AMD finally offensive at the high end. The power map changes at once and the ability of the video card that has entered the fierce battle is checked!
After a solid calm, the 2020 turbulence. What will happen in 2021 !?
Score distribution of old and new GPUs seen in 3DMark-Fire Strike
The GPU market in 2020 was almost stagnant in the first half, and after August, NVIDIA and AMD competed fiercely. In the first half of 2020, only one new GPU was introduced, but in the second half, seven new GPUs including NVIDIA / AMD were introduced in a short period of four months. The number of new GPUs is less than 2019, but in 2020, the power map of the GPU industry has been significantly rewritten.
NVIDIA was the first to take the lead in the fight. The “GeForce RTX 30 series” that adopted the Ampere architecture surpassed the high-end of the previous generation to TITAN by an overwhelming performance difference, further improving the performance of DXR (DirectX Raytracing).
AMD, on the other hand, announced the company’s first DXR-compatible GPU “Big Navi”, “Radeon RX 6000 Series,” which adopted the RDNA2 architecture. It attracted a lot of attention due to its many ambitious designs, but the one that attracted the most attention was the announcement that “performance equal to or better than the high-end model of the RTX 30 series and high wattage performance”, and actually achieved almost the same performance. That’s what I was doing. AMD has turned to a cost-effective route since Fury X in 2015, but finally got a weapon that can be turned into a counterattack with pure performance. For fans who have been waiting for a “strong Radeon”, 2020 is a memorable year.
In 2021, these new generation GPUs are expected to be deployed in the middle to entry zone, and further fierce battles will be fought. I would like to expect the offensive and defensive moves that I have forgotten in the last few years. There is also a dark horse called the “Xe” -based GPU under development by Intel. GPU battles in 2021 will be even more exciting. (TEXT: Katsuaki Kato)
The RX 6900 XT has been proven to be able to compete head-on with GeForce’s top-of-the-line RTX 3090. An original cooler model will also appear, but there are also issues …
GeForce with overwhelming performance and power consumption
NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series, which uses Samsung’s 8nm custom process, is a GPU that has evolved the design of the previous generation RTX 20 series and aimed to significantly improve drawing performance. The flagship “GeForce RTX 3080” is also considering 4K gaming, and the top “RTX 3090” is also considering 8K gaming (although DLSS is almost assumed). In particular, the RTX 3090 uses more than 10,000 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. The product is strong not only for gamers but also for creative applications such as 8K video editing.
As a result of such a significant increase in circuit scale, drawing performance, especially DXR-compatible games, has improved dramatically. But at the same time, the overall power consumption (TGP) of the card has also increased significantly, reaching 320W for the RTX 3080 and 350W for the RTX 3090. It is a design that can not help increasing power consumption because it is fast.
The “RTX 3070” and “3060 Ti” that came out at the end of 2020 were finished as GPUs for enjoying DXR games with realistic power consumption and price. In 2021, it is expected that measures such as launching a gap model to compete with rivals and supporting Resizable BAR (described later) will be taken.
The soul of TITAN was inherited by the RTX 3090. The Founders Edition of the RTX 3090 is a huge card with a thickness of 3 slots. This term’s FE version uses a special Micro-Fit 12-pin auxiliary power connector.
A splendid revival of “strong Radeon”
AMD’s RX 6000 series is AMD’s first hardware and DXR compatible GPU, and it is also a GPU that challenged the performance of RTX 3070-3090 head-on.
In addition to the high clock design that rotates at 2 GHz or higher actually measured even in the game, the biggest feature is that it is equipped with “Infinity Cache” which should be called the tertiary cache of GPU. It is essential to secure memory bandwidth for high-end GPUs, but increasing the memory bus width reduces power efficiency. Therefore, by using Infinity Cache, which is a combination of the cache mounting technology cultivated in Ryzen and EPYC and Infinity Fabric, it is possible to secure bandwidth and improve power efficiency at the same time. For this reason, the performance, especially the performance in full HD to WQHD, has been greatly improved without significantly changing the design around the SP. All models are equipped with 16GB of video memory, which is a strong advantage over the RTX 3070 and 3080.
Furthermore, using the Resizable BAR that has existed since the PCI Express Gen2 era, a function called “Smart Access Memory” that improves the data transfer efficiency of GPU → video memory was quickly implemented. In order to make up for the delay in DXR, it has also set out to lead the GPU market in terms of technology.
The RX 6800 XT is cheaper than the RTX 3080 and has a large amount of video memory. DXR performance is inferior to GeForce, but performance in traditional games is overwhelming
High-end models are difficult to obtain for both camps …
If you want the best performance in DXR games, the RTX 30 series and the non-DXR RX 6000 series are becoming more popular, but there is also the problem that the high-end models are not readily available in both camps. In particular, the shortage of the RX 6000 series, which is competing for the CPU and 7nm process node, seems to be serious. As for the RTX 30 series, the popular model of RTX 3080 continues to be in stock in small quantities, but the lower RTX 3070/3060 Ti is relatively abundant. Currently, due to the influence of the new coronavirus, there is no doubt that the production systems of the two major GPU manufacturers have not fully met the demand.
Some of the high-end models of the new GPU will continue to receive irregularly and very small quantities immediately after their release. It ’s a dead end for the fans.
