AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT benchmarks revealed — and RTX 3080 should be worried

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Forget Nvidia RTX 3080 — AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT tears through 4K gaming

Radeon RX 6800 XT
(Image credit: AMD)

When AMD took the covers off the Radeon RX 6000 series, which includes Big Navi, the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6000, we saw it bring some serious graphical firepower to shoot down Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000-series.

But Team Red has since posted a suite of benchmarks on its site that really show how it’s set to be a major threat to Nvidia when it comes to 4K gaming. And that’s thanks to the performance of the Radeon RX 6800 XT vs the GeForce RTX 3080. 

Testing its new graphics cards in a system running an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor, 16GB of RAM, and a high-end motherboard, the Radeon 6800 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 video memory would often outmatch the GeForce RTX 3080 with its 10GB of faster GDDR6X VRAM. Running games at 4K and maxed out, the $649 RX 6800 XT beats the $699 RTX 3080 in games like Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, and Gears 5. It even beats the $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090. 

The Radeon card loses out to Team Green’s high-end gaming GPU in titles like Doom Eternal and the Resident Evil 3 remake, but the difference is marginal. That means the Radeon RX 6800 XT is offering a lot of bang for the buck. 

As for the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT, it pretty much wipes the floor with all other graphics cards other than in a few games where the more expensive RTX 3090 pulls ahead. And in The Division 2, AMD most powerful consumer graphics card is beaten by the RTX 3080. 

Radeon RX 6800 XT benchmarks

(Image credit: AMD)

The less powerful $549 Radeon RX 6800 does a fine job too. While it can't outpace the more powerful GeForce RTX 3000-series cards, it still beats the $999 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the one-time leader of Nvidia’s graphics card pack.

It’s worth noting that AMD’s benchmarks had its Smart Access Memory feature enabled, which allows for better communication between GPU memory and the processor. This is something that’s unique to the latest Ryzen processors, so if the tests were carried out using an Intel CPU, they could tell a different story,

And no ray-tracing performance was shown off either. Nvidia’s graphics cards have dedicated ray-tracing hardware, so there’s a good chance that they could still be the superior GPUs when it comes to ray tracing.

However, these benchmarks paint a strong picture of how AMD’s new Radeon GPUs offer impressive value for the money and inject more competition into the graphics card arena. That should push Nvidia to offer more competitive graphics cards and in turn force AMD to retort, all of which means better graphics for PC gamers at more compelling prices.

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.