GeForce & Radeon Ultrawide & 4K Gaming Performance Roundup

[PAGETITLE=Games: AC Valhalla, Borderlands 3, Destiny 2, Monster Hunter...][Top Ad] A couple of weeks ago, we took a look at 1080p and 1440p gaming on a variety of graphics cards. Our intention was to quickly follow-up with a look at higher-end resolutions, and while it's unfortunately taken longer to get this published than we would have liked, we're glad to get it done now, so we can get back to focusing on some creator benchmarks (since there are many looking for updates). GPUs that are best-suited for 1080p and 1440p gaming are not always going to be the same set that's best-suited for 4K and ultrawide, so the GPUs you'll see in this article's test results vary a bit from the previous article. Notably, AMD's and NVIDIA's top-end GPUs have made an appearance here, as they are pretty much overkill for lower-resolutions, but perfectly-suited for top-end resolutions. In our 1080p/1440p article, we tested the entire set of current-gen GPUs for our synthetic tests. To avoid repeating ourselves here, we're going to skip that page here, but point anyone who cares about those results to hop over to the respective 3DMark, VRMark, and Superposition page from that article. Before jumping into our test results, let's quickly go over AMD's and NVIDIA's GPU lineups. To give some extra perspective, these tables also include last-gen models. AMD's Radeon Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price RX 6900 XT 5,120 2,015 23 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $999 RX 6800 XT 4,608 2,015 20.74 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $649 RX 6800 3,840 1,815 16.17 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 250W $579 RX 6700 XT 2,560 2,321 13.21 TFLOPS 12 GB 1 384 GB/s 230W $479 RX 5700 XT 2,560 1,605 9.75 TFLOPS 8 GB 1 448 GB/s 225W $399 RX 5700 2,304 1,465 7.95 TFLOPS 8 GB 1 448 GB/s 180W $349 RX 5600 XT 2,304 1,375 7.19 TFLOPS 6 GB 1 288 GB/s 150W $289 RX 5600 2,048 1,375 6.39 TFLOPS 6 GB 1 288 GB/s 150W $279 RX 5500 XT 1,408 1,717 5.2 TFLOPS 8 GB 1 224 GB/s 130W $199 Notes 1 GDDR6 Architecture: RX 6000 = RDNA2; RX 5000 = RDNA If you're looking to game at 4K or ultrawide resolution with an AMD GPU, the newer RX 6700 XT should be treated as the bare minimum, as the last-gen RDNA cards are going to leave a lot to be desired in most cases. Depending on how high you want to put your graphics settings, even the 6700 XT may not offer enough oomph overall. The RX 6800 non-XT is likely the most ideal choice here, if we're looking at things from a bang-for-the-buck perspective. Of course, that only means so much when current GPU prices are most commonly found to be much higher than SRP (which goes for NVIDIA, as well.) As for NVIDIA's lot: NVIDIA's GeForce Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP SRP RTX 3090 10,496 1,400 35.6 TFLOPS 24GB 1 936 GB/s 350W $1,499 RTX 3080 8,704 1,440 29.7 TFLOPS 10GB 1 760 GB/s 320W $699 RTX 3070 5,888 1,500 20.4 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 220W $499 RTX 3060 Ti 4,864 1,670 16.2 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 200W $399 RTX 3060 3,584 1,780 12.7 TFLOPS 12GB 2 360 GB/s 170W $329 RTX 2080 Ti 4,352 1,350 13.4 TFLOPS 11GB 2 616 GB/s 250W $1,199 RTX 2080 S 3,072 1,650 11.1 TFLOPS 8GB 2 496 GB/s 250W $699 RTX 2070 S 2,560 1,605 9.1 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 215W $499 RTX 2060 S 2,176 1,470 7.2 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 175W $399 RTX 2060 1,920 1,365 6.4 TFLOPS 6GB 2 336 GB/s 160W $299 GTX 1660 Ti 1,536 1,500 5.5 TFLOPS 6GB 2 288 GB/s 120W $279 GTX 1660 S 1,408 1,530 5.0 TFLOPS 6GB 2 336 GB/s 125W $229 GTX 1660 1,408 1,530 5 TFLOPS 6GB 3 192 GB/s 120W $219 GTX 1650 S 1,280 1,530 4.4 TFLOPS 4GB 2 192 GB/s 100W $159 GTX 1650 896 1,485 3 TFLOPS 4GB 3 128 GB/s 75W $149 Notes 1 GDDR6X; 2 GDDR6; 3 GDDR5 RTX 3000 = Ampere; GTX/RTX 1600/2000 = Turing On the NVIDIA side, the RTX 3070 should be considered the ideal starting point. That card offers similar performance to the last-gen RTX 2080 Ti, which was the top-end option for NVIDIA's last-gen lineup (if we ignore the non-GeForce TITAN RTX). Naturally, for anyone wanting the absolute best performance out of these top-end resolutions, the RTX 3090 (or RX 6900 XT) are your likely targets. This article is not going to be covering ray tracing performance, but as we've covered before, if RT acceleration is important to you, then NVIDIA is where you should be looking. While AMD support for RT is growing and improving quickly, NVIDIA still has the best support overall, and not to mention the best performance. Even if both AMD and NVIDIA were on par with ray tracing, NVIDIA pushes things to the next level with the help of its DLSS technology. Enabling it in supported games will generally improve the frame rate by 1.5x to 2x - so it's pretty significant. For those who do care quite a lot about ray traced games, we plan to tackle a good collection in the weeks ahead that will paint a great picture overall of performance from AMD's current-gen RDNA2 cards, as well as NVIDIA's current- and previous-gen RTX options. Benchmarking PC & Testing Methodology. Techgage Gaming GPU Test PC Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (3.4GHz Base, 4.9GHz Turbo, 16C/32T) Motherboard ASRock X570 TAICHI (EFI: P4.00 01/19/2021) Memory G.SKILL TridentZ Royal (F4-3600C16-8GTRG) 8GB x 2 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-16-16 (1.35V) AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 21.3.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 21.3.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 (16GB; Adrenalin 21.3.2) AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12GB; Adrenalin 21.3.2) AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (8GB; Adrenalin 21.3.2) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER (8GB; GeForce 465.89) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER (8GB; GeForce 465.89) Storage GeForce: WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Radeon: WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Corsair RM850x (850W) Chassis Fractal Design Define C Mid-tower Cooling Corsair iCUE H115i RGB PLATINUM (240mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro build 19042.867 (20H2) All of our testing is done using the latest versions (at the time of benchmarking) of Windows (10, 20H2) and all of the games tested. Because some games update frequently, our goal is to always clear through our chosen set of GPUs before any of our tested games manage to drop a new update. If an update does roll out, we quickly sanity check a previous result to make sure performance remains the same. Here are some other general guidelines we follow: Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc. Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver. Vsync is disabled at the driver level (and in any tested game). OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another. We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run. Testing doesn’t begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage). All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results. We do not use outdated data. Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality. This article includes testing with nine standard games, and one specific to high-performance esports gaming. We wanted to include Rainbow Six Siege as a second esports title, but a recent update causes the game to use a random texture detail setting instead of the one specified, which is obviously a problem. As covered above, anyone interested in synthetic benchmark results from the likes of UL and Unigine should check out the respective page in the previous article, as all cards were included in that. That page would have been largely a copy/paste job for this article, so it doesn't make much sense to include it here as well. Here's the full breakdown of our tested games and synthetic tests: Assassin's Creed Valhalla - AMD Ryzen partner Borderlands 3 - AMD Radeon partner Death Stranding Destiny 2 Horizon Zero Dawn Monster Hunter World Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - AMD Radeon partner Total War: Three Kingdoms Watch Dogs Legion - NVIDIA GeForce partner eSport: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive eSport: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege - NVIDIA GeForce partner Note: You can download all of the tested setting images at once here (ZIP, 10MB). Assassin's Creed Valhalla. We get our first taste of 4K and ultrawide performance with the help of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and it doesn't take long to start to draw some conclusions. While we included GPUs like the RTX 3060 and RX 5700 XT in our testing here, it's only to better highlight the overall scaling. If you adopt one of those GPUs and intend to play at either of these resolutions, you are likely going to be disappointed. It's important to note, however, that if you're an esports gamer, and generally only play games that are highly optimized to deliver high frame rates (eg: CS: GO), then those lower-end cards could suit the bill just fine. That said, if 144Hz is your goal, you should definitely eye the bigger models. At the high detail levels chosen here in Valhalla, it takes an RX 6700 XT to hit 60 FPS at our ultrawide resolution of 3440x1440, while the RTX 3090 or RX 6800 XT is needed for the same performance at 4K. Despite the AC series generally performing extremely well on NVIDIA hardware, AMD has an edge this go-around. Borderlands 3. With Borderlands 3, AMD continues to deliver super-strong performance, with the RX 6900 XT beating out the RTX 3090 once again, but with NVIDIA's card able to topple the RX 6800 XT in this particular test. At ultrawide, the last-gen RTX 2080 Ti or current-gen RTX 3070 will hit 60 FPS at top-level settings, while at least an RTX 3080 is needed to hit it at 4K. If you don't do the math on these resolutions, it could seem that ultrawide would be as much of a performance glutton as 4K, but that's not the case. 4K draws 67% more pixels than 3440x1440, and that shows in the performance - especially on lower-end GPUs...

GeForce & Radeon Ultrawide & 4K Gaming Performance Roundup

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Rob Williams