Ray Tracing Performance
Now we are going to test Ray Tracing performance between the video cards. The goal is simple, at 1440p we will enable the highest level of Ray Tracing and see how the cards perform, and which ones are playable at those settings.
There were a couple of games we could not include here, unfortunately. Cyberpunk 2077 still does not support Ray Tracing on the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series. It’s a shame, it’s terrible, it should have at launch, but there you go, there is no support so we can’t compare that. The other game we can’t compare is Wolfenstein Youngblood. No Ray Tracing support on AMD Radeon RX 6000 series there either.
In reality, the only game we used on the last two pages that supports Ray Tracing on the Radeon RX 6000 series is Watch Dogs Legion. Therefore, we decided to add two more games we did not use, to the mix. We went ahead and added Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus on this page just so we’d have some more titles to compare Ray Tracing performance with. As we indicated previously, Dirt 5 will receive Ray-Tracing support, but that will come later this month.
Watch Dogs Legion
For Watch Dogs Legion we are running at 1440p and “Ultra” quality and we have enabled “Ultra” Ray Tracing.
This graph doesn’t even need explaining, does it? Firstly, SAM made no difference in performance with Ray Tracing. Even the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is 46% faster at Ray Tracing compared to the Radeon RX 6700 XT. The RTX 3070 is 71% faster. That said, none of these video cards are anywhere near close to having a playable experience at 1440p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing enabled. The only way to make it playable on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX video cards would be to enable DLSS, which then does make the RTX 3070 playable.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider we are running at 1440p with SMAA 2TX enabled and the highest in-game settings. We have enabled “Ultra” Shadow Ray Tracing.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT does a lot better in this game with Ray Tracing enabled. The game is actually playable with the feature enabled, especially with SAM turned ON which provided a 4% performance improvement. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is still faster though and provides an even better experience over 60FPS. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is 15% faster with Ray Tracing in this game. The RTX 3070 is 31% faster with Ray Tracing.
Metro Exodus
In Metro Exodus we are running at 1440p but instead of using the “Extreme” quality setting, we have set it down one level to the “Ultra” quality level. The reason being, we tried “Extreme” and with Ray Tracing enabled all the video cards were just way too slow, and very unplayable. Therefore by lowering the quality to “Ultra” quality level we can at least get a good feel for how the cards compare with Ray Tracing. The Ray Tracing quality itself is on the “Ultra” setting.
Enabling SAM made no impact on performance. The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is rather slow with Ray Tracing enabled here, staying in the ’30s. This performance is not playable. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti really isn’t playable either, but it is 26% faster in Ray Tracing. If you enable DLSS it does make the RTX 3060 Ti playable. The GeForce RTX 3070 is playable, just barely, and it is 47% faster than the Radeon RX 6700 XT at Ray Tracing.
3DMark Port Royal
One more test we wanted to throw in, since we didn’t have a large selection here, was a synthetic test, 3DMark Port Royal. This way you can compare your result at home, with ours.
SAM made a tiny difference. Overall the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is 19% faster in Port Royal. The GeForce RTX 3070 is 39% faster.