the most powerful gaming cpu on the
planet
is it enough to play modern games on a
massive
8k oled tv like this z1088 from lg
and what graphics card could possibly be
worthy
to find out we have the two absolute
fastest top-of-the-line gpus from both
amd and nvidia representing team red
and weighing in at a cool 1500 us
dollars
is the rog strix radeon rx 6900 xt
liquid cooled edition and for team green
we've got the 2 000
msi nvidia rtx 3090
supreme x either one of them
alone costs more than an xbox series s
series x and playstation 5 combined
and is capable of consuming in excess of
700 watts of power under heavy load
at stock speeds and today we'll be
overclocking both of them
to their absolute limits fortunately
our sponsor seasonic has got us covered
with their tx 1000
80 plus titanium power supply it's
efficient
quiet fully modular and comes with a 12
year warranty let's make this poor thing
hurt shall we
the msi rtx 3090 supreme x is a powerful
card to be sure and
at least on paper it is well ahead of
its competitor the radeon 6900xt
thanks in part to its super fast gddr 6x
memory
but here's the thing amd pulled off a
pretty major surprise
when the rx 6900xt managed to hold its
own against this monster
in traditional rendering at 4k thanks in
large
part to its even faster but much smaller
infinity cache also the
built-in water cooling on this version
of the card can't hurt its chances
actually both of these are among the
best available in their class featuring
overkill cooling a factory overclock
triple
eight pin power connectors oh and of
course rgb for that extra fps
and the radeon actually has another
trick up its sleeve that nvidia
doesn't have support for yet smart
access memory also known as resizable
bar support
allows the cpu in our system because
we're using a ryzen 5900 xt
to access all of the gpu's memory at
once
rather than in the traditional 256
megabyte chunks
this would ordinarily speed up memory
intensive games
sometimes by a lot but whether that
advantage translates to
8k remains to be seen just like my sick
limited edition foil gpu shirt from
ltdstore.com
like these gpus we can only make a
limited number of these by the way and
we are expecting them to sell out fast
so
go go go anyway meantime our gpu bench
is ready to freaking go here with the
aforementioned ryzen 5950x 16 core cpu
a fresh install of windows and of course
our seasonic prime tx 1000 80 plus
titanium power supply
again that's to be sure that we're not
bottlenecking ourselves in any
meaningful way
we're also going to be using these tools
from nvidia right here
to monitor our power consumption in real
time as we run our tests
so that's pretty fun there's no way to
please everyone these days hey
they want you to test in a closed case
so that you don't give a thermal
advantage to some card designs over
others
but the thing about a closed case is
that it's
like you can't access the i o when you
have the power measurement
stuff hooked up and everything before we
actually overclock the cards we're doing
some baseline testing at their stock
speeds to see
how they compete at 8k like amd
technically has the vram for it way more
than the rtx 3080
but it's slower so like
that's tough hey yeah it's like almost
half the speed yeah it seems like it'd
be
fine for you know working on large
projects like as a prosumer card
but for actual gaming then again we will
try to overclock it later
that's actually not terrible it's like
50 plus fps and remember this is a
g-sync
capable display so
it is not currently enabled oh did you
not enable it it's best to disable it
for
uh benchmarking that's true still in
terms of the gaming experience 55 fps
with adaptive sync
not bad certainly like on a console you
wouldn't complain about that
nope on a pc i wouldn't complain about
that yeah maybe not in this game in this
game i'd like to have a little bit more
oh we're definitely getting some judder
though you can really see it in those
panning shots
yeah with the g-sync that wouldn't be
such a big deal though yeah i want to
get out into a more open area but i'm
getting like 75 80 fps in here
man this game is so well optimized it
could probably run on like
a toaster if you really needed to how
are we doing for power consumption
anthony looks like we've peaked at uh
461 watts
and we're averaging about 420.
nice something to note here though is
that while the game is never dropping
below 60 fps
anthony do you see that judder and those
micro stutters oh yeah
yeah it's like hitching every i don't
know like
every time maybe yeah yeah
so hopefully overclocking will help us a
little bit with that let's see
oh it's hot oh it's hot yeah yeah yeah
yeah
always yeah that backplate is used
actually for cooling
yeah no kidding jeez well it's handling
it actually
looks like nvidia might not have the
only 8k gaming card on the market
what does the frame rate display show uh
it shows 55.
