Ray Tracing Overclocked Radeon RX 6800 XT Performance
Now we will turn on Ray Tracing and see how performance compares. We will test at 1440p and 4K in the games that support Ray Tracing in this review. One game that does not yet support Ray Tracing on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (as of this review) is Cyberpunk 2077. Ray Tracing works on NVIDIA GeForce RTX series, but not yet on AMD Radeon RX 6000 series as of patch v1.04. Perhaps a new patch will add support, sadly it didn’t come out in time for this particular review. The other game is Wolfenstein Youngblood, it doesn’t yet support Vulkan RT yet and therefore Radeon RX 6800 XT cannot support Ray Tracing in it yet. However, we can look at Ray Tracing in the other games we used here.
We are not testing DLSS on the GeForce RTX series in this review as AMD has nothing to directly compare it with. We did test Ray Tracing with DLSS in our GeForce RTX 3080 Overclocking Review.
Watch Dogs Legion – 1440p
This is a pattern you are going to see on this page, the GeForce RTX 3080 FE decimates the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT in Ray Tracing performance. No amount of overclocking on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is going to help here.
In Watch Dogs Legion running at just 1440p with “Ultra” and “Ultra” Ray Tracing the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT averages 38FPS. Overclocking the video card improves performance by 8%, but that means just 41FPS average and very much on the border of being playable. Honestly, it isn’t. The minimum framerates hit too low. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 29% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and is playable.
Watch Dogs Legion – 4K
4K Ray Tracing performance is very bad for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. It isn’t good for the GeForce RTX 3080 FE either, but the GeForce RTX 3080 FE has an ace up its sleeve, DLSS, and the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT does not. Overclocking just makes no difference at 4K, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is completely Ray Tracing bottlenecked at 4K with “Ultra” Ray Tracing in this game.
Control – 1440p
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is playable with Ray Tracing at 1440p in this game, and overclocking it helps gameplay quite a bit. It improves performance by 7%. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is still much faster though at 45% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Control – 4K
4K is not playable with Ray Tracing on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT in this game. Overclocking does very little for performance as it is Ray Traced bottlenecked at 4K. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is also not very playable, but it can turn on DLSS to fix that. Even without DLSS it is 48% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Metro Exodus – 1440p
Metro Exodus with Ultra Ray Tracing at 1440p is somewhat playable on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Overclocking helps a little bit by 6% which definitely helps. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is much smoother though near 60FPS at this resolution with Ray Tracing, it is 21% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Metro Exodus – 4K
At 4K you can forget the game being playable on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT with Ray Tracing. Overclocking actually does nothing of significance since it is very bottlenecked. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is not playable either, but turn on DLSS and it is a lot better.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider – 1440p
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1440p with Ray Tracing the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is very playable. Overclocking it improves performance by 7%. It actually brings it up to almost 60FPS average, so the overclock is very smooth and playable. It still cannot keep up with the GeForce RTX 3080 FE though which is 15% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider – 4K
At 4K the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT suffers quite a bit with Ray Tracing. Overclocking it improves performance by 10% but that isn’t saying much at just 32FPS. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 13% faster than the Overclocked AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.