It's been an all-out brawl this year in the game of graphics cards, with both AMD and Nvidia loading up the big guns and firing entirely new stacks of GPUs at consumers and hardware analysts alike. The flagship models for both companies, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, come with heaps of performance hiding under their shrouds, pushing games (and specifically those played at 4K resolution) deeper in detail and higher in frame rates than they've ever gone before.
That said, actually being able to buy one of these cards is another issue entirely. As of this writing in December 2020, just about all models of every new graphics card released in the past six months are sold through, and we mean through. Bots have turned what used to be the leisurely process of waking up at 9 a.m. on launch day to buy a new GPU from an online retailer into an all-out trigger-finger hunt, and scalpers are dictating the terms of the market like never before. (See our tips for landing the latest hard-to-find components.)
So while it's important to compare these two cards and figure out whose ray tracing reigns supreme, keep in mind that for now, it's also a matter of what you can find and when you can find it, as much as which model gets three more frames per second in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
RTX 3080 vs. RX 6800 XT: Design
While AMD's reference and third-party designs of the RX 6800 XT follow many of the same traditions we've seen in the past in terms of heatsink approaches and overall aesthetic, this year Nvidia has taken a drastically different tack with the company's Founders Edition RTX 30 Series of reference cards.
Featuring a completely redesigned PCB and cooling system, RTX 30 Series Founders Edition graphics cards are an experiment unto themselves. In all RTX 30 Series Founders Edition cards, Nvidia has managed to shrink the PCB of its cards by up to 50 percent, and filled the missing space with more heatsink, and more cooling in a new push/pull dual-fan configuration.
While in our testing we didn't see a whole heap of difference in temperature results between the RTX 3080 and the Radeon RX 6800 XT (77 degrees C versus 81 degrees C, respectively), the RTX 3080 Founders Edition is only a two-slot-wide card, while the RX 6800 XT is 2.5 slots wide.
Overall, while there's certainly nothing wrong with AMD's reference design for its Radeon RX 6000 Series cards, Nvidia's attempt to fundamentally redefine the way cards are designed and built in 2020—and hopefully beyond—gives it the edge in this department.
WINNER: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
RTX 3080 vs. RX 6800 XT: Performance Tests
While on paper, initial impressions of the performance achieved by the $649 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT might make the card seem like a good deal compared with the $699 RTX 3080 Founders Edition, as we'll discuss in the next section, it was the consistency of results at all resolutions that gave Nvidia the win in this department. (The results at 4K are often pretty close.)
Here's a look at a subset of popular games that we ran the two cards through in our reviews. Hit the full reviews for a much larger set, and some synthetic graphics tests, as well.
Frame-rate results in both the RTX 3080 Founders Edition we tested, as well as three third-party RTX 3080s, were consistently the fastest we've seen yet, especially at 4K resolution. However, while the RX 6800 XT was just fast at times, especially for its price in games like Red Dead Redemption 2, it also had some issues with consistency, depending on the game or engine we were testing, as evidenced by the results above (as well in as a bunch of other games illustrated in our full reviews, notably a handful of older titles). Which brings us to our next point...
WINNER: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
RTX 3080 vs. RX 6800 XT: Drivers
This has never been a strong area for AMD against Nvidia, and the problems that have nagged the company in years past seem to be recurring on its RDNA 2 cards.
During our testing of the Radeon RX 6800 XT, we found that games like Far Cry 5, Total War: Warhammer II, Death Stranding, and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey would stall out in certain resolutions; we also saw 1080p frame-rate numbers lower than 1440p ones in AC: Odyssey. Not only that, but in an unofficial test-drive, we found that in the popular game PUBG, the card struggled to render basic ground elements like foliage and bushes at a distance, resulting in a game-breaking bug that could get players banned from their Steam accounts if PUBG Corp ever gets wise to this unintentional driver-based "exploit."
AMD forgot to bring the foliage
Nvidia, meanwhile, continues to release stable driver sets that gave us no problems across all four samples of GeForce RTX 3080 card we've tested thus far. The company consistently rolls out new "Game Ready" driver updates when a major new title is released for PC, and its support for its GeForce Experience software is equally as robust.
WINNER: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
Speaking of GeForce Experience, the past few years have seen a number of additional features added to AMD's Radeon Software and Nvidia's GeForce Experience. These include image sharpeners like Radeon Image Sharpening with CAS and Nvidia's Freestyle, as well as all manner of latency-reducing technologies (Anti-Lag for AMD, Reflex for Nvidia), broadcasting/streaming software, and storage speed-up tech like RTX IO.
That said, with additional hardware like the Tensor cores found in Nvidia's card (which power the frame-saving tech, DLSS), Nvidia takes the edge in this department. In games where it is supported, DLSS offers up huge gains in performance, up to 40 percent in select resolutions on games like Death Stranding. Until AMD can answer the call of DLSS with its own supersampling tech (known as "Super Resolution," release date pending), Nvidia will maintain a strong lead on available extra features.
WINNER: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition
Verdict: Nvidia Takes Another Victory Lap
If the conclusion of our review of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT wasn't already enough to convince you, this should make it clear: If you can find one, the GeForce RTX 3080 is the card to get. That said, if you can find either one, you're lucky.
Right now, there isn't much that the Radeon RX 6800 XT does that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition can't do as well, or better. The design of the RTX 3080 Founders card leapfrogs the Radeon RX 6800 XT's, and with more-stable and more-consistent drivers that also power DLSS in select games, Nvidia holds the pole position in the 4K-gaming GPU market at the moment.
Now, this could change as AMD continues to refine the stability of its drivers (and—who knows?—perhaps drop the MSRP of its card by another $50 to sweeten the pot). And perhaps once it releases its DLSS competitor, the tides will turn. But until then, in most metrics, the RTX 3080 Founders Edition should be your next 4K-pusher of a graphics card if you're willing to put in the time for the hunt.
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The Link LonkDecember 14, 2020 at 09:13PM
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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 vs. AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT: Which High-End Card to Get for 4K Gaming? - PCMag.com
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