Tech

GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, playing in native 4K and with ray tracing is possible

Citing the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is talking about extreme performance, not in vain this graphics card is today the most powerful on the market, and by far. I am aware that your selling price is also high, but understandable considering what it offers.

We already saw in our June review what the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GAMING OC was capable of, and just over a week ago we shared with you another review focused on professional testing, where we tested the Founders Edition version, a model that he was able to vastly outperform his direct rivals.

I think we have done two quite complete comparisons, but I had a pending account with the performance in ray tracing, and that is that, when evaluating the performance of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and what it offers compared to other graphics cards, few comparisons they give him the importance it really deserves. For this reason, I wanted to expand these articles with another one dedicated especially to the performance of this graphics card in ray tracing, where we will see how it positions itself against its direct rival, the Radeon RX 6950 XT.

GeForce RTX 3090TI

My approach is very simple, the price of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE is 2,249 euros on the official NVIDIA website, although thanks to the discount of 350 euros can be ours 1,899 euros. The price difference between the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE and the cheapest Radeon RX 6950 XT that we can find on the market, at the time of writing this article, was 500 euros. NVIDIA graphics solution it is more expensive, but it is also clearly superior as:

  • Yields 10% more on average in games set to 4K and maximum quality (native resolution).
  • It has 24 GB of graphics memory (8 GB more graphics memory than the Radeon RX 6950 XT).
  • Use a more advanced architecture which fully accelerates ray tracing, freeing up the shader engines completely and working completely asynchronously.
  • It has hardware specialized in artificial intelligencetensor cores, which offer high performance working with inference and deep learning and allow us to access DLSS, an intelligent image reconstruction technology that significantly improves performance.
  • Can double performance of the Radeon RX 6950 XT in ray tracing.

GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: the value of an architecture that is second to none

Ampere

Ampere is the consecration of Turing, and in this sense we can consider it as a continuation of that, although with very important novelties. Ampere has, as we know, doubled the number of shaders per active SM unit, which has allowed NVIDIA to achieve simply impressive numbers. To give you an idea, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has 10,752 shaders, while the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti adds 4,352 shaders.

The difference at the level of shaders is huge, but it is not the only one. Ampere also introduced the 2nd generation RT cores and 3rd generation tensor coreswhich dramatically improve performance when working with ray tracing, AI and deep learning tasks.

The former deserve special attention, since, as we have said, completely relieve shaders of ray tracing tasks, and they can work without having to wait for the queues that are generated in them, which in the end ends up making a huge difference compared to the RDNA2 architecture that AMD uses. This architecture uses specialized kernels, but these share resources with the texturing units, they cannot work asynchronously and they depend on the shaders, since these still have to face the work that the BVH traversal intersections represent.

Ampere

I’m sure all of the above will help you understand why Ampere is far superior in ray tracing, but we must not forget that this architecture also uses wider buses and faster memories. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has a 384-bit bus and 24 GB of 21 GHz GDDR6X memory, which leaves us a bandwidth of 1,008 constant TFLOPs, while the Radeon RX 6950 XT has a 256-bit bus and 16 GB of GDDR6 at 18 GHz, which leaves us a bandwidth of 576 GB/s.

To compensate for this lower bandwidth, AMD has integrated 128MB infinite cachewhich works in a similar way to like the Xbox One eSRAM did. It works, but it has two big drawbacks, the first is that takes up valuable space at the silicon levelwhich prevents the introduction of other specialized kernels, and the second is that it is a very small amount of memory that clutters quickly as resolution increaseswhich causes the graphics card to be penalized when working in 4K and with active ray tracing.

NVIDIA has made better use of space at the silicon level doubling the number of shaders and introducing RT cores and second and third generation tensor cores. This approach has been a success because it has allowed it to achieve much higher performance on all fronts, and has made Ampere one of those architectures that will be remembered in a few years as one of the most important in historysomething that has already happened, for example, with Kepler, which put an end to “hot shaders” and tripled the number of shaders.

A scene where ray tracing works wonders. Notice how well resolved the lighting is, and the shadows.

The numbers don’t lie, GeForce RTX 3090 Ti vs. Radeon RX 6950 XT in 4K with ray tracing

The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is an extremely powerful graphics card, and it’s designed to work smoothly with extreme settings. Ray tracing fits right in as such because, as many of our readers will know, it generates a huge workload from calculating the collisions, hits, and misses of each ray and pixel, plus everything else that comes after when it needs to be done. other tasks, such as noise reduction, for example.

Without specialized hardware to carry out all that workload, it would be impossible to achieve optimal rendering times, since this would have to be assumed by the shaders, and in the end we would have a frame rate per second that is so low that we would find ourselves before a real slideshow. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has RT cores that, as we have said, take care of ray tracing completely, and tensor cores that contribute to noise reduction tasks.

Those two keys, together with its high rasterization power, make the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti capable of smoothly moving even current games in maximum quality with 4K resolution and ray tracing, without having to resort to DLSS. Obviously, with this technology we can greatly improve performance, but in this article I wanted to focus on showing you what this graphics card can do without resorting to any kind of upscaling, and how it compares against the Radeon RX 6950 XT.

Metro Exodus EE

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition looks great with ray tracing. Notice how the light falls differently depending on the distance and the surface. The fire from the bottom reaches the ceiling in a different way than it reaches the front of the cave, and its surroundings.

I’m sure you’ll find this performance test interesting because, for some reason I can’t figure out, there are still ways that avoid making direct comparisons of ray tracing performance between the Radeon RX 6000 and the GeForce RTX 30, or they do it in a questionable way and limit the importance of that technology in an absurd way. To carry out these tests we have used a team made up of the following components:

  • Ryzen 7 5800X (Zen 3) processor with eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.8 GHz-4.7 GHz.
  • Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra motherboard.
  • Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix White cooling system with three 120mm Corsair ML RGB fans.
  • 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL RAM at 3,200 MHz with CL16 latencies.
  • GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card with 24 GB of graphics memory and MSI AMD Radeon RX 6950XT GAMING X TRIO with 16 GB of graphics memory.
  • Samsung Evo 850 500 GB SSD.
  • Corsair MP400 4TB PCIE NVMe SSD.
  • 2TB Corsair MP600 Core NVMe PCIE SSD.
  • 2TB Seagate SHDD with 8GB SSD as cache.
  • Corsair AX1000 80 Plus Titanium Power Supply with 80 Plus Titanium certification.
  • Windows 10 as the operating system.

As we can see in the attached graph, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is so powerful that it manages to double the performance of the Radeon RX 6950 XT in ray tracing. In this performance test I have not beat around the bush, I have focused on three of the titles that make the most intensive use of said technology, and I have calculated the average performance of three different zones with different graphic load. Interestingly, this has allowed me to improve the results I got with the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti in my first analysis, although it is an issue that I have already mentioned on other occasions, and that is that the performance of a game can change a lot depending on the area Where do we test?

In other titles they use less demanding ray tracing the difference is smaller, but even in these cases it is still very clear and in favor of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, as we can see in the attached graph. Even a highly optimized title for the Radeon RX 6000 like Resident Evil Village, and with ray tracing that can be greatly improved, something that I already told you about at the time in my technical analysis, performs better on the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

performance 2

Final Notes: GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Doubles the RX 6950 XT’s Ray Tracing Performance

We have already said that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is 500 euros more expensive than the Radeon RX 6950 XT, but it is also much more powerful than this in ray tracing. As we’ve seen in our performance tests, the graphics solution can double the performance of AMD’s option in ray tracing, and this makes such a big difference that allows you to make the unplayable playable.

One of the best examples we have in Control, which runs at 22 FPS with the Radeon RX 6950 XT and reaches 41 FPS with the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Cyberpunk 2077 is a slideshow on AMD’s graphics solution, while the NVIDIA graphics card exceeds the minimum that we can consider as playable (more than 25 FPS). Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition brings back to the table that enormous difference that exists between the two when we apply ray tracing.

Cyberpunk 2077

The difference that ray tracing makes in Cyberpunk 2077 is so great that it makes it a unique title and unattainable for next-gen consoles.

I believe that, with the evolution that ray tracing has undergone and with the future that this technology has ahead of it, it has long ceased to be fair to value a graphics card solely for the performance it offers in rasterization, in the same way that it would have been unfair at the time not to value T&L hardware support on a graphics card, or its support of programmable shaders.

The graphic sector improves thanks to the drive of those who dare to implement new technologies that at the time seemed impossible or meaningless, and yet over time they end up becoming standards. NVIDIA was criticized when it bet on ray tracing and intelligent upscaling, and today, four years later, both next-gen consoles and major developers and even its direct rival, AMD, have ended up embracing ray tracing and using their own rescaling technologies.

With the above in mind, I don’t think I need to explain to you why ray tracing has been around for a long time. ceased to be the future to become the presentand why the performance of a graphics card compatible with said technology should matter to us, and more and more.

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