It's obvious that Nvidia GPU’s are just playing better I mean look how few people are buying Radeon cards and if everyone's doing it must be right wrong actually when you look at the price and performance of AMD GPU’s right now on paper they're the obvious choice you can get a 6700 XT which delivers near RTX 3070 performance for just about the price of an RTX 3060 and we just got our hands on a one-click tuning software from monism’s the creator of clock tuner Verizon that he claims will put a 6800 XT this isn't it a 6800 XT in the same performance class as a 3090 TI a GPU that costs twice as much now obviously a claim like that needs to be taken with a grain of salt but if there is even any free performance on the table it's worth investigating to make sure that you don't get taken for a ride. The truth is I'm at least partly to blame for the current situation after some very bad experiences with AMD’s GPU drivers that delayed our video production almost every time we tried to use them we switched to almost exclusively using Nvidia GPU’s in our showcase builds and in our test rigs I mean during a review for a new card from AMD we would often find that it was pretty okay some instability or bugs notwithstanding but then it would invariably sit on the Shelf until it was needed as a point of comparison for some other review for me the experience that turned me off of AMD was a bit more personal back in 2015 I was swayed by the please by this person to vote for competition with your wall call it and I use my incredibly hard earned cash I was a student at the time to buy a Radeon R9 380. my favourite game at the time was dirt rally and it had an AMD splash screen at the start so it should be fine right yeah you would think so turns out Not only was AMD’s performance subpar but due to driver issues the AMD GPU’s couldn't properly render foliage and shadows in effect making my experience barely better than the anaemic gt740 I had before that DDR3 RAM in it in a game with AMD’s logo on the splash screen it was a similar story many of my favourite games too you can tell how over it he is by how red his face is right now however there is good reason to think that things have changed back in July of this year AMD completely rewrote their DirectX 11 drivers apparently dramatically increasing stability and performance at the same time so to unscientifically test this Harrison and Alex from the rating team switched to team red for two weeks and played video games like they normally would to see if anything wonky happened I wasn't informed people were just taking GPU’s home but okay you're in Hawaii and it was fun the point is that after I made the switch and installed AMD’s drivers I honestly just completely forgot that I'd swapped the GPU until this morning when I looked at the script again I didn't even have to adjust any of my in-game settings going from an RTX 3080 to an RX 6800 XT I could have easily just saved like 200 by going team red of course you guys deserve a more scientific approach to testing so we handed the cards that we'll be looking at today over to our Labs team to whip up some charts and graphs
I assume you're pouring over in detail right now if you're not super detail-oriented don't worry about that the bottom line is this AMD is at or near the performance of Nvidia in traditionally rendered so not Ray traced games at anywhere from 100 to 200 dollars cheaper and that's before we pull out our secret weapon when Asma sent us an early preview of what he's calling Hydra 1.2 a user-friendly tool for RDNA 2 architecture Radeon cards that can be used to easily improve both performance and power consumption Alex is going to show us how it works to get Hydra right now you have to subscribe to Onesimus’s patron but this tool will be free once it's you know not broken and stuff speaking of which if you have an Intel CPU it won't work unless you have an F model so right now the iGPU will take priority when you boot it up and it just doesn't work I'm sure that's very easy to fix but uh we have a I9 12900kf in here so that solved that problem first of all a warning you can destroy your processors by using the software if you do something really bad it's probably fine most of the time you'll just crash your stuff but you know you need the warning right there so this is your basic overclocking dashboard your sort of main stuff is all in here so we have like this eraser deletes all of your stuff and restores it all back to your factory defaults you can also come back in here so that you change your core frequency you can save it right there boom it's saved now that save button only applies it to you know this it doesn't actually apply it to the GPU so what this is basically doing is changing stuff within the GPU drivers itself the power play table and that's what's doing your overclocking you do that with this little lightning bolt then driver resets and you're good to go now all this stuff right here is just your basic manual overclocking but why would you overclock something yourself when you can have just the robots do it for you let's go over the diagnostic window GPU there we go this allows us to change what kind of a test we're doing so we can change it from this right here is openly you can go to whatever you want and it's fine the duration is how long it's going to test for stability right now it's 90 seconds that's okay but if this was my personal rig and I was going to use the GPU like day in day out I would increase this by quite a bit it's the sort of thing you don't want your computer to crash in the middle of A ranked game below that we have the do overclocking window this right here is the real meat and potatoes of hydro 1.2 basically what this does is move your whole voltage frequency curve so your GPU is going to have something that looks a little bit like this given a frequency you will have a certain voltage to make sure that it doesn't crash there