Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is here, but how does it compare against the
cheaper RX 6900 XT from AMD?
I’ve compared both graphics cards in 17 different games at 3 resolutions to show you
the differences.
Let’s start with the differences in specs, the first obvious difference is that the 6900
XT has 16 gigs of memory while the RTX 3080 Ti has 12 gigs, though Nvidia’s is faster
GDDR6X.
The 3080 Ti costs 20% more money though, well at least based on the MSRP, which let’s
face it is pretty useless at the moment.
This is the system that I’m using to test all three GPUs in, so AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU
and 32 gigs of DDR4-3200 memory are the key specs.
I’ve used MSI’s B550 Tomahawk motherboard and resizable BAR was enabled on both cards.
Let’s start out with the gaming comparisons, followed by things like power draw, content
creator workloads and pricing and availability, or lack thereof, afterwards, or you can time
travel to a relevant part with the timestamps below.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little china with the street kid life path.
I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom, 1440p results in the middle, and 4K up the
top.
The 6900 XT was reaching higher average FPS at both 1080p and 1440p, though it was behind
the 3080 Ti when it came to 1% lows.
At the highest 4K though it’s a win for Nvidia, granted less than a 5% lead.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was tested with the games benchmark, and this test saw the
biggest gains on the 6900 XT out of all 17 titles covered.
Honestly it looks more like a crazy outlier compared to most of the other games we’re
looking at, this one just seems to really favor Radeon graphics.
Even the 1% lows at 1080p are above the average FPS from the 3080 Ti.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was also tested using the games benchmark.
This time the 3080 Ti was ahead in all instances, however the gap gets larger as we get to higher
resolutions.
The Nvidia GPU was just 5% ahead at 1080p, but then 10% ahead at 1440p and 22% ahead
at 4K, the biggest difference out of all 17 games covered at this resolution.
Borderlands 3 was tested with the games benchmark, and this is another title that tends to favour
Radeon graphics, so not surprising to see it taking the lead this time around.
The 1% lows in particular seem to have large gains on the 6900 XT, at 1440p and 4K they’re
close to the average FPS from the 3080 Ti.
Control on the other hand tends to favor Nvidia, and I’ve tested it with and without ray
tracing, let’s start with ray tracing off.
Again the bigger difference seems to be in the 1% lows, at 1440p the 3080 Ti was reaching
25% higher 1% low while the boost to average FPS was lower at 13%.
The 3080 Ti could also push past the sweet sweet 60 FPS even at 4K max settings, putting
it 18% ahead than the 6900 XT.
With ray tracing enabled the 3080 Ti is in another league, not too surprising given the
game came out before AMD had graphics cards that supported ray tracing.
Sure the 6900 XT can still do ray tracing here, but even the 1% lows from the 3080 Ti
are far above the average FPS of the Radeon GPU.
Death Stranding on the other hand had huge 1% low improvements with the 6900 XT at 1080p,
modest gains at 1440p, then both were basically the same at 4K.
While the 1080p result looks good, I doubt anyone is looking at buying either of these
cards for 1080p gaming, so I’d argue the higher resolution results are more useful.
Fortnite was doing better with Nvidia, again quite large gains noted in the 1% lows at
lower resolutions.
At both 1080p and 1440p this is the biggest win for the 3080 Ti out of all 17 games tested.
Call of Duty Warzone on the other hand had one of the biggest differences in favor of
the 6900 XT at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions.
Its 1% lows are ahead at 4K, though the average FPS is a couple of frames behind the 3080
Ti, granted that’s probably not something you’re too likely to notice in practice.
Microsoft flight simulator had basically no major differences to average FPS at 1080p
and 1440p, a bit more of a gain to the 1% lows for Nvidia, then at 4K the averages were
further ahead there.
I’ll just briefly skip through the results for the other 8 games, I’ve talked through
9 titles already that were either mostly in favour of Nvidia or AMD to illustrate that
it can really depend on the game and the resolution.
In comparison the rest of these games generally saw smaller differences for the most part,
so let’s check out the average differences at all three resolutions next.
On average the new RTX 3080 Ti is around 6% slower in terms of average FPS when compared
to the RX 6900 XT in all 17 games at the lower 1080p resolution.
For the most part, 1080p games were doing better on the Radeon card, but as I mentioned
earlier, just how many people are looking to spend $1000 USD plus even assuming best
case MSRP for 1080p gaming?
I’d argue probably not many.
Stepping up to 1440p and on average the 6900 XT still has the lead, with the 3080 Ti now
almost 3% slower on average.
Things are starting to shift over to the Nvidia card, but out of this selection of games at
least the 6900 XT still has more of an advantage, even if we don’t include the huge gains
seen in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
At 4K most games are now doing better on the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, and given both of these
graphics cards can easily handle modern games with high settings at this resolution, I think
this is probably the most important comparison.
The 3080 Ti was now around 6% faster than the 6900 XT, so on average not by a large
margin, especially when remembering that it also costs 20% more money.
As a result the 6900 XT is offering better value when it comes to cost per frame, at
least when assuming MSRP which I get is kind of useless at the moment but at the same time
I don’t have anything else to go by, so here we are, hopefully this is useful at some
point in future.
Not only is the 6900 XT cheaper, but as we saw in general it was performing better at
1080p and 1440p.
The 3080 Ti generally performs better at 4K, but that’s offset by its higher price.
The 3080 Ti just seems a bit too expensive, it costs 20% more money compared to the 6900
XT while offering a 6% performance boost in games at 4K, but hey I suppose this is the
top end of a product stack and diminishing returns come into play and value goes out
the window.
I think if the 3080 Ti was able to match the $1000 USD price point of the 6900 XT then
things would be much more interesting, but hey at this point in time people are probably
just buying whatever they can get their hands on, so maybe this comparison wasn’t that
useful.
Now let’s check out the differences in content creator workloads, it’s not all just about
gaming!
I’ve tested DaVinci Resolve with the Puget Systems benchmark, and the 3080 Ti is scoring
almost 7% above the 6900 XT, so although Nvidia wins it’s not ideal when the 3080 Ti has
a 20% higher MSRP.
The gap was a bit wider in Adobe Premiere, at least this time the 3080 Ti is scoring
21% higher than the 6900 XT, so a reasonable scaling when compared against the pricing
difference.
In terms of power draw the 3080 Ti system was drawing 12% more power from the wall in
Control at 4K, though in this particular game there was also an above average 18% boost
to FPS in games, so doesn’t sound too bad, but this game did seem to favor Nvidia so
those percentages would vary by game.
I think hardware unboxed already summed up the 3080 Ti nicely in their video.
Why make these things instead of cheaper models when there’s already not enough supply?
Great question, well asked.
Hopefully the 4 days I spent testing the 3080 Ti were at least useful to someone.
If you’re new to the channel then get subscribed for future comparisons like this one, come
and join me in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel on
Patreon, and if you want to see how the 3080 Ti compares against Nvidia’s own lineup
then check out my video from yesterday over here, I’ve also compared it against their
3080 and 3090 to see where it fits in, so I’ll see you over in that one next.