oh wow that's okay very similar and you
know what i need to get out into a more
open area first but it actually doesn't
feel
quite as juddery how's our power
consumption
power consumption has peaked so far at
384
and we're in around 311 average
and to be clear that's just the gpu the
numbers we're talking about there
not the entire system so yeah like 100
watts less for
similar questions performance
it's a lower fps reported by the game
but it's actually a little bit smoother
feeling in terms of the frame delivery
which is not what i actually expected
uh freesync is anon right i could check
that
ah i don't know i see tearing i don't
think so
okay so back to the same thing with the
pillars look how much smoother
that is i think we're gonna need to run
some more testing and get the peeps some
some real numbers here the rest of our
games went about as you'd expect with
amd trailing nvidia significantly at
about three quarters of the performance
to shadow the tomb raider
and it's even worse with ray tracing
enabled
and that doesn't even consider dlss
nvidia's deep learning
super sampling that runs the game at a
lower resolution
then uses machine learning to upscale it
it's a great feature and in supported
games
honestly nvidia is just untouchable
red dead redemption 2 has a similar
story in minimum frame rates but the
average
closes the gap somewhat while forza
horizon brings us
much closer at roughly a 10 performance
difference
finally ha would you look at that
cs go has amd winning at stock speeds
very interesting this simpler title
lends credence to the notion that amd's
raw
raster performance may be higher than
nvidia's regardless
of memory throughput and f1 2020 gives
us
another win for team red dang i was
worried this wasn't going to be much of
a like
ultimate showdown but turns out we've
got a battle on our heads
now let's get to overclocking nvidia's
newer versions of geforce experience
provide a way to
automatically do overclock scanning and
set power targets
unfortunately adjusting the voltage or
power target
made the oc scan crash the system and
msi afterburner similarly
either crashed or settled on an unstable
overclock whenever performing an oc scan
for a while there we thought our card
might already just be at peak
performance
but manually overclocking we were able
to bump the core by
about 100 megahertz and 800 megahertz on
the memory before we started
losing stability and performance to down
clocking and error correction
in order to do that though of course we
have to raise our power limit
and apply as for your core voltage
honestly increasing it might work
against you as much as for you
because you'll be more likely to hit
your power limit so
anthony says he actually got about the
same results with it cranked as with it
just
to at nothing so whatever you know what
you only live once all right
crank it yolo yolo something to watch
out for here is that those gddr6x memory
chips get
extremely hot even under normal
circumstances and they are going to get
even hotter now so the back plate of
this card is
necessary for keeping them cool so far
this actually doesn't really seem any
better
we're getting about 70 65 to 75 fps
which is
pretty much what we saw before i'm also
feeling a bit more stuttering than i did
on amd
that's something that based on the
measurements we took ahead of time we
were not expecting
yeah there's definitely a judder yeah
see that
did it look worse than the radeon card
to you i feel like the radeon
didn't have as severe stuttering
at least based on what i'm seeing here
and what's in my memory
uh maybe i'm just crazy but it looks
worse here
that does not look like 70 frames per
second
period yeah it looks kind of like 45 or
50. yeah if that
and not a smooth 50. yeah it almost
reminds me like the microstarter you'd
get from multi gpu yeah
frame rate high consistency low how are
we doing for power
500 peak
and the average looks like it's floating
in around
440 450 so
we're up a lot higher yep that's higher
all right
half our power supply dedicated just to
the gpu
and this tool does not measure fine
enough time increments to see these like
micro spikes that can take place from
time to time
now we'll throw the amd card back in and
i'll try not to punk myself here and
touch the back plate
we expect it to be even hotter than last
time amd's radeon software offers
overclocking controls directly
setting the card to 2600 megahertz seems
to be
about as high as we can go
out of the gate any higher and it'll
throttle to this speed anyway
just add full voltage and a power target
and then the memory we were actually
able to set
as high as possible and it's possible we
could have even gone
farther if we had a bit more control
over memory frequency
okay so let's try cranking the power
limit for one thing
uh main frequency you can leave max
frequency 2600
and ram just you can go advanced control
just to see how much
that is uh yeah 2150.
