Ray Tracing Performance
Now it is time to look at Ray Tracing performance on the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X. We will also include the overclocked performance as well. Since NVIDIA offers DLSS, we will add those results to the regular non-DLSS Ray Traced results so you can see how much that adds to performance when using DLSS by comparison.
Cyberpunk 2077
First, in Cyberpunk 2077 we are going to look at 1080p. 1080p is the resolution you are going to have to use with the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X if you wish to have any semblance of playability with Ray Tracing enabled. Using the “Ray Tracing Medium” preset (which doesn’t utilize all the Ray Tracing features) the MSI RX 6700 XT GAMING X averages 36.5FPS, and the game is not playable. When we overclock the video card performance goes up 6%, but it’s still unplayable at 38FPS.
By comparison, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is 46% faster than the MSI RX 6700 XT GAMING X and the RTX 3070 is 65% faster. The only video card that is actually playable at 1080p with Ray Tracing Medium is the GeForce RTX 3070 providing a smooth 60FPS. This is of course without DLSS, for that we will look at the two graphs below.
In this graph, we are at 1080p again, but now we are using the Ray Tracing Ultra setting. This enables all the Ray Tracing features in the game. The MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X is completely bottlenecked at 27FPS. Overclocking does nothing really to any affect. Even the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 struggle at 1080p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing, providing only 43 and 49FPS respectively.
However, what the two GeForce RTX cards can do that the Radeon RX 6700 XT cannot enable DLSS. Once you enable DLSS both the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 are more than playable at 1080p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing. The RTX 3060 Ti provides near 70FPS and the RTX 3070 is at 77FPS, making the game completely playable at 1080p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing.
Now we have bumped the game up to 1440p with “Medium” Ray Tracing. The MSI RX 6700 XT GAMING X is at 24FPS and overclocked isn’t much better. The two GeForce RTX cards struggle as well, in the ’30s, but turn on DLSS and it all changes. The RTX 3060 Ti is now at 56FPS and the RTX 3070 is above 60FPS. DLSS really makes the difference.
Dirt 5
Dirt 5 recently had a big patch update. New in this patch is official support for Ray Tracing. The game now supports Raytraced Vehicle Shadows. Therefore, we enabled it and looked at performance.
Dirt 5 with Vehicle Raytraced Shadows’ performance is actually really good! Even on the Radeon RX 6700 XT, it’s good! The MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X is providing us a more than playable 78FPS at 1440p with Raytraced Vehicle Shadows enabled. That’s impressive. It’s actually outperforming the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti as well by 8%. Though the GeForce RTX 3070 is faster than the MSI RX 6700 XT GAMING X by 6%. That is until we overclock the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X. Overclocking improves performance by 6%. This actually puts it over the GeForce RTX 3070, or rather, right on par performance-wise. This is a first. It appears Dirt 5’s Ray Tracing is well optimized on AMD GPUs.
Watch Dogs Legion
In Watch Dogs Legion we will start at 1080p as we did with Cyberpunk. At 1080p we have the “Ultra” Ray Tracing enabled. Well, the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING X does pretty poorly at 35FPS, and overclocking it only takes it to 37FPS. This is not playable, even at 1080p. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 outpace the Radeon RX 6700 XT video cards by a lot, just in pure Ray Tracing performance. But turn on DLSS, and it’s just a slaughter fest. DLSS makes the cards much faster at 1080p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing and both are playable.
The same is true at 1440p. The Radeon RX 6700 XT video cards are not anywhere near playable with “Ultra” Ray Tracing. Neither are the two GeForce RTX video cards, for that matter. But turn on DLSS, and it all changes, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 are playable at 1440p with “Ultra” Ray Tracing using Quality DLSS.