Big if true: pictured Radeon RX 6800 XT engineering sample is beating the RTX 3080 in almost all leaked 3DMark results

Yesterday, we were reporting on the rumors regarding the alleged performance of the RX 6800 XT cards based on info provided by industry insiders. Meanwhile, no less than four other sources have come up with detailed 3DMark results from what appears to be AIB partner engineering samples of RX 6800 XT cards that are said to feature overclocked frequencies. We also get a clearer look at the board layout surrounding the GPU, thanks to a leaked image from Twitter user 13a68154676249c.

The tweeter post has been deleted in the meantime, but the guys over at Videocarz managed to save a copy of the image.  Unfortunately, the pic does not show the complete board, and the GPU itself is masked. However, we can see that there are 8x 2 GB GDDR6 VRAM slots, additional radiators and two 8-pin connectors. This is most likely a custom RX 6800 XT or RX 6800 board leaked by somebody working for Asus, MSI or Gigabyte. We already know that the RX 6900 XT is an AMD-exclusive card, so this one cannot be it.

If the word of an industry insider was not enough to pique your interest, we now have four different sources that posted detailed 3DMark results, which more or less confirm that the RX 6800 XT is on par, if not better than the RTX 3080 in some tests.

The results posted by Igor’s Lab and WccfTech are very similar, so we’ll analyze these in conjunction. Both reference Time Spy Extreme 4K and Port Royal 4K results, but Igor is referencing Firestrike Extreme 4K, while WccfTech shows Firestrike Ultra 4K results. In any case, we see the RX 6800 XT card leading by around 19% in the Firestrike tests, yet the difference is substantially reduced in the Time Spy tests, where the AMD card leads by only 3%. The Port Royal ray tracing test is dominated by the RTX 3080, which leads by 22%. Probably no one was expecting to see better ray tracing results here, still, we see the AMD card beating the RTX 2080 Ti by a few percent, which is not that bad for a first try at ray tracing from Team Red.

Another source that provided some figures is the developer of the CapFrameX utility. According to his tweet, the “Big Navi” card is ~8% faster than the RTX 3080 in Firestrike Ultra. Since the source does not name the SKU, we could conclude that it might as well be referring to the RX 6800 model, not the XT one.

Last, but not least, Twitter user KittyYYuko (formerly known as Kitty Corgi) shows some results that place the AMD card just a step behind the RTX 3080 in the Time Spy tests, whereas the RX 6800 XT is beating even the RTX 3090 in the Firestrike tests. Now, it is worth pointing out that Kitty claims the RTX 6800 XT has 80 CUs. We already know this model actually comes with 72 active CUs, so we suspect somebody is confusing certain SKUs. We might be looking at a mix of RX 6900 XT results (Firestrike tests) and RX 6800 XT ones (Time Spy tests).

As much as we would like to think that these AMD cards are indeed faster, we need to acknowledge that we are talking about synthetic tests after all, and these do not always reflect the real-world performance in games. Additionally, we hear that AMD is constantly improving the drivers, so we might see a totally different snapshot by mid-November, plus the RX 6900 XT cards might provide some surprises.