GeForce RTX 3080 Ti vs. Radeon RX 6800 XT

Today we take an in-depth look at the battle of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and Radeon RX 6800 XT. Granted, the prices of both are disgusting, but that’s the 2021 theme with no end in sight for this situation. It’s also out of our control and while we don’t recommend purchasing a gaming graphics card at this time, a lot of you are, and a lot more of you are fed up with the wait. .

If you find yourself between an overpriced 3080 Ti and 6800 XT, this benchmark review should help. It also gives us the opportunity to look at another partner version of the 3080 Ti and this one comes from a company that we have had a lot of good experiences with in the past, but haven’t checked anything new for a while. time. , that company is Gainward.

Right at hand we have their all new RTX 3080 Ti Phantom GS, a beastly looking model with three 8 pin PCIe power inputs, a huge triple slot / triple fan air cooler and all the essentials like dual BIOS support.

For all of these tests, we use our AMD Ryzen 9 5950X test system with 32GB of dual row and dual channel DDR4-3200 CL14 memory. Both GPUs have been tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.

We’ve tested a total of 30 games, so we’ll discuss the most interesting results as usual for about a dozen of them, and then quickly take a look at how these two GPUs stack up between all of the games we tested. in a single graph.

Landmarks

First off, we have Borderlands 3 and here we’re looking at some very competitive performance between the 3080 Ti and the 6800 XT. It’s basically identical performance at 1440p and 4K …

The results of Total War Warhammer II are all over the place, the 6800 XT performs well at 1080p offering a slight performance boost of 5% and although it maintains slightly higher performance of 1% at 1440p, the frame rate average fell behind the 3080 Ti. by a margin of 9%. Then, at 4K, the 6800 XT lags far behind the GeForce GPU, with a fairly substantial margin of 26%.

Switching to Death Stranding, the 6800 XT performs well at 1080p and even offers slightly better performance of 1% at 1440p, although the average frame rate ended up being about the same. Then at 4K the 3080 Ti took the lead, but with only an 8% margin, so the overall performance was pretty similar.

Forza Horizon 4 is still a strong title for AMD and here the 6800 XT leads at 1080p and 1440p while the 3080 Ti advances at 4K with a 5% margin, so the overall performance between these two GPUs was very important.

Moving on to Days Gone testing, we see that this is a very strong title for Nvidia because here the 3080 Ti had a 25% performance advantage at 1440p and an even bigger advantage. 33% at 4K. It should be noted that the low 1% data was much closer, but that could very well be CPU related and not necessarily a problem with the GeForce GPU.

We tested F1 2021 with ray tracing as it is enabled by default on supported hardware. This improves the performance advantage of the 3080 Ti and while the 6800 XT is still very good at 1440p, the GeForce GPU was much faster delivering 25% higher performance and then 30% more frames in 4K.

Metro Exodus Enhanced is another ray tracing title and in this case the feature is required to run the game, so you can’t turn off ray tracing here and so we went for the ‘normal’ setting for testing. . This gave the 3080 Ti its biggest win to date, delivering 58% more frames at 1440p and an astounding 82% more at 4K.

Worse still for AMD, while the 6800 XT offered a pleasant experience at 1440p with an average 74fps which is enough to enjoy Metro Exodus, the 35 fps seen in 4K were horrendous and you would have to play with the ray tracing effects. completely disabled in order to receive an acceptable gaming experience and that means playing the original version of the game.

Moving on to Red Dead Redemption 2, we take another look at the competitive results between these two GPUs. The 3080 Ti was only 8% faster at 1440p, although the headroom exploded to 17% at 4K and that’s something we expected. Basically, Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is best used at high resolution.

As we said in the 6600 XT vs RTX 3060 comparison, we included Counter-Strike Global Offensive simply because it is still in high demand, despite the fact that it runs on a potato and is essentially a benchmark. CPU at this point. But given that we have 29 other titles to help balance the results, I’m quite happy to include some wildly popular tiles like Global Potato, even if you don’t need that level of GPU power to run it.

Apex Legends is another popular shooter and this one requires a decent level of GPU power for high refresh games at 1440p and above. The RTX 3080 Ti offered 20% more frames at 1440p which is a serious performance boost and the 25% gain seen at 4K will be huge for those playing on premium 4K 144Hz panels.

