AMD Shares Radeon RX 6000 Series 4K Benchmarks: “Most Powerful GPU We’ve Ever Built”

[Tsing]

Image: AMD



AMD’s RDNA 2 event won’t take place until the end of October, but CEO Dr. Lisa Su couldn’t keep herself from treating gamers to a sneak peek of Big Navi at the end of today’s Zen 3 announcement. In addition to new renders, Su held up an actual Radeon RX 6000 Series GPU to show how beautiful the reference design looks in person.



Su also teased that Big Navi would be perfectly capable of 4K/60 FPS gaming. She demonstrated this by playing back footage of Borderlands 3 running on a Ryzen 9 5900X and Radeon RX 6000 Series GPU, which looked pretty smooth.



That was followed by 4K benchmarks for Borderlands 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Gears of War 5 running at their highest quality settings. The Radeon RX 6000 Series is able...

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[Dan_D]

Well no kidding? I don't think anyone expected the 6000 series to be weaker than the 5700XT or something. While they didn't show much in the way of benchmarks, from a basic check on what 3080's score in CoD:MW, it looks like the 6000 series Radeon will sit between the 3070 and the 3080's. To be honest, that's about what I expected. However, we only saw benchmarks from a couple of games so its hard to say for sure at this point.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Agreed. We'll have to wait and see what the bottom line numbers end up being. If they do sit between ad 3070 and 3080 let's hope for their sake they can price them competively as to not lose ground in that market segment. They've been doing o.k. there but it'll only further cement NV's dominance in the upper tiers if they don't.

 

[LeRoy_Blanchard]

Double the size. Double the price?

 

[LazyGamer]

Agreed. We'll have to wait and see what the bottom line numbers end up being. If they do sit between ad 3070 and 3080 let's hope for their sake they can price them competively as to not lose ground in that market segment. They've been doing o.k. there but it'll only further cement NV's dominance in the upper tiers if they don't.

Not just how they sit in the popular benchmarks, but also whether AMD is making any progress on the other side: software.

I mentioned it in my thread on laptops, where I've seen reviews citing AMD for poor software compatibility outside gaming. And there's also software related to gaming that AMD is missing, namely support for streaming. Between DLSS, RTX Voice, and NVENC, Nvidia is getting software support where it counts, and AMD is coming up cold.

And the frustrating part is that AMD doesn't really have a problem building 'powerful' GPUs. Their GPUs are usually plenty powerful! It's all the other stuff that's needed to really use that power that they lag on. Nvidia didn't get support for their hardware in a wide range of software with a 'build it and they will come' approach, and Intel isn't one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux kernel out of the goodness of their hearts. The 'standards' for GPUs are still being written, and AMD is going to have to start leading if they don't want to have their architectures dictated to them.

 

[Dan_D]

Not just how they sit in the popular benchmarks, but also whether AMD is making any progress on the other side: software.

I mentioned it in my thread on laptops, where I've seen reviews citing AMD for poor software compatibility outside gaming. And there's also software related to gaming that AMD is missing, namely support for streaming. Between DLSS, RTX Voice, and NVENC, Nvidia is getting software support where it counts, and AMD is coming up cold.

And the frustrating part is that AMD doesn't really have a problem building 'powerful' GPUs. Their GPUs are usually plenty powerful! It's all the other stuff that's needed to really use that power that they lag on. Nvidia didn't get support for their hardware in a wide range of software with a 'build it and they will come' approach, and Intel isn't one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux kernel out of the goodness of their hearts. The 'standards' for GPUs are still being written, and AMD is going to have to start leading if they don't want to have their architectures dictated to them.

I'm going to disagree with this. AMD does have a problem building powerful GPU's. AMD's GPU's have been woefully under powered compared to NVIDIA's top end offerings. For years now, AMD has only been able to take on NVIDIA's midrange. Last gen was a great example of this. The Radeon 5700XT was beaten by the 2080, 2070 Super, 2080 Super, 2080 Ti, and RTX Titan. The 5700XT could really only manage to take on the 2070 FE and it was only capable of matching the 2070 Super in a couple of titles here and there.

AMD is literally two years late delivering a solution that can compete with or exceed the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti. Based on what we saw today, I don't think the 3080 or 3090 are in any danger of being dethroned from their respective spots. You do have a point on the software side though.

 

[LazyGamer]

Being more specific, you're absolutely right Dan. Since buying ATi, AMD has rarely swung for the fences with their GPUs; disappointing as an enthusiast, but also an approach that can be seen as commercially prudent.

I guess I was more thinking of their 'big chips', i.e. the Vegas and the Radeon VII, and also thinking in terms of compute moreso than gaming performance. The delineation between the two is what I find interesting. Essentially, when software is made for AMD GPU hardware, it flies, whether it be a well-tuned game or even a whole ecosystem like OS X.

Now, part of the problem is almost certainly a difference in architecture that is exhibited as a real deficiency for gaming, but at the same time I'm not entirely convinced that that isn't on purpose to some degree. Despite building compute-focused GPUs, AMD is also behind in the datacenter, and that's probably what stings the most for them from a growth perspective, so having that capability at lower-level SKUs may be important enough to 'compromise' on outright gaming performance especially given that they don't have the resources that Nvidia or Intel have.

