The year 2020 has been a gaming year. NVIDIA has announced its new series of graphics card after two years after its last RTX series in 2018. Also with the reveal of AMD’s RADEON RX-6000 series gaming CPU, many people are now questioning which one is the best?

Nvidia RTX 30 series and AMD’s Radeon RX-6000 series are the second generations of their corresponding technologies. They both are not likely to be held by the new processes or the early adoption of bleeding-edge technologies as they will be much refined.

In addition to other upgrades, the RTX 30 Series will be equipped with Nvidia 2nd generation ray tracing as well as 3rd generation tensor cores. Nvidia is saying that the new line of GPU will offer 2x the performance and 1.9x the power efficiency that powers ray tracing and tensor cores. While the AMD RX 6000 series will be built based on RDNA 2 architecture that introduces a new upgraded compute unit, fresh visual pipeline, and the brand-new AMD Infinity Cache! Over the last generation RDNA, the RDNA 2 assures to provide up to 54% better performance per watt and with its new Infinity Cache, it assures 3.25x more bandwidth.

Gaming Performance Comparison between RX 6000 series and GeForce RTX 30 series by AMD.

• RX 6900 XT vs RTX 3090 (4k Gaming Performance)

At a much lower price point and lower power consumption, AMD says that their Radeon RX6900XT will beat or match GeForce RTX 3090.

• RX 6800 XT vs RTX 3080 (4k Gaming Performance)

As per 4k gaming performance, at a lower price point and significantly lower power consumption, AMD promises that their Radeon RX 6800 XT will beat or match GeForce RTX 3080.

 

• RX 6800 XT vs RTX 3080 (1440p Gaming Performance)

At a lower price point and power consumption, Radeon RX 6800XT is roughly equal to GeForce RTX 3080 in performance at 1440p.

Notice:

• The above results are provided by AMD and they are yet to be verified by the end-users.

• The best results were used while testing the games with different APIs i.e. DX12 and Vulkan so they are not directly comparable.

• The Radeon RX 6800 and 6900 XT were tested with Rage Mode which may not reflect real-world performance.

Looking at the results the Radeon RX 6900XT card looks pretty beefy against GeForce RTX 3090, taking the light spot at 4k gaming in Forza Horizon and Battlefield 5.  But it appears that these numbers only account for when AMD’s new and easy overclocking feature i.e. Rage Mode is enabled. To get a better idea of AMD's Potential we’ll have to test it ourselves.

But we can be assured that the RX 6000 series will be able to deliver competitive gaming performance at 1440p and 4k gaming.

 

Availability/Pricing of RX 6000 series and GeForce RTX 30 series

• RTX 30 Series

There are 3 graphic cards in RTX 3000 series i.e. RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090. The GeForce RTX 30 series was announced officially on September 1, 2020. The RTX 3080 was released first on September 17th, 2020, and RTX 3090 was released later on September 24th, 2020, and at last on 29th October 2020. The RTX 3070 price is $500 i.e. (NPR 58465.95), RTX 3080 price is $700 i.e. (NPR 82104.33) and the RTX 3090 price is $1500 i.e. (NPR 175937.85.)

• AMD RADEON RX-6000 Series

 

Figure 2: AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphic card (Source: JayzTwoCents)

The Radeon RX-6000 series was officially announced on 28th October 2020. There are also 3 graphics cards variant in this series i.e. (RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900XT). The RX 6800 and 6800XT was expected to release on 18th November 2020 and is available to buy now. The RX 6900 XT was also released a few days ago on 8th December 2020.The Rx 6800 costs around $579 i.e. (NPR 67912), The RX 6800 XT costs around $649 i.e. (NPR 76122.44), and the Beast RX 6900 XT costs around $999 i.e. (NPR 117174.61). The price mentioned in NPR above is just a simple conversion of USD to NPR at the rate of 1 USD= 117.29 NPR. The cost of these cards is expected to be more than mentioned above in Nepalese stores as these cards are not launched in  Nepal officially.

 

Which one to buy? 

(RX 6000 series or GTX 30 Series)

 

As of the performance test, the RX 6900XT is right by the RTX 3090 when it comes to gaming at 4k resolution. AMD is winning over 50% of the games and the other 50 % is a close match between these two cards. But looking at the pricing, as expected Nvidia has a higher price tag of $1500 on its RTX 3090 which is a whooping 50% more expensive than AMD’s RX 6900XT which is priced at $999.That's a great difference for a very small performance increase over a couple of titles. So, going for the RX 6000 series will offer the best bang for the buck.