Conclusion
To say Rage Mode performance gains were a let-down would be putting it mildly. At best, we experienced a 2% advantage to Rage Mode in a couple of games, and only 3% in one-game scenario. Otherwise, it was an FPS difference of 1FPS (frame rates) most of the time or no change at all most of the time. Out of 10 games played, we mostly saw no advantages what-so-ever. Only slight “benchmarkable” differences. The advantages, when there were any, were so small that they can all be thrown into the pile of “within the margin of error” for testing. Nothing was big enough to affect gameplay or the gameplay experience. We saw no major differences between 1440p gaming or 4K gaming.
We think the reason for this comes down to one specific statement made in the AMD Reviewers Guide.
The amount of performance headroom can vary from one chip to the next, and it will also depend on the cooler design of the card in question.
We think this is the key to making Rage Mode make a difference. For our testing we are using a made by AMD reference Radeon RX 6800 XT video card. It has a certain level of TDP/power headroom, and it also has a certain thermal limit with the cooling AMD is using. It is quite possible that it lacks the kind of build that would make Rage Mode make a difference.
That is to say, perhaps custom add-in-board partner video cards, using custom PCBs, custom power delivery, and most importantly custom cooling that will be the cards that show a difference with Rage Mode. With a more robust cooling configuration, and perhaps different TDP/power headroom and power delivery, it will actually have the headroom for Rage Mode to do its magic. It simply may be the AMD video card itself that is limiting Rage Mode.
Of course, we won’t know for sure until we have custom retail cards in hand we can test. To any manufacturers that want to send us a video card, we’d love to test it. At least we have a theory.
Final Points
At the end of the day, the made by AMD reference Radeon RX 6800 XT shows no sign of Rage Mode making any significant difference. Only Radeon RX 6800 XT video cards support Rage Mode to begin with. We aren’t sure why; the Radeon RX 6800 non-XT would certainly benefit potentially. It’s the kind of card you want to eek out the most performance from at that price point, it could be quite exciting. Alas, it’s Radeon RX 6800 XT or bust.
The best course of action to improve performance is to manually overclock the video card. We had very positive gains in our Radeon RX 6800 XT Overclocking performance review. Even with Rage Mode being a thing, nothing is going to beat good ole fashioned manual overclock tuning of GPU and memory frequency.