Only" or "Games released 2020."

The first conclusion of this testing is that when comparing games with the DirectX 11 API, the RTX 3070 Ti is in a slightly better position, but it's not a huge difference. With DirectX 12 and Vulkan, on the other hand, AMD clearly has the lead; at 1440p, the difference is 3.5% (vs. 0.8% across all 50 games). While in our previous RTX 3080 vs. RX 6800 XT TPU50 we saw a clear trend that AMD has over the years been gaining ground on NVIDIA, this doesn't seem to be the case here. The differences are very similar: 2018 and before: -0.5%; 2019: -0.7%; 2020: -0.2%. The only big change is in 2021, where the RTX 3070 Ti ends up 2.2% slower on average, mostly pushed forward by titles like F1 2021 and Resident Evil Village, which are clearly better-optimized for AMD than NVIDIA. Still, I feel like AMD developer relations are more active, probably with more staff, resources, and money. While AMD did regularly miss the ball on day zero driver support several years ago, important game releases are now almost guaranteed to have an AMD game-ready driver available on launch, which NVIDIA has been providing for more than a decade. Many of you will remember driver issues on AMD, like all the problems people had with the Radeon RX 5700 XT. These seem to be a thing of the past, too, so good job, AMD.

While all our benchmarks are tested with ray tracing disabled and only few games today support the technology, ray tracing is here to stay. When considering ray tracing, NVIDIA clearly has the better architecture, with more operations performed in dedicated RT hardware units. However, while the differences were huge in the first ray tracing enabled titles, like Control, deltas have schrunk significantly, mostly because AMD is now interacting with developers and pushing them to include RT effects that work well on AMD, too. The problem with this approach is that games such as Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village only have minimal ray tracing support that's just good enough to tick the "i haz ray tracing" checkbox without achieving the stunning fidelity improvements we were promised. In those titles, the RT performance hit is minimal, and both cards are surprisingly similar in FPS.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 has 16 GB of VRAM, and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti only has half of that—8 GB. What looks like a huge difference on paper turns into no tangible difference in gaming, especially at 1440p. Not one of our tested games suffered noticeably from having less memory available, not at 1440p or even 4K. While it's not tested in this article, DOOM Eternal and Far Cry 6 at 4K with ray tracing enabled do show the RTX 3070 Ti fall behind because it's running out of VRAM. In my testing, those are the only titles with such issues. Of course, nobody can predict the future, but I'm quite positive that future titles won't go overboard with memory requirements, especially not when it comes to 1440p gaming. Assuming a future title has crazy hardware requirements, it will have tough requirements not only for memory but also shading power—the number-crunching circuitry in GPUs. Given the number of graphics cores on the RTX 3070 Ti and RX 6800, and their capabilities, 4K in such a hypothetical title would simply run too slowly for either to be feasible no matter the amount of VRAM. With DirectStorage around the corner, memory requirements of games might actually go down because assets can be streamed in from the disk in a much more efficient manner.

Last but not least, another consideration worth making is power, heat, and noise. Here, AMD has the upper hand thanks to TSMC's 7 nanometer production process, while NVIDIA uses Samsung's 8 nanometer node, which is slightly less energy efficient. PSU requirements are quite a bit different with the RX 6800 using around 225 W during gaming, while the RTX 3070 Ti needs 75 W more, around 300 W in total. Those extra 75 W have to be cooled somehow, which means the RTX 3070 Ti needs to have coolers that are more powerful or they'll run louder than the RX 6800. I've reviewed three RX 6800 and six RTX 3070 Ti cards, and the RTX 3070 Ti cards typically emit more noise during gaming. All these cards have idle fan stop, so no differences there. In terms of custom board designs, the selection for NVIDIA (60 models) is much bigger than for AMD (28 models). General availability of RTX 3070 Ti also seems slightly better than RX 6800, but both cards are basically sold out all the time everywhere.

With such terrible availability, just like the rest of the market, your choices are somewhat limited. At its MSRP, the $599 RTX 3070 Ti is slightly more expensive than the $579 RX 6800, but these prices are a fantasy and almost laughable considering actual market rates. At this time, a realistic market price for the RTX 3070 Ti is $1200 and $1500 for the RX 6800. This huge difference is partly caused by the fact that NVIDIA has limited mining performance on their card, which makes it less interesting for the crypto people. Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, we find the RTX 3070 Ti at 0.31%, whereas the RX 6800 is nowhere to be found, so less than 0.15%. At those prices, the RTX 3070 Ti is the clear winner of this duel, but as soon as both cards are available with equal pricing, I'd pick the RX 6800 over the RTX 3070 Ti.