![]() ![]() No Board Partner RX 6900 XTs?: This one was a rumor that was circulating in the lead-up to the announcement, helpfully pointed out by reader Jay in a comment on the initial announcement post I wrote, and as announcements come out from AMD’s board partners, it does seem to be coming true. The webpage they built to show these numbers does already have the functionality, after all. DX9 support is more of a joke from me, but if you play older games or are a highly competitive Counter Strike: Global Offensive player, that API still matters, sadly! I don’t think there are any real surprises or scares lurking in the DX11/9 shadows, but I would love to see AMD expand these charts over the coming weeks to show more data from different APIs just to get a taste of where things will land. For me, Final Fantasy XIV is a DX11 title and so I would like to see some DX11 benchmarks prior to launch just to have a ballpark estimate of what to expect. DirectX11 is still in use in many games and is one place where Nvidia has always done very well. What potentially worries me is the complete exclusion of DX11 and DX9 titles. DX12 doesn’t have as interesting of an origin story, but it again is a case where AMD’s architecture is generally better optimized for it, as only Turing and forward have had hardware that fully plays nice with DX12 from Nvidia. This isn’t a controversy in my opinion, though, because in both major Vulkan showcase titles – Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein Youngblood – the RTX 3090 sits atop the charts. Naturally, it does tend to run better on AMD hardware, although Turing and onward GPUs from Nvidia handle it much better than past parts because of their new dedicated Integer units. Vulkan, also, coincidentally, is built on the remnants of AMD’s own Mantle API, which they built for a laugh in the early 2010s as enabling software to the APUs in the PS4 and Xbox One, but also as the Bulldozer debacle began to unfold. Both of these APIs are heavily optimized for modern GPUs, but are also low-level and require the developer to put some elbow grease into implementation for best results. Because of that and my desire to write more about this (for my own sake as a potential buyer but also because I got feedback that people like reading these!), and I wanted to breakdown some potential concerns I have after looking at this data.ĪPI Choice: No DX11 or DX9 Titles: The numbers AMD has in this cool table view only show either DirectX 12 or Vulkan API titles. However, browsing this data did two things – it reaffirmed my purchasing decision towards the RX 6900 XT, but it also raised some potential issues worth pointing out. ![]() The platform used for testing enables SAM, while Rage Mode is fully open to any owner of these cards, so the distinction is important in my opinion. I have only one concern about this data directly, in that it does not make clear on the page currently, as of this writing, if the data for the new Radeon cards is using the Smart Access Memory technology or Rage Mode. It also lets you select the resolution, and has dropdowns for settings and APIs (although those only offer one choice each). ![]() AMD has earned a lot of trust over the Ryzen era for being forthrightly transparent and not fudging numbers – they do engage in some cherry picking, but generally speaking, they’re pretty on the level and they don’t shy away from providing unflattering benchmarks (the new Ryzen CPUs still losing to Intel in Battlefield V, the Radeon RX 6000 cards doing poorly at Wolfenstein: Youngblood) as they help paint a more accurate picture of where a component actually plays.Īfter the videos yesterday, I kind of thought that was all we’d get short of the partner game stuff until third-party reviews met embargo dates and started to spill the tea, but I took a trip to AMD’s site and found something I genuinely appreciate: a full set of the benchmarks used in the Radeon event showing system configuration and giving a single, apples-to-apples chart that you can browse for each game they tested with all 6 cards for comparison – the 3 Nvidia cards they compared against and the 3 new Radeons. Now, I complained last month about what it is with Nvidia I dislike about their marketing, which, distilled simply, is this – the company loves to obfuscate via benchmarks and does not provide easy to digest numbers or otherwise browsable metrics. I spent much of yesterday being very excited for the new AMD Radeon RX 6000-series cards, making jokes about the RX 6900 XT (nice) and being very interested in the performance numbers that AMD shared.
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