The first ray-tracing benchmark of AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 (Navi 21 XL) GPU has surfaced, showing rather impressive performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Despite the game being a GeForce partner title and featuring an RTX optimized implementation of DXR, the RX 6800 manages to beat the rival Ampere card, the RTX 3070. Without DLSS, that is.
As you can see, at 4K ultra with ray-tracing at high and DLSS turned off, the RTX 3070 nets just below 40 FPS on average. The RDNA 2 based Radeon RX 6800 is a good deal faster scoring 46 FPS in the same benchmark.
However, with DLSS turned on, the tables turn and the RTX 3070 jumps to 50FPS+, leaving the 6800 in the choppy 40s. At 1440p, even with DLSS turned on, the RX 6800 is just 5 FPS slower than the RTX 3070, showing that the AI-based upscaling technique is favorable only at 4K.
AMD is presently working on its own upscaling technique (Super Resolution) which will most likely be based on DirectML and be utilized across multiple platforms. However, don’t expect older titles to get support for the same.