Compare basic ability and power consumption of card alone
This time, we will pick up representative products one by one from the current GPU one generation ago and check them focusing on GPU performance. The RTX 20 series and below and the RX 5000 series are third-party products, but some of the RTX 30 series and RX 6000 series used FE versions and reference cards.
First, we compared the power consumption with the standard “3DMark”, but compared the power consumption with Total Board Power (TBP), which eliminates the influence of the CPU and mother, not the power consumption of the entire system. NVIDIA’s “PCAT” was used for TBP measurement, and the average and instantaneous maximum value after 10 minutes of operation were compared.
* NVIDIA describes the power consumption of the entire card as Total Graphics Power (TGP), but AMD currently describes it as “Board Power” or “GPU power”. In this paper, the power consumption of the entire card is referred to as “Total Board Power” (TBP) as a manufacturer-independent expression.
Lightweight FPS with frame rate life
The test result of Rainbow Six Siege (API uses Vulkan) shows that the RX 6000 series has a frame rate that exceeds its rivals in Full HD to WQHD. It’s only surprising that the results are nearly double that of the previous generation RX 5000 series. However, it is worth noting that the RTX 3080 and 3090, which have wide memory buses, are performing well in 4K.
Apex Legends will peak at 300fps even if the fps limit is lifted, so the performance difference between the top GPUs is small. The factory OC model RX 6800 XT is extremely fast, and even with WQHD, the result is close to the value of full HD.
Rainbow Six Siege screen. If it is a high-end GPU, it exceeds 500 fps in full HD, but there is currently no liquid crystal with a refresh rate that can follow this
(C) 2015 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
Medium to heavyweight games with heavy drawing processing
”Horizon Zero Dawn” is a title that does not use DXR but has an extremely high drawing load. Since it is a port from a home video game console equipped with AMD’s processor, it seemed that the same AMD Radeon would be advantageous, but surprisingly the performance of the RTX 30 series and RX 6000 series are almost in competition.
On the other hand, in “Dirt 5”, it is verified with the β version with DXR built-in (GTX 16 series and RX 5000 series that do not support DXR were measured with DXR OFF). As you can see, even in games using DXR, the RX 6000 series may outperform depending on the design of the game engine, which is an example result.
DXR has not yet been enabled in the official version of Dirt 5 for PC, but in this verification, it was verified with the beta version incorporating DXR
(C) 2020 The Codemasters Software Company Limited (“Codemasters”). All rights reserved.
Heavyweight game for ray tracing
The last thing to try is the heavyweight games “Watch Dogs Legion” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War” that use plenty of DXR. Here too, older generation GPUs that do not have a dedicated circuit for ray tracing are measured without DXR.
In both titles, the RTX 30 series far outperforms the RX 6000 series, consistent with 3DMark’s Port Royal results. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has a remarkable tendency to dominate the RTX 30 series, and the RX 6000 series seems to be particularly difficult to produce high fps at present.
By using DLSS, RTX 3090 will also be able to play 8K. However, the display environment that supports 8K + HDR is still rare
(C) 2020 Ubisoft Entertainment. AllRights Reserved.
In the winter issue of DOS / V POWER REPORT 2021, a special feature of 160 pages of extra-large volume entitled “100 selections of PC parts + 700” is posted. In addition to summarizing the latest topics and market trends for major genres such as CPUs, motherboards, video cards and SSDs, we have selected gold / silver recommendations as products that we can confidently recommend based on our abundant verification results. In addition, there is a catalog that summarizes the products of interest, and it is finished in one book that shows all the products you should buy now.
[Verification environment] CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores 32 threads), Motherboard: GIGA-BYTE X570 AORUS MASTER (rev. 1.0) (AMD X570), Memory: G.Skill F4-3200C16D-32GTZRX (PC4-25600 DDR4) SDRAM 8GB x 2) x 2, SSD: GIGA-BYTE GP-ASM2NE6200TTTD [M.2 (PCI Express 4.0 x4), 2TB], CPU cooler: Corsair iCUE H115i RGB PRO XT (simple water cooling, 28cm class), power supply: Super Flower Leadex Platinum 2000W (2,000W, 80PLUS Platinum), OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit version, Total Board Power: With NVIDIA’s power measurement device “PCAT” attached, average value for 10 minutes in idle state, and 3DMark-Time Spy Stress Test for 10 minutes Measure the average value and maximum value when moving, Apex Legends: Specify the startup option “+ fps_max unlimited”, measure the frame rate when performing a certain operation in the shooting training field with the highest image quality setting, measure with “CapFrameX”, rainbow Six Siege: API is Vulkan, render scale is set to 100% based on image quality “highest”, measured using built-in benchmark function, Horizon Zero Dawn: measured using built-in benchmark function with image quality “highest” setting, Dirt 5: Use DXR compatible β version, set the image quality to “Ultra High” and measure using the built-in benchmark function, Watchdogs Legion: API is DirectX 12, image quality “maximum” + all late racing settings are set to maximum And measured using the in-game benchmark function, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War: Add high resolution assets at the time of installation, set the image quality setting to the highest (SSR is “low”, motion blur is disabled), stage The frame rate when playing “Fracture Joe” is measured with “CapFrameX”, and the others are the same as p.58.