Wrapping up, I didn't really consider the 5700XT to be indicative of AMDs capability; they very well could have simply built a 2x version of it and been more or less competitive. They just haven't chosen to do so, and that's been an ongoing theme.

 

[Dan_D]

Being more specific, you're absolutely right Dan. Since buying ATi, AMD has rarely swung for the fences with their GPUs; disappointing as an enthusiast, but also an approach that can be seen as commercially prudent.

I guess I was more thinking of their 'big chips', i.e. the Vegas and the Radeon VII, and also thinking in terms of compute moreso than gaming performance. The delineation between the two is what I find interesting. Essentially, when software is made for AMD GPU hardware, it flies, whether it be a well-tuned game or even a whole ecosystem like OS X.

Now, part of the problem is almost certainly a difference in architecture that is exhibited as a real deficiency for gaming, but at the same time I'm not entirely convinced that that isn't on purpose to some degree. Despite building compute-focused GPUs, AMD is also behind in the datacenter, and that's probably what stings the most for them from a growth perspective, so having that capability at lower-level SKUs may be important enough to 'compromise' on outright gaming performance especially given that they don't have the resources that Nvidia or Intel have.

When it comes to compute performance, AMD often does a good job on that front. Especially for the price. However, it's not because AMD doesn't swing for the fences as you put it. They are trying. That's the sad part. It's not entirely their fault. NVIDIA has been a juggernaut almost out of the gate. No other company has been able to keep up with NVIDIA's innovation, product cadence and the pace at which it increases its performance so dramatically. I'm not saying every generation of NVIDIA card has been good and they've been caught off guard a couple of times but when NVIDIA entered the landscape there were a lot of players in the GPU market. Now, its just AMD and NVIDIA. Sure, Intel's trying but they may be a long way off from being competitive.

Wrapping up, I didn't really consider the 5700XT to be indicative of AMDs capability; they very well could have simply built a 2x version of it and been more or less competitive. They just haven't chosen to do so, and that's been an ongoing theme.

That's just it. AMD couldn't do that or it would have. RDNA was massively inefficient. When you pushed the clocks, voltages, etc. it's heat and power consumption got out of control rather quickly. Good gains could be had in some cases, but even so, it cost a lot to achieve that. Brent's overclocking experience as outlined in his article showed that the 5700XT could gain as much as a 10% performance improvement overclocked, but it cost an additional 85w to achieve that.

If they had doubled up on the 5700XT's stream processors, it would have required way more power than the PCIe spec allows for. Not only that, but it would have required a full on custom water cooling loop just to deal with it. Even then, I don't know if you could run it at the same clocks the stock 5700XT runs at and keep it could enough. Given how much heat they generate as is, such an idea didn't bode well for AMD. AMD said a lot of crap about scalability of the RDNA architecture, but that was obvious BS. AMD had to push Navi pretty hard just to get the 2070 FE level performance the stock 5700XT was capable of out of the box.

Keep in mind that Navi, at 7nm was less efficient than Turing at 12nm. Let that sink in. RDNA was a dud. They couldn't just double up on it and compete with NVIDIA. Again, AMD has had a real problem creating powerful GPU's beyond using them in a compute context.

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

if they manage to match a 3080 I’ll be impressed.

 

[kcthebrewer]

I ran some benchmarks with my 3090 FE for BL3 badass 4k and got 69.5 stock and 74.75 overclocked
If RDNA2 overclocks well (and scales well with the OC), it should be very competitive in straight rasterization

 

[Jnewberry1986]

AMD has a habit of not putting all the chips on the table during sneak peaks. They still have something to show us and several leaks are out there saying 6800 will compete with 3080 and 6900 will compete with 3090... Hence the naming scheme.. which would make sense since the 5700 was suppose to compete with the 2070. I have a feeling it's about to get very competitive.

 

[Dan_D]

AMD has a habit of not putting all the chips on the table during sneak peaks. They still have something to show us and several leaks are out there saying 6800 will compete with 3080 and 6900 will compete with 3090... Hence the naming scheme.. which would make sense since the 5700 was suppose to compete with the 2070. I have a feeling it's about to get very competitive.

AMD does play things close to the vest. However, they have a bad habit of making people think they are up to something and it being a big let down. This has happened more often than not with Zen & Zen2 being one of the rare exceptions. It really doesn't happen much if ever on the GPU front.

I'm not saying it won't or can't happen, but that would be a huge surprise. AMD has been so far behind NVIDIA on the performance front that catching up in one generation like that would be a serious achievement. As it is, it's taken them at least two years to catch up to the RTX 2080 Ti.

 

[Brian_B]

This has happened more often than not with Zen & Zen2 being one of the rare exceptions. It really doesn't happen much if ever on the GPU front.

While he had nothing really to do with Bulldozer - I blame most of this on Raja. He had so far overhyped Fury and Vega there was no way AMD could live up to it. And it seems he's doing mostly the same thing at Intel with Xe.