Although AMD didn’t talk about performance figures for activating ray tracing in their new Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 graphics cards during the presentation, they later unveiled their first results on their website in the official Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing Benchmark, which gives us an idea of what to expect when activating DXR in these new graphics cards.
This is what AMD has said about it:
“According to an AMD Engineering Laboratory test dated August 17, 2020, measurements taken on an AMD RDNA2-based graphics card using Microsoft’s DXR SDK demonstration application Procedural Geometry, hardware ray tracing gives the AMD RDNA2-based graphics card 13.8x more speed (471FPS) than the software simulation layer (34FPS) at the same speed”.
As we can see, AMD mentions that one of its graphics achieves 471 FPS in the Microsoft Raytracing benchmark, although no mention is made of which of its graphics it is.
RDNA 2, how does it compare to the graphics cards from Nvidia?
For comparison, we ran the benchmark on an RTX 3070, which reached 478 FPS. According to Reddit users, and RTX 3080 receives 635 FPS and an RTX 3090 749 FPS, so this chart only reaches the RTX 3070 and is far behind the RTX 3080.
the card that ultimately was the RX 6800 XT, it would not be surprising if these tests were also conducted with this graphic. If this were the case, the RX 6800 XT would only be compared with the RTX 3070 when ray tracing was enabled, and the RTX 3080 would have 33% more power, so the difference between AMD and Nvidia would still be quite large. If we add DLSS to this, Nvidia is still the option to choose if you want to play with ray tracing enabled.
Obviously, these RDNA 2 results don’t directly reflect the performance of AMD graphics in games, so we’ll have to wait a few weeks to know. We recommend taking them with tweezers because it is only a first look and not a final number.