The penultimate game we’re going to be looking at is Outriders and here Nvidia has a reasonable performance advantage delivering 15% more fps at 1440p and 23% more in 4K where it managed to keep the frame rate at the top. over 60 fps.

Finally we have Cyberpunk 2077 and here the 3080 Ti was 14% faster at 1440p and 24% faster at 4K. Obviously the 4K headroom is important but we expected the 3080 Ti to do a little better at 1440p.

Performance summary

As you might expect, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the faster of the two GPUs and can be much faster with ray tracing enabled. For those who play in 4K, the GeForce GPU seemed like the more obvious choice, but before drawing any definitive conclusions, let’s take a look at the results of the 30 games tested.

For those of you playing at 1440p, the Radeon RX 6800 XT may offer more value depending on the price you can get in your area. But the point is that at 1440p for the most part, the 3080 Ti wasn’t much faster and, as a result, ended up delivering 11% more performance on average. For those of you wondering, if we removed the ray tracing results in Metro Exodus Enhanced, the 3080 Ti would be 9% faster on average.

The only games that favor the 6800 XT include Assassin’s Creed Valhalla then Forza Horizon 4 and Borderlands 3 but by a very insignificant margin. For about half of the games tested, we saw single-digit performance margins.

However, if you plan to play in 4K the results change dramatically and from a performance standpoint the RTX 3080 Ti becomes the more obvious choice. On average, the GeForce GPU was 20% faster and that’s a significant difference.

Overclocking with the Gainward RTX Phantom GS

Let’s take a look at the performance of the Gainward RTX 3080 Ti Phantom GS. All previous data was based on the Nvidia benchmark specification, and the same goes for AMD results. The Phantom GS is overclocked at the factory and clocked on average at 1845 MHz, which is a small 4% bump compared to the FE model which is clocked at 1770 MHz on average.

This is a fairly typical factory OC, the Asus TUF Gaming clocked at 1830 MHz under the same test conditions, the MSI 3080 Ti Suprim X supported 1875 MHz on average and the Asus ROG Strix LC OC in average 1920 MHz.

In terms of performance, you’re considering a Founders Edition-style FPS, so there’s no point going through more benchmarks.

However, if we take a closer look at the temperature results, in our closed test system built into the Corsair Obsidian 5000D, in a room at 21 ° C, the Phantom GS peaked at 74 ° C with a fan speed of 2100. rpm, and that’s only a few degrees better than the Nvidia FE model.

That’s okay, but it’s not a good result considering the Asus TUF Gaming peaked at just 64 ° C and was slightly quieter. Still, it’s not bad and if the Phantom GS is all you’ve got, it’s worth considering.

What we have learned

For MSRP, you can’t expect to see a direct comparison between the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ($ 1,200) and the Radeon RX 6800 XT ($ 650), but depending on your region, just how crazy the prices are inflated. (eg timing) and the chance to grab some of them in stock, there may not be much of a price difference in relative or even absolute terms.

However, if all GPUs were available at MSRP, the RTX 3080 Ti would be pretty much the dumbest buy you could make, dumber than even the RTX 3090 or 6900 XT. Not only that, but the non-Ti RTX 3080 would be the best-value, high-end GPU: roughly matching the performance of the 6800 XT, while still offering all those extra features such as better support for the ray tracing and, of course, DLSS. So in a normal market, we recommend that you get the RTX 3080.

But it’s been months since we’ve seen MSRP pricing, so we’re going to drop that for now and focus on the reality in front of us.

In many markets we have checked (Australia, US, European regions), the RTX 3080 Ti is only slightly more expensive than the vanilla RTX 3080 and is on average 7-9% faster, depending on resolution, and of course you get a 20% increase in VRAM. In such a scenario, the 3080 Ti makes more sense than the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT, which is weird, but that’s how it is.

Meanwhile, you’re planning to pay around 50% more for the RTX 3090, so at least some things have stayed the same, and it’s still a banned GPU for gamers.

As good as AMD’s RDNA2 generation is, parts like the Radeon RX 6800 XT should be reasonably priced compared to their closest competitor as they do not have the same level of tracing performance. of spokes, and FSR has not yet been widely adopted. Also, in its current form, FSR is not as good as DLSS, although this probably applies more to budget products targeting 1080p resolution.

So this is it. In a normal market, we would buy the GeForce GTX 3080 and in the current market, for the right price, the RTX 3080 Ti would be added to our cart.

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