now AMD doesn't want to have this like right on the edge of crashing all the time so they're a little bit conservative with their values what Hydra is doing is just moving this curve over a tiny bit seeing if it crashes if it's all good and it just moves over a little bit more once it gets instability pushes it back a little bit you're good to go on and that is exactly what we're doing right here so you can see our start offset that is negative 43.75 millivolts so we'll be starting with the Curve moved over by that much and then the step offset is 6.25 so every time that it does an iteration it's going to be decreasing the voltage by another 6.25 millivolts so that's how you can see for the same amount of power you're going to be getting it going faster because let's say default we have this amount of voltage this frequency yeah you get it you get it GP goes faster the last field here is the power offset this is if you want to increase your power so that you have a custom water cooler you can just crank your power right up so say right now it's 15 that increased our TDP from 255 watts to 292. I'm just going to set that back to zero additional power tune up here is where some things get a little bit strange so all the do overclocking is concerned about your GPU core whereas additional power tuning is focused a little bit more on the memory on some GPU’s if you get really good Ram you can actually drop your thermals by a lot while also overclocking the GPU core if you're able to drop the voltage of your memory chips yeah but some of the other ones it doesn't work at all just hope you get lucky well Brandon should we run it to do let's go here we have MSI combustor it's not crashing so that's good and now we wait okay the diagnostic process successfully completed so we have a core curve offset of negative 68.75 millivolts should have been .025 more we'll fix that later anyway our total board power has stayed exactly the same our core frequency has only increased what is that uh 72 megahertz so that's not a whole lot oh wait uh average FPS in MSI combustor went up by one so it's not incredible that didn't do too much but what we did see is about a three to five percent increase in games after we had done this so not too bad to be clear what we're doing isn't black magic Nvidia and AMD for that matter are running these kinds of optimizations constantly on their GPU’s to try to squeeze as much performance out as possible we're just using the excellent access that AMD provides to overclockers to fly a little closer to the Sun.
To be clear three to
five percent it's not a ton of extra performance but as I like to say it's
better than a kick in the teeth and given that it didn't cost us anything but
15 to 20 minutes of our time and it didn't even increase power consumption or
heat I'd say it's kind of a no-brainer not everyone has 15 minutes though thankfully
there's an easier way when Ausmus created a one button overclocking tool that
he calls monster profiles and it's with one of these that he claims we should
be able to beat a 3090 TI for half the price let's give it a shot for the RX
6800 XT and RX 6700xt their Radeon monster profiles so all you have to do is
click this profile button right here so we have 355 good bin and bad bin those
are coming soon we don't actually have those and given this cooler that would
not work anyway we also have our 305 watt good bin and 255 so that's stock
power good bin we're going to try the 305 watt good bin use it apply Radeon
monster profile enabled this is where we should be able to beat a 3090 TI this
guy right here in time spy got us a score of 21 425. can we beat it well I'm
not going to let the whole thing run because I already ran it and I'm just going
to spoil it for you we did not beat the 3090 TI the score of our 6800 XT was 21
255 just missed it under 200 points off but that still is damn close for a GPU
that's half as much money this thing works really quite well although honestly
in real games outside of synthetic benchmarks it's not quite as impressive but
at the same time it's free performance you can just put it on here your car
goes faster the monster profile doesn't always work out great though our 6700
XT this one right here absolutely refused to work with any of them even that
bad bin profile caused it to immediately crash the good news though is that
hydra's automated tuning process you know the one that takes about 15-20
minutes did work for this card and we actually managed a similar performance Improvement
by fine-tuning the voltage frequency curve just like on our 6800 XT which puts
this card comfortably in competition with Nvidia’s 3070 and 3070 TI for a
hundred or in some cases well over a hundred dollars less so the 3090 TI
slaying claims were little optimistic
but hey free performance is free performance and I've got to say that our
experience with these cards both on the bench and for the writers at home lends
credibility to AMD’s claims of much better drivers though there are some
inconvenient details in all of this Nvidia has some feature benefits over AMD
that simply cannot be ignored although AMD did recently improve their AMF
encoder to include B fames it still isn't quite at the same level as Nvidia’s
nvank and if the games that you enjoy support real-time raytraced lighting and
you wish to enable said Ray tracing feature Nvidia has a pretty clear
performance advantage and that's before you enable their excellent DLSS machine
learning powered image upscaling technology AMD of course has their own version
of DLSS called FSR but frankly it isn't as good at least not yet by the time we
released this video though the story may have changed because AMD will have announced
their upcoming line-up of our DNA 3 GPU’s hopefully with decent pricing and an
even more competitive feature set but with how affordable and tuneable RDNA 2
is today I think these cards are going to stay relevant for quite some time.