AMD vs NVIDIA eGPU Performance (RX 6800 XT vs RTX 3070) (2024)

nando4

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November 28, 2022 10:25 pm

Plenty of reviews out there. hardwareunboxed/techspot places the RX 6800 XT as a RTX 3080 competitor:

https://www.techspot.com/review/2427-geforce-rtx-3080-vs-radeon-6800-xt/

Picking a Winner
In terms of rasterization performance, the RTX 3080 and Radeon 6800 XT are very evenly matched. Whatever tales you may hear about driver optimization, truth is nothing has changed in this shootout since day one. Surely there's been some more significant movements on a per game basis, but overall the picture looks unchanged.
When comparing our 50 game benchmark results with other reviews or follow up testing, please take note of the number of games tested, as well as the settings used as this can heavily influence the margins. For example, if we were to cherry pick the 25 most favorable games for Nvidia, the RTX 3080 ends up being 14% faster at 4K, which is twice of what we see across all games. Something to keep in mind.

With performance being so close, at least before we factor in ray tracing, DLSS and other performance-enhancing features, the next thing to look at is pricing. Last month's pricing update saw the RTX 3080 10GB coming in at $1,538 and the Radeon 6800 XT priced slightly lower at $1,304. Today both are available at major retailers for ~$1,200 which is great to see as prices continue to slowly fall.
So how do you decide which one to purchase? Arguments could be made for either product.
The advantage of the Radeon RX 6800 XT is the larger VRAM buffer, and long term this should see it age well, though 18 months from its initial release, the RTX 3080 is still good. The only other noteworthy advantage of the 6800 XT is Smart Access Memory. When paired with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU, the performance gains in certain titles can be impressive, and even with an Alder Lake CPU we believe the uplift can be significant. GeForce GPUs don't appear to benefit from Resizable BAR nearly as much.

The GeForce RTX 3080 has two other distinct advantages: DLSS support and superior ray tracing performance. In our opinion, DLSS has become a strong selling point of RTX branded products as support and quality continues to improve. Meanwhile, AMD still doesn't have a real answer to DLSS. FSR has helped to lessen that blow, but it doesn't nullify DLSS and it's not a selling point of Radeon GPUs, largely because it supports all GPUs, GeForce included.
As DLