The rumors were true: AMD Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" series comes within gnawing distance of the NVIDIA RTX 3080 in first sneak preview

After having revealed the Ryzen 5000 lineup, AMD also offered a sneak peek into some fps numbers achieved by the Radeon RX 6000 series GPU a.k.a Big Navi. AMD did not name the exact SKU being previewed but did say that this is the company's biggest graphics leap yet.

AMD's Dr. Lisa Su showed off the RX 6000 series performance in a few games such as Borderlands 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Gears of War 5. The Big Navi GPU was paired with the new Ryzen 9 5900X. This may not really offer a true apples-to-apples comparison with NVIDIA's Ampere reviews we've seen so far, but we can still get an idea.

We obviously don't have a direct comparison with an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 9 5900X setup. But considering that the benchmarks at 4K are not really CPU-bound, we can do a quick check on how these numbers fare against an RTX 3080 in combination with a Ryzen 9 3950X — data for two of the benchmarks, Borderlands 3 and Gears of War 5, are from Hexus.

Taking AMD's preliminary numbers, we see that the combination of the Radeon RX 6000 series with the Ryzen 9 5900X offers 61 fps in Borderlands 3 Badass Quality (RTX 3080 - 59 fps), 88 fps in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Ultra Quality, and 73 fps in Gears of War 5 Ultra Quality preset (RTX 3080 - 77 fps).

From this quick top-level comparison, we see that the AMD RX 6000 series is almost on par with the RTX 3080 in Borderlands 3 and Gears of War 5. Modern Warfare numbers seem to be highly variable across reviews, though. Nevertheless, the 88 fps mark seems to be pretty decent and is likely to be within 20% of what an RTX 3080 would achieve at a similar preset.

Overall, it looks like Navi 21 could prove to be a game (pun intended) changer for AMD after having lagged behind significantly in the previous generation. We are already hearing rumors that an ever Bigger Navi with more compute units than Navi 21 may also be possible. If priced right, AMD has the potential to regain significant lost ground in the GPU space as well.