AMD Radeon RX 6800 vs. NVIDIA RTX 30 Linux Performance Heating Up

Here is a look at the geometric mean from all the 4K benchmarks carried out for today's article. To much surprise overall the Radeon RX 6800 manages to effectively tie with the GeForce RTX 3080 overall while the RX 6800 XT had around a 12% advantage in these benchmarks conducted. This is much better performance than on launch day in November where in a number of cases the GeForce RTX 3080 was outperforming the RX 6800 XT by a measurable difference. Over the past three months there have been significant strides made in the RDNA2 open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver performance both by AMD as well as other parties (Valve, Google, etc) working on the RADV+ACO stack.

So these days if you are switching to the very latest open-source graphics driver stack, the Radeon RX 6800 series performance is even more compelling than it was back at launch thanks to these driver improvements. However, for novice Linux users upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa isn't as trivial as say installing the newest package driver like you will find with NVIDIA. For those not on an enterprise Linux distribution where you can easily use AMD's packaged driver and not comfortable with the steps to upgrade your open-source driver components, Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedor 34 in April will deliver a similar driver stack to what was tested today. There still is also room for further improvement with the open-source Radeon driver like yet to be supported Vulkan ray-tracing while NVIDIA obviously has their ray-tracing/RTX support all squared away well even under Linux.

For those who continually request 1080p benchmarks even with these high-end graphics cards, here are a few:

The 1080p performance largely continues in AMD's favor. Those various 1080p benchmarks for those interested can be found at OpenBenchmarking.org.

Lastly when it comes to the Vulkan compute performance in tests like VkFFT, VkResample, RealSR-NCNN, and Waifu2x-NCNN, the Radeon RX 6800 XT comes out just over 3% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080. See all those Vulkan compute benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.