okay apply changes okay it was not my
imagination last time
this is noticeably smoother than the
nvidia experience although
if the numbers are anything to go by
it's a bit of an outlier
what's also a better experience compared
to nvidia though
is the overclocking headroom on this
card at the low end
we still only got about uh five percent
improvement
but on the high end we were looking at
up to 15 16
faster performance so that's
pretty cool this might be my imagination
but it seems like it is far smoother
than before
um i think it is smoother i don't know
if i would describe it as far
smoother it's definitely smoother though
we're getting 60 to 70 mid fps
we were getting like 50 to 60 before
weren't we actually that's true
isn't it okay yeah and it is noticeably
smoother
to operate i'm surprised amd comes out
with a pretty clear win
at least in do maternal although you
know what anthony
i am seeing more stuttering now that
we've overclocked it
or judder rather see that how it'll go
smoothly for a little bit and then it'll
like
like the nvidia card how's our power
consumption
looks like 415 watts maximum
uh we're averaging around 360
362 watts as far as you know
not too shabby overall neither card had
terribly impressive overclocking
headroom but that's not a huge surprise
considering that both of them
already had factory overclocks applied
for our results
we did eek out a frame or two here and
there on both cards
in shadow of the tomb raider but ray
tracing remains a pain point for amd
with minimums that are still in the
single digits
red dead redemption 2 and forza horizon
meanwhile put amd
a couple of percentage points closer to
nvidia than stock
which in forza puts the 6900 xt within
the 10
mark and as we might expect cs go
improved by a significant margin
maintaining amd spot well ahead of
nvidia but this time
in every measurable way the tldr then is
this
amd's best puts up a valiant effort for
the 500
price difference against the 3090
sometimes coming close
or even beating it at 8k but only
sometimes it still falls short in more
demanding titles
even with its greater overclocking
headroom which only serves to further
highlight the importance of technologies
like dlss
and how much not having it is holding
amd back right now
and not just in ray tracing either
outside of doom eternal which
surprisingly was quite a bit smoother on
amd
gddr6 seems to be helping nvidia out
tremendously
because remember ak is four times the
number of pixels as 4k
just the frame buffer alone that is each
frame displayed on the screen
is nearly 128 megabytes
which is exactly enough to hobble the
6000 series 128 megabytes
of ridiculously fast infinity cache
leaving them with
memory that's just over half as fast as
ampere's
for everything else with that said if
amd had a dlss analog to reduce this
memory footprint
amd might have been more competitive
more often so it seems reasonable to
suggest that if amd had equipped the
6900xt
with gddr6x things might look quite a
bit different
which makes me wonder how much of a
bottleneck it would have been for nvidia
if they had stuck with pci express gen 3
this time around
get subscribed for our video because we
are going to be exploring that by the
way
so then is 8k gaming a lie
well it's complicated while i
participated in some of nvidia's early
promotion
for 8k gaming on the rtx 3090
and it does work in the same way that a
primitive hammer
can pound in a nail it's clear that it's
not practical for every game today
and as more visually elaborate titles
trickle out over the next few years
new hammers will be much more
appropriate tools to handle them
at this resolution but this was still an
interesting exercise for a couple of
reasons
first because of how demanding it is
gaming at 8k
can give us a glimpse into how a card's
performance might evolve
over time amd famously squeezed several
years of life
and performance improvements out of its
radeon 7970
and it looks like compared to nvidia
they may have a bit more headroom here
again oops amd cards over there
and second while you might roll your
eyes and say
who cares nobody has an 8k monitor the
same was true for 4k
a short while ago and even if you only
use a 4k display
super sampling or running at a higher
resolution than native
then down scaling it is still the best
way to reduce shimmering
and other artifacts while preserving 100
of the detail in an image
and 4x super sampling at 4k means
rendering at 8k fun fact to close this
out
dlss nvidia's killer app that allowed
them to market this card as an
8k gaming solution with a straight face
is currently used to render at a lower
resolution
and then blow it up to your display's
native res but that wasn't how it was
first introduced
it was a form of anti-aliasing hence the
super sampling in the name
and it's very good at this task so good
in fact that its second iteration
it now legitimately enables high impact
features like ray tracing to run at a
lower resolution while preserving
most of the sharpness and detail of
native rendering
this point is especially painful for amd
whose ray accelerators already
significantly lag behind nvidia's rt
cores
anyway the main takeaway is that neither
amd nor
nvidia is even close to creating a gpu
that can natively run 8k maxed out
aaa games and that upscaling tricks are
here to stay
and by the way one more takeaway is that
unless your screen is this big
8k has a much smaller impact on your
gaming experience than
say hdr or running at a higher refresh
rate for smoother animations
and that last one you can actually check
out our whole video about that here
on the subject of smoothless smoothness
big shout out to sonic for keeping our
test benches running
smoothly as can be they have observed
these gpus both of them actually spiking
north of a thousand watts for
very very short durations which can
wreak havoc on over current protections
and our tx1000 handled them like a champ
you can check it out at the link in the
video description
and of course they've got lots of other
power supplies to fit any budget