Quake RTX just got Vulkan ray-tracing support a day back and thanks to that, now AMD users can also try out the technology on the Big Navi graphics cards. Try out, not enjoy that is. We did some testing comparing the Radeon RX 6800 against Ampere (RTX 3070) and Turing (RTX 2080 Ti) and the results aren’t pretty:
The game is pretty intensive as it makes use of path-tracing instead of standard single-intersection ray-tracing. More on that here. One important point to note here is that the Vulkan port doesn’t come with DLSS, so this is an apples-to-apples comparison.
We ran the game at the default medium setting at 4K with the static resolution slider at 75%, and Dynamic Resolution turned off. While the GeForce RTX 3070 managed an average of 47 FPS, the RX 6800 failed to touch even the 30 FPS mark, rendering the game unplayable. NVIDIA’s last-gen flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti averaged 41 FPS which was fairly playable.
The 1% lows were equally worse on Big Navi with the 6800’s 1% being just 25 FPS. In comparison, the RTX 3070 got 42 FPS while the RTX 2080 Ti managed 36 FPS, being 70% and 45% faster, respectively.
It looks like AMD’s Infinity Fabric doesn’t really do much here and the use of a hybrid hardware-accelerated structure really tanks performance. You can read more about NVIDIA and AMD’s ray-tracing approaches in the below posts:
- NVIDIA RTX 3080/3090 “Ampere” Architectural Deep Dive: 2x FP32, 2nd Gen RT Cores, 3rd Gen Tensor Cores and RTX IO
- AMD Radeon RDNA 2 “Big Navi” Architectural Deep Dive: A Focus on Efficiency
