The RX 6800 XT could be 33% slower than the RTX 3080 using Ray Tracing according to a Microsoft Benchmark

During the Radeon RX 6000 Series unveiling event, AMD didn’t share many details about the real-time ray tracing performance of the three announced cards (RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT), but it turns out that the red team has revealed some details that can be directly compared to the NVIDIA Ampere series.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series features Ray Accelerators, in contrast to Nvidia’s RT cores. Each calculation unit has an accelerator:

These units are responsible for the hardware acceleration of ray tracing in games. The RX 6900XT features 80 RA, the RX 6800XT features 72, and the RX 6800 has 60. The same beam accelerators can be found on RDNA2-based game consoles.

The Radeon RX 6800XT has 72 RA, while the GeForce RTX 3080 has 68 RT cores. AMD has tested the Microsoft DXR SDK tool called ‘procedural geometry’.

«Measured by AMD Engineering Labs on 8/17/2020 on an AMD RDNA 2-based graphics card, using Microsoft’s DXR SDK Procedural Geometry sample application, AMD RDNA 2-based graphics card achieves a Up to 13.8x acceleration (471 FPS) using HW raytracing vs. using the DXR Software backing layer (34 FPS) on the same clocks. Performance may vary. RX-571 »

Reddit user NegativeXyzen tested the performance of the ASUS RTX 3080 TUF model and reported an average frame rate of 630:

Videocardz has also run the GeForce RTX 3080 benchmark with stock values using a pre-compiled executable file. The RTX 3080 averaged 635 frames per second over three 1-minute runs.

This means that the GeForce RTX 3080 is around 33% faster than the Radeon RX 6800 XT in this particular benchmark. Of course, there are a few things that need to be noted, such as the test platform and DXR test resolution (AMD did not clarify this, therefore the default was used).

The GeForce RTX 3090, on the other hand, has a frame rate of 749, according to the screenshot posted by Hassan Mujtaba of Wccftech. This means that the RTX 3090 is 59% faster than the AMD RX 6800XT in this DXR test.

AMD promises to launch a super sampling solution to compete with Nvidia’s magical DLSS, but at the moment there is nothing concrete. It may take a while, since the cards will be out in a few weeks and it was not even announced at the presentation event.