Big Navi ray-tracing could be better than expected: leaked benchmarks show the Radeon RX 6800 compete with the GeForce RTX 3070 with DLSS enabled

Leaked benchmarks outed by @PJ_Lab_UH indicate that AMD's Big Navi RX 6800 does remarkably well in ray-tracing workloads, even without DLSS-like upscaling technology. According to the tipster, the midrange Radeon RX 6800 managed 80 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1440p, with ray-tracing effects enabled.

Remarkably, this is just 5 percent lower than what the GeForce RTX 3070 manages with DLSS technology enabled. Either the Radeon RX  6800's raw rasterization power is making up for relatively weaker RT cores, or AMD's "Ray Accelerators" are faster than expected. 

These results are interesting since AMD's yet to share hard performance data itself on ray-tracing performance. The results have major implications for products higher up on the product stack such as the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT. If AMD's hardware ray-tracing solution is nearly as efficient as Ampere, Radeon gamers could enable high-end ray-tracing effects at 4K on cards like the RX 6900 XT without too severe of a performance hit.

AMD itself is working on a DirectML-based DLSS alternative, though it has yet to share details. In the here and now, RX 6800 ray-tracing results mean that native 4K/60 gaming could now be viable with ray-tracing on.