We all know that the stoush between NVIDIA and AMD has been raging on for a while now and I’m not going to get into the details for the umpteenth time, so for the sake of this article, I just wanted to touch on the current GPU war between NVIDIA and AMD. As of this moment, I’m of the opinion that AMD does have a better bang for your buck, at least on a hardware level. It is because of DLSS that NVIDIA is able to stay ahead of AMD in terms of pure on-screen performance. In terms of Ray tracing. AMD can throw all the hardware it wants at a game and still come up lagging behind NVIDIA with the FPS numbers.

AMD currently has Fidelity FX CAS, but in my experience as it stands, it still has a way to go yet to be of any competition to DLSS. That said, I have recently had a chance to play with AMD optimised versions of Resident Evil Village and Dirt 5. The long and the short of it is that when a game is optimised properly for AMD hardware, DLSS is a non-issue, even with Ray tracing enabled.

Playing on a Ryzen 9 3900 CPU coupled with a 6800 GPU and 64gb DDR4-3200 ram, I was able to Max out the visual settings on Resident Evil Village And maintain a steady 80 to 100 frames per second with Ray tracing turned on. Unfortunately, I don’t have an NVIDIA RTX 3000 series GPU to put in this machine to do a like for like comparison, However, Thanks to Dell, we currently have a Dell M15 R4 laptop that is made up of an I7 10th Gen Intel CPU, RTX 3080 8gb GPU and 32gb of DDR4-3200 RAM.

While this isn’t an exact like for like comparison, it did give me an opportunity to do some testing at least. Using the exact same build of Resident Evil Village and Dirt 5 on both machines, our AMD machine came up trumps.

Now, this wasn’t totally unexpected as the laptop does run a cut down version of the 3080 RTX & the AMD machine had twice as much VRAM as the laptop. This enabled me to max at all the settings on Resident Evil Village, whereas the laptop just could not cope with only 8 gig of VRAM.

My testing was done at 3440 by 1440 Ultrawide, which does make the GPU work for its living.

On the Dell laptop, I managed to get between 30 and 50 frames per second with display settings turned up as far as the video ram would allow me to.

As AMD move forward and brings out its own version of Nvidia’s DLSS, and provided they keep their price point lower than NVIDIA, I can imagine that AMD will finally give NVIDIA something to shake in their shoes about.

I think that one of the biggest challenges facing hardware vendors today is educating the consumer about the hardware specifications on paper. It is easy for an average consumer to get bogged down in all these numbers that are written on marketing material, websites, online stores, specification sheets etc etc. Raw specs only tell half the story, so apart from requiring a DLSS equivalent, AMD still have the uphill battle of convincing consumers to buy their product, when side-by-side comparisons, at least on paper anyway, nearly always put NVIDIA ahead.

Below are some videos of captured gameplay from our testing and if you’d like to see what we thought about Resident Evil village in its entirety, you can check out our PlayStation 5 review of the game here.

 

Some final thoughts.

In the end. it does not always matter if NVIDIA is better than AMD or if AMD is better than NVIDIA, you will always have those loyal to each brand. And because of this I think that no matter what AMD does, apart from give away free GPU’s, (even if they wanted to and could afford to, there’s not enough hardware in the world to be able to), the NVIDIA consumer base is still so much larger than AMD’s and not everybody has disposable income to just “try out” another brand.

This is especially true in current times when hardware is so hard to get hold of and so expensive. We have been lucky enough to be able to play with a 6800 GPU supplied to us buy AMD, and it is with this that we try to offer you as much information as possible so you are able to make an informed decision on your next hardware purchase.

So, with this, I ask myself this question; “if I were to purchase a new GPU right now, what would I purchase?” My answer, knowing what I know now because of my time with the 6800 GPU, I would buy I AMD…. until I got to top tier where I would choose the 3090 over the 6900 XT. My reason for this is simply because for me personally, the 24 gig of VRAM on the 3090 is much more beneficial for my usage then the 16 gig offered on the AMD 6800 and higher GPU’s.

As another personal preference, I would steer clear of anything AMD 6700 and below, & NVIDIA 3060 and below. I don’t hate them that’s just my preference, my choice.
AMD does seem to be going from strength to strength at the moment and I can’t wait to see what the next one to two years brings for AMD.