I was lucky enough to pick up a Radeon RX 6800 XT a few weeks ago, after cancelling my pre-order for RTX 3080, who’s supply had completely dried up with the place I pre-ordered it from. So here’s a few observations, for my first ever Radeon card after gaming with nVidia since the early 2000s. I had to pay over the odds, but not too much.
Performance at 1080p is identical, simply because the game at that resolution is wholly CPU bound, both cards are overkill at this resolution. AT 1440p the Radeon is ever so slightly ahead, maybe 2-3 fps at most. At 4K the 3080 pulls ahead by 18% (33fps vs 40fps) on the Sydney landing challenge. These are all stock figures without Rage mode on the AMD or Shared Access Memory enabled…or DLSS on the nVidia. Right now, without AMD enabling their version of DLSS yet, the Nvidia card would be a better choice for 4K gaming. Also ray tracing, for those who care about it…forget it on the Radeon cards, the performance hit is terrible.
Then come the drivers, nVidia has always been way ahead here, although I must say AMD’s Adrenalin software is far more configurable and was a pleasant surprise, it’s very different from nVidias software. I have noticed a few bugs in the latest driver in MSFS however, such as where changing some settings in game will cause the frame rate to plummet to 10fps when you go from the menu to in-flight, requiring a system reboot to fix it. Only happened three times so far. Apart from that I have never had a crash in game and the frame rates on my 1440p monitor are outstanding on mostly ultra with a few settings lowered that don’t do much or I don’t like (trees on medium for example) up to 87fps in a steam gage GA aircraft in country areas and often 60fps and above in many cities, meaning I can enable Vsync and have buttery smooth gameplay with no juddering (micro stutters) at all, except when scenery may be loading (I have roaming cache disabled). FPS in tubeliners is obviously lower, but still top of the shop at 1440p (RX 6090 XT aside). It’s awesome.
As for the Xbox issue, I believe there near certainty of Asobo to work closely with AMD on optimisation, as Microsoft have been heavily pushing 4K gaming with their new console, which has both an AMD CPU and cut down version of the RX 6000 series GPUs. AMDs version of DLSS is not far away and will probably be in place when the game is available for Xbox.
In short, right now grab either card if you can and you will be happy, with a caveat for 4K gamers.