Question RX 7700 XT versus RX 6800 ?

[Maximuzzm]

Which should I buy? The slightly cheaper Rx 6800 with its 16gb vram, or the rx 7700xt with its new low price of $399 and newer architecture?

Lmk what you think I should buy and why

Trying to just game at 1440p mainly

Thanks in advance

 

[hotaru.hino]

Given they both perform roughly the same, the extra VRAM in the 6800 gives it an edge if you encounter something that needs it.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Agreed. The 6700/6750xt is good but as games get more demanding the extra horsepower will help the 6800. That’s probably why cards like the 6800 and 6800xt even though around 3 years old are still good performers.

 

[Maximuzzm]

I noticed if you turn on Ray tracing it kills the 6800...other than that it seems like a great card the 16gb vram definitely helps in some of the newer games..I watched a YouTube video on the 6800 it did good at everything except for Ray tracing.

 

[beyondlogic]

I noticed if you turn on Ray tracing it kills the 6800...other than that it seems like a great card the 16gb vram definitely helps in some of the newer games..I watched a YouTube video on the 6800 it did good at everything except for Ray tracing.

RY tracing isn't really doing great on AMD hardware ATM there both behind intel and nvidia.other thing to consider is there anti alias can be all over the place depending on game

 

[Maximuzzm]

the 6800 runs games like a champ for the money ... the only real problem is the ray tracing ive noticed ... which seems really nice... but whatever its a 350~ card what can I say

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah I mean realistically 350 what’s that get from nvidia? A 4060? That card may do limited ray tracing but normal performance won’t be as strong as either of the other cards. So you just have to decide how much you care about ray tracing.

 

[Maximuzzm]

after seeing the youtube video i realized its really really nice to have ray tracing.. however.. not necessary... and i really just want to be able to run 1440p with decent frames.. which is basically what the 6800 is good at if you turn off ray tracing.

even without ray tracing some of the visuals in newer games now days are amazing.. and i noticed when you get those really good visuals is when the vram really starts getting stressed and having the 16gb in the 6800 really seems to help there

 

[35below0]

Yeah I mean realistically 350 what’s that get from nvidia? A 4060? That card may do limited ray tracing but normal performance won’t be as strong as either of the other cards. So you just have to decide how much you care about ray tracing.

A 4060 can technically do ray tracing. Technically correct may be the best kind of correct, but technically can do ray tracing sadly translates into "is crap at ray tracing".

Given the VRAM and bus limitations, the 4060 is a decent performer as the bottom of the 40XX pile, but it's going to choke on the first ray it has to trace.

4070 and above if you want RT gaming.

 

[hotaru.hino]

A 4060 can technically do ray tracing. Technically correct may be the best kind of correct, but technically can do ray tracing sadly translates into "is crap at ray tracing".

Given the VRAM and bus limitations, the 4060 is a decent performer as the bottom of the 40XX pile, but it's going to choke on the first ray it has to trace.

I dunno, given it seems to get near 60 FPS on 1080p with ray tracing and DLSS, I wouldn't really call this crap performance. Especially since it seems to beat the RX 6800 most of the time.

 

[Maximuzzm]

what are you saying I shouldnt go with the 6800?

 

[hotaru.hino]

what are you saying I shouldnt go with the 6800?

If you want to dabble in ray tracing, NVIDIA cards offer much better performance. If you don't care about it, then stick with the 6800.

 

[artk2219]

what are you saying I shouldnt go with the 6800?

The vast majority of games are not ray traced, and will likely not absolutely require ray tracing support for years. Its up to you, but the RX 6800's ray tracing ability wont be a limiting factor for at least 4 or 5 years, by which point, its performance in general would be the biggest limiting factor. None of the current crop of cards, will offer acceptable ray tracing performance in a few years time with the exception of maybe the RTX 4090, the 4080 is a question mark, but everything is too memory limited on the 4070's and below. For the price, an RX 6800 is tough to beat, and would be enough for now, and the next few years.

 

[35below0]

I dunno, given it seems to get near 60 FPS on 1080p with ray tracing and DLSS, I wouldn't really call this crap performance. Especially since it seems to beat the RX 6800 most of the time.

It really depends on what the expectations are. It's an entry level GPU. Pretty damn potent for people who do not demand much, but twitch gamers and frame chasers are not going to be impressed.
I may have exaggerated but the 4060 is not highly regarded as a gaming GPU. Even though it exceedes recommended requirement of many popular games.

It's a ~$300 dollar GPU from Nvidia, and yes it does better RT than AMD at that price point but excluding RT, AMD offers better GPUs all the way up to around ~$600-700. In my opinion.

For me, the 4060 is more than good enough. And it's decent at 1440p. But for the OP i don't know if i would recommend it over the 6800 or 7700. The cheapest one sells for under $300 (https://pcpartpicker.com/product/qnGhP6/pny-verto-geforce-rtx-4060-8-gb-video-card-vcg40608dfxpb1)
It's worth considering i guess.

 

[artk2219]

It really depends on what the expectations are. It's an entry level GPU. Pretty damn potent for people who do not demand much, but twitch gamers and frame chasers are not going to be impressed.
I may have exaggerated but the 4060 is not highly regarded as a gaming GPU. Even though it exceedes recommended requirement of many popular games.

It's a ~$300 dollar GPU from Nvidia, and yes it does better RT than AMD at that price point but excluding RT, AMD offers better GPUs all the way up to around ~$600-700. In my opinion.

For me, the 4060 is more than good enough. And it's decent at 1440p. But for the OP i don't know if i would recommend it over the 6800 or 7700. The cheapest one sells for under $300 (https://pcpartpicker.com/product/qnGhP6/pny-verto-geforce-rtx-4060-8-gb-video-card-vcg40608dfxpb1)
It's worth considering i guess.

We're just in a funny period, and we have been for the last few years i guess, ray tracing is basically still in the "woo its new" phase, and just about everything still sucks at it. I've played with it over the years, first with a 2070 super i had, and it wasn't worth the performance penalty, then with an RXT 3080, it still wasn't worth the performance penalty, i traded with a friend for an RX 6900 XT, it definitely wasn't worth the performance penalty there, and I preferred the extra 6GB of VRAM on the 6900 XT. Finally I upgraded to my current 7900 XTX (my wife got my RX 6900 XT, a nice upgrade from her 5700 XT), and the conclusion was the same, it didn't add anything new to the gameplay, and i would rather have the extra frames, the performance just isn't there yet in our current crop of cards. Now that equation will change once game devs start shoving it down our throats, but we're still years away from that, probably around the next console generation. I guess my best analogue is that we are in the N64, Playstation 1, and Saturn era of ray tracing. Those were the first major 3D capable consoles, and they put out some great games, but I wouldn't say any of them did 3D really well. It wouldn't be until the Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox that we got some decent enough looking 3D games.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I guest my best analogue is that we are in the N64, Playstation 1, and Saturn era of Ray tracing. Those were the first major 3D capable consoles, and they put out some great games, but I wouldn't say any of them did 3D really well. It wouldn't be until the Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox that we got some decent enough looking 3D games.

I don't really know if this analog works that well, because with raster based 3D rendering, more power was meant to add more detail. Raster graphics basically throws away a ton of stuff before it actually draws the image. With more power, you can throw away less stuff. Using ray tracing, the amount of detail on the final image depends on how many rays you can shoot out, independent of how many assets there are in the scene or their quality. So basically, ray tracing gets "maximum quality" for free.

In any case, there's been some major improvements to optimizing the ray tracing pipeline. Like one of them being ReSTIR.

However there's one other thing I want to bring into light. Raster based rendering is basically cheating on how to light things as much as possible. Sometimes those cheats are very effective. But there are some things in lighting that you can't really cheat your way out of, and at some point, you'll spend more processing power cheating than actually doing it the "correct" way.

I found something interesting while poking around. In NVIDIA's Rise of the Tomb Raider performance guide in the section on dynamic shadows, they had this:

The guide was written in January 2016 with the GTX 980 Ti was one of the highest-end cards you could get. So by turning on dynamic shadows at all, you saw a hit of like 20-25% performance on medium, all the way up to 35% on the maximum setting. And unless you were using Very High, the quality of the shadows could turn ugly real fast if they had to project on a large area.

The way shadows are rendered here is they render the scene from the light's point of view and the shadow quality is bumping up the resolution of the render. This eats into both rendering time and VRAM. So if you want basically nice, clean shadows that look great no matter the distance, angle, or coverage, you have to spend a huge amount of resources to do so. And then do this for every dynamic light source.

I had a chance to play around with a special build of UE5 that let you play around with ray tracing options and found what one of raster rendering's biggest weakness was. If you have something like 50 dynamic lights (which isn't hard to get to in gritty, urban settings), if you all want them to cast a dynamic shadow regardless of distance, then ray tracing starts beating raster rendering in performance. The raster rendering side has to re-render the scene (albeit, not entirely) 50+ times over and "very high quality" shadow maps can be 4096x4096.

You ever notice in some games that have large open spaces but have things that cast shadows on the ground (like say tall buildings or a cliff), and there's a glaring cut-off point where the shadows suddenly look uglier? This is why. The developer had to adjust the dynamic lights to make sure performance wouldn't get too bad.