Introduction
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 was recently launched with an MSRP of $599, but prices on AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series have fallen a lot over time. Not only has AMDs pricing on GPUs remained closer to MSRP than NVIDIA’s, since launch, but nowadays they are much more affordable than they ever used to be. Due to AMD not having yet released, its next-generation Radeon 7000 series in the “mainstream” price points, and at the current high pricing of NVIDIA GPUs, it leaves gamers with interesting price-to-price comparisons between NVIDIA’s current generation GPUs based on Ada Lovelace, and AMD’s last generation RDNA 2 GPUs that compete.
GeForce RTX 4070 vs Radeon RX 6800 XT Pricing
Here is the fun part, as we’ve discussed the GeForce RTX 4070 FE has an MSRP of $599, but AIB cards can be more expensive. The Radeon RX 6800 XT may have launched at $649 (which is already in the ballpark), but now current online pricing in 2023 is even more affordable. Sorting by pricing, we can see that on Newegg’s pricing of the Radeon RX 6800 XT remains below the MSRP of the GeForce RTX 4070, and these video cards are in stock. The prices start at $539 (at the time of writing) and does go up with many in the $579 range.
The Radeon RX 6800 XT is therefore extremely competitive with GeForce RTX 4070, in price, even though it is two and a half years old. Therefore the question is, how does the GeForce RTX 4070 compare to the Radeon RX 6800 XT in performance?
In today’s review, we will directly compare the GeForce RTX 4070 versus Radeon RX 6800 XT performance in games. We will test rasterized performance, ray tracing, DLSS, and FSR.
GeForce RTX 4070 and Radeon RX 6800 XT
Let’s do a quick recap of both video cards being compared today, in specs and current online pricing as it is in 2023. The GeForce RTX 4070 was launched on April 12th, 2023, and priced at $599 MSRP, while AIB custom cards can be more expensive, naturally, in the range of $650 for example, for this one that we have reviewed. This is NVIDIA’s next-generation RTX 40 series GPU.
The GeForce RTX 4070 is based on the AD104 Ada Lovelace die, which is cut down from the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. It has 5,888 CUDA Cores, 64 ROPs, 184 Texture Units, 184 4th Generation Tensor Cores, and 46 3rd Generation RT Cores. The base clock is 1920MHz while the boost clock is 2475MHz for the Founders Edition. It has 12GB of GDDR6X running at 21GHz for 504GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TGP is 200W.
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT was launched on November 18th, 2020 with an MSRP of $649 and based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture and its Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. That does put it at about two and a half years old at this point, but AMD has not yet released their next generation RDNA 3 GPU at this price point, therefore it is still the closest competitor to the GeForce RTX 4070.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is based on the NAVI 21 die. It has 4,608 streaming processors, 128 ROPs, 288 TMUs, and 72 Ray Tracing Cores. The base clock is 1825MHz, the game clock is 2015MHz and the boost clock is 2250MHz. It has 16GB of GDDR6 at 16GHz on a 256-bit bus providing 512GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TDP is 300W.
| Specification | GeForce RTX 4070 | Radeon RX 6800 XT |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace | RDNA 2 |
| Process Node | TSMC 5N | TSMC 7N |
| GPU Cores | 5888 CUDA cores | 4608 Stream processors |
| Tensor Cores | 184 | N/A |
| Ray Tracing Cores | 46 | 72 |
| Boost Clock | 2475MHz | 2250MHz |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR6X | 16GB + 128MB Infinity Cache |
| Memory Clock | 21GHz | 16GHz |
| TGP/TDP | 200W | 300W |
| Launch MSRP | $599 | $649 |
Test Setup
Please read the information on our GPU testing procedures and methodology here. Note that our GPU Testing Bench has been upgraded to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and AM5 platform.
We are using the motherboard’s current default BIOS settings on the latest release BIOS. We have enabled PCI-Express Resizable BAR in the motherboard BIOS. This means we are utilizing Resizable BAR on NVIDIA GPUs and AMD Smart Access Memory on AMD GPUs in all our testing. We have enabled EXPO I in the BIOS for the memory.
We are using a fresh install of Windows 11 Pro with the latest Windows Updates, including the 22H2 Fall 2022 update. We have the latest drivers installed including the latest chipset drivers from AMD. We are using the “Balanced” power profile in Windows Settings. Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling is ENABLED in Windows. VBS is DISABLED and Game Mode is ENABLED.