AMD Teases Radeon RX 6000 Card Performance Numbers: Aiming For 3080?
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2020 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Navi 2x
- RX 6000 Series
As part of today’s Zen 3 desktop CPU announcement from AMD, the company also threw in a quick teaser from the GPU side of the company in order to show off the combined power of their CPUs and GPUs. The other half of AMD is preparing for their own announcement in a few weeks, where they’ll be holding a keynote for their forthcoming Radeon RX 6000 video cards.
With the recent launch of NVIDIA’s Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series parts clearly on their minds, AMD briefly teased the performance of a forthcoming high-end RX 6000 video card. The company isn’t disclosing any specification details of the unnamed card – short of course that it’s an RDNA2-based RX 6000 part – but the company did disclose a few choice benchmark numbers from their labs.
Dialing things up to 4K at maximum quality, AMD benchmarked Borderlands 3, Gears of War 5, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). And while these are unverified results being released for marketing purposes – meaning they should be taken with a grain or two of salt – the implied message from AMD is clear: they’re aiming for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080 with this part.
Assuming these numbers are accurate, AMD’s Borderlands 3 performance are practically in lockstep with the 3080. However the Gears 5 results are a bit more modest, and 73fps would have AMD trailing by several percent. Finally, Call of Duty does not have a standardized benchmark, so although 88fps at 4K looks impressive, it’s impossible to say how it compares to other hardware.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that as with all vendor performance teases, we’re likely looking at AMD’s best numbers. And of course, expect to see a lot of ongoing fine tuning from both AMD and NVIDIA over the coming weeks and months as they jostle for position, especially if AMD’s card is consistently this close.
Otherwise, the biggest question that remains for another day is which video card these performance numbers are for. It’s a very safe bet that this is AMD’s flagship GPU (expected to be "Big Navi", Navi 21), however AMD is purposely making it unclear if this is their lead configuration, or their second-tier configuration. Reaching parity with the 3080 would be a big deal on its own; however if it’s AMD’s second tier-card, then that would significantly alter the competitive landscape.
Expect to find out the answers to this and more on October 28th, when AMD hosts their Radeon RX 6000 keynote.
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flyingpants265 - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
$399 for 6700XT will be cool. They should bundle these together (5600, 6700XT and motherboard) for $800.Spunjji - Monday, October 12, 2020 - link
"Even at $499 it will be a tough sell if the 3070 is beating it with ray tracing and DLSS"Big IF there, buddy. Any price is a tough sell to a known Nvidia shill. Please don't pretend there's any reason you'd buy or recommend an AMD card over the Nvidia alternative; most of us know who you are and it's just sad seeing you piss into the wind like this.
MisterAnon - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
DLSS is a gimmick. It is a marketing name for upscaling, and reduces quality compared to native resolution. It is not something you just dial up.watzupken - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
In my opinion, DLSS like AMD’s image sharpening tech are not gimmicks. They work, but only if considerable effort goes in from the developer’s end, particularly DLSS. Which is why with so many games released, you don’t see many games supporting DLSS. Only those titles that worked closely with Nvidia gets DLSS support. Also given that most gamers are still on 1080p and 1440p, there is little incentive for developers to spend time and effort baking DLSS support in games.Spunjji - Monday, October 12, 2020 - link
100% this. There seems to be this tendency to describe DLSS as either utterly essential or "just a gimmick" and neither of those things are true.It's a great feature to have for the people that want it. I hope AMD's alternative is a solid one, and ideally not one that requires any special effort from developers. I'd argue that if they can manage that, slightly lower resulting image quality compared with DLSS would still be an acceptable compromise. If not, it's going to have to at least match it.
Spunjji - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Not really, as you're comparing apples to oranges. Apparently AMD have their own equivalent to DLSS coming - it makes more sense to compare that to DLSS (in terms of both image quality and frame-rate) than it does to compare DLSS to native rendering.playtech1 - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
Unless AMD's feature set is better than I expect, Nvidia still has the bonus features of DLSS, ray tracing, NVenc and AI that I think mean it can sustain premium pricing over AMD. I think Nvidia could even beat AMD on price this time around if it has to, given that Samsung will be cheaper than TSMC.brakdoo - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
1. NV dies are much bigger, so even if SS 8nm is much cheaper, the die won't be that much cheaper. (N7 has really nice yields now).2. NV is a company that is used to really high margins, much higher than AMD. The premium desktop chips have probably a margin >70%. They are definitely not willing to give up those margins. Amd is a company that has a gross margin of ~45% and the GPUs are on average below that. Any improvement here would be good enough for AMD.
haukionkannel - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
Amd needs and want to have better marging like that! So Expect prices that Are really close to 3080!brucethemoose - Thursday, October 8, 2020 - link
AMD already has hardware encoders.DLSS is great. Actually, its amazing. But its locked down to certain games, which kinda sucks unless you only play AAAs :/.
We'll see how raytracing and AI performance shake out. CUDA on AMD is still quite funky, and the research side of things is still on CUDA, but there are some Vulkan ports of popular programs coming out.