- It's obvious that Nvidia GPUs
are just plain better.
I mean, look how few people
are buying Radeon cards.
And if everyone's doing it,
it must be right, right?
Wrong.
Actually, when you look at the price
and performance of AMD GPUs right now,
on paper they're the obvious choice.
You can get a 6700Xt, which delivers
near RTX 3070 performance
for just about the price
of an RTX 3060.
And we just got our hands on a 1 click
tuning software from 1usmus,
the creator of ClockTuner for Ryzen,
that he claims will put a 6800XT.
This isn't it.
A 6800XT in the same performance class
as a 3090 Ti.
A GPU that costs twice as much.
Now, obviously a claim like that
needs to be taken with a grain of salt,
but if there is even any
free performance on the table
it's worth investigating to make sure
that you don't get taken for a ride.
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- The truth is I'm at least
partly to blame for the current situation.
After some very bad experiences
with AMD's GPU drivers that delayed our video production
almost every time we tried to use them,
we switched to almost exclusively
using Nvidia GPUs in our
showcase builds and in our test rigs.
I mean, during a review for a new card from AMD
we would often find that it was pretty okay.
Some instability or bugs not withstanding,
but then it would invariably sit
on the shelf until it was needed
as a point of comparison for some other review.
- For me, the experience that turned me
off of AMD was a bit more personal.
Back in 2015, I was swayed by the please
by this person to vote for competition
with your wallet, and I used
my incredibly hard earned cash.
I was a student at the time
to buy a Radeon R9 380.
My favorite game at the time was Dirt Rally
and it had an AMD splash screen at the start.
- Well, It should be fine right?
- Yeah, you would think so.
(laughing)
Turns out not only was AMD's
performance subpar, but due to driver issues
the AMD GPUs couldn't
properly render foliage and shadows.
In effect, making my experience barely better
than the anemic GT 740 I had before.
It had DDR3 RAM in it.
In a game with AMD's logo on the splash screen.
It was a similar story in
many of my favorite games too.
- You can tell how over it he is
by how red his face is right now.
However, there is good reason
to think that things have changed.
Back in July of this year,
AMD completely rewrote their
Direct X11 drivers, apparently dramatically
increasing stability and performance
at the same time.
So to unscientifically test this,
Harrison and Alex from the writing team
switched to team red for two weeks,
and played video games
like they normally would to see
if anything wonky happened.
I wasn't informed, people were just
taking GPUs home but okay.
- You were in Hawaii, and it was fine.
The point is that after I made the switch
and installed AMD's drivers,
I honestly just completely forgot
that I'd swapped the GPU
until this morning
when I looked at the script again.
I didn't even have to adjust
any of my in-game settings.
Going from an RTX 3080 to an RX 6800XT,
I could have easily just saved
like $200 by going team red.
- Of course, you guys deserve
a more scientific approach to testing.
So we handed the cards that we'll be looking
at today over to our labs team to whip
up some charts and graphs
that I assume you're pouring
over in detail right now.
If you're not super detail oriented,
don't worry about that.
The bottom line is this: AMD is at
or near the performance of Nvidia
in traditionally rendered,
so not ray traced, games at anywhere
from $100 to $200 cheaper.
And that's before we pull out our secret weapon.
1usmus sent us an early preview
of what he's calling Hydra 1.2,
a user-friendly tool for RDNA 2
Architecture Radeon cards that can be used to
easily improve both performance
and power consumption.
Alex is gonna show us how it works.
- To get Hydra right now,
you have to subscribe to 1usmus Patreon,
but this tool will be free
once it's, you know, not broken and stuff.
Speaking of which, if you have an Intel CPU,
it won't work unless you have an F model.
So right now the iGPU will take priority
when you boot it up, and it just doesn't work.
I'm sure that's very easy to fix
but we have a i9-12900KF in here.
So that's solved that problem.
First of all.
Warning, you can destroy your processors
by using this software if you do something
really, really bad.
It's probably fine.
Most of the time you'll just crash your stuff.
But you know, you need the warning right there.
So this is your basic overclocking dashboard.
Your sort of main stuff is all in here.
So we have like, this eraser.
It deletes all of your stuff and restores it
all back to your factory defaults.
You can also come back in here
so that you change your core frequency.
You can save it right there.
Boom, it's saved.
Now that save button only applies it
to, you know, this.
It doesn't actually apply it to the GPU.
So what this is basically doing
is changing stuff within the GPU drivers itself,
the power play table,
and that's what's doing your over clocking.
You do that with this little lightning bolt.
Then driver resets and you're good to go.
Now all this stuff right here
is just your basic manual overclocking,
but why would you over clock something
yourself when you can have
just the robots do it for you?
Let's go over the diagnostic window.
GPU, there we go.
This allows us to change what kind
of a test we're doing.
So we can change it from
this right here is OpenGL.
You can go to whatever you want and it's fine.
The duration is how long it's going
to test for stability.
Right now it's 90 seconds.
That's okay, but if this was my personal rig
and I was gonna use the GPU
like day in day out,
I would increase this by quite a bit.
It's the sort of thing you don't want
your computer to crash
in the middle of a ranked game.
Below that, we have the do overclocking window.
This right here is the real meat and potatoes
of Hydra 1.2.
Basically what this does is move your whole
voltage frequency curve.
So your GPU is going to have something
that looks a little bit like this.
Given a frequency,
you'll have a certain voltage to make sure
that it doesn't crash there.
Now AMD doesn't want to have this, like, right
on the edge of crashing all the time.
So they're a little bit conservative
with their values.
What Hydra is doing is just moving this curve
over a tiny bit, seeing if it crashes.
If it's all good, then it just moves over
a little bit more.
Once it gets instability
pushes it back a little bit, you're good to go.
And that is exactly
what we're doing right here.
So you can see our start offset
that is negative 43.75 millivolts.
So we'll be starting with the curve
moved over by that much,
and then the step offset is 6.25.
So every time that it does an iteration,
it's going to be decreasing the voltage
by another 6.25 millivolts.
So that's how you can see for the same amount of power
you're going to be getting it going faster,
because let's say default we have this amount of voltage
this frequency, you get it, you get it.
(indistinct)
The last field here is the power offset.
This is if you want to increase your power so
that you have a custom water cooler,
you can just crank your power rate up.
So say right now it's 15,
that increased our TDP
from 255 watts to 292.
I'm just gonna set that back to zero.
Additional power tune up here is where
some things get a little bit strange.
So all the do overclocking is concerned
about your GPU core,
whereas additional power tuning
is focused a little bit more
on the memory.
on some GPUs, if you get really good RAM,
you can actually drop your thermals
by a lot while also over clocking the GPU core.
If you're able to drop the voltage
of your memory chips.
Ah, with some of the other ones
it doesn't work at all.
Just hope you get lucky.
Well, Brandon, should we run it?
- Yes
- Let's go.
Here we have MSI Kombustor.
It's not crashing, so that's good.
And now we wait.
Okay, the diagnostic process
successfully completed.
So we have a core curve offset
of negative 68.75 millivolts.
Ugh, should have been 0.025 more.
We'll fix that later.
Anyway, our total board power
has stayed exactly the same.
Our core frequency has only increased.
What is that?
72 megahertz.
So that's not a whole lot.
Oh wait, average FPS in
MSI Kombustor went up by 1.
So it's not incredible.
That didn't do too much.
But what we did see is about
a 3 to 5% increase in games
after we had done this.
So not too bad.
- To be clear, what we're doing
isn't black magic.
Nvidia, and AMD for that matter,
are running these kinds of optimizations
constantly on their GPUs to try to
squeeze as much performance out as possible.
We are just using the excellent access
that AMD provides to over clockers
to fly a little closer to the sun.
To be clear, 3 to 5%.
It's not a ton of extra performance,
but as I like to say
it's better than a kick in the teeth.
And given that it didn't cost us anything
but 15 to 20 minutes of our time,
and it didn't even increase
power consumption or heat,
I'd say it's kind of a no brainer.
Not everyone has 15 minutes though,
thankfully there's an easier way.
1usmus created a one button
over clocking tool that he calls
Monster Profiles, and it's
with one of these that he claims
we should be able to beat
a 3090 Ti for half the price.
Let's give it a shot.
- For the RX 6800XT and RX 6700XT,
There are Radeon Monster profiles.
So all we have to do is click this
profile button right here.
So we have 355 good bin and bad bin.
Those are coming soon.
We don't actually have those,
and given this cooler
that would not work anyway.
We also have our 305 watt good bin and 255.
So that's stock power good bin.
We're gonna try the 305 wat good bin, use it.
Apply.
Radeon Monster profile enabled ha ha.
This is where we should be able
to beat a 3090 Ti.
This guy right here in Time Spy
got us a score of 21,425.
Can we beat it?
Well I'm not gonna let the whole thing run
'cause I already ran it
and I'm just gonna spoil it for you.
We did not beat the 3090 Ti.
The score of our 6800XT was 21,255.
Just missed it, under 200 points off,
but that still is damn close for a GPU
that's half as much money.
This thing works really quite well.
Although honestly, in real games outside
of synthetic benchmarks,
it's not quite as impressive.
But at the same time it's free performance.
You can just put it on here,
your card goes faster.
- The Monster Profile doesn't always
work out great though.
Our 6700XT, this one right here,
absolutely refused to work with any of them.
Even the bad bin profile
caused it to immediately crash.
The good news though is that Hydra's
automated tuning process,
you know the one that takes about 15,
20 minutes, did work for this card
and we actually managed
a similar performance improvement
by fine tuning the voltage frequency curve
just like on our 6800XT.
Which puts this card comfortably
in competition with NVIDIAs 3070
and 3070 Ti for 100
or in some cases well over a $100 less.
So the 3090 Ti slaying claims
were a little optimistic.
But hey, free performance
is free performance.
And I've gotta say that our experience
with these cards ,
both on the bench and for the writers at home,
lends credibility to AMD's claims
of much better drivers.
Though there are some inconvenient
details in all of this.
Nvidia has some feature benefits
over AMD that simply cannot be ignored.
Although AMD did recently improve
their AMF encoder to include B frames,
it still isn't quite
at the same level as Nvidia's NVENC.
And if the games that you enjoy support real
time ray trace lighting,
and you wish to enable said
ray tracing feature,
Nvidia has a pretty clear performance advantage.
And that's before you enable their excellent
DLSS machine learning powered
image up scaling technology.
AMD, of course, has their own version
of DLSS called FSR,
but frankly it isn't as good, at least not yet.
By the time we release this video though
the story may have changed,
because AMD will have announced
their upcoming lineup of RDNA 3 GPUs.
Hopefully, with decent pricing and an
even more competitive feature set.
But, with how affordable and tuneable
RDNA 2 is today I think these cards
are gonna stay relevant for
quite some time.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check
out our last 1usmus video
where we used ClockTuner for Ryzen
to get free performance out of AMDs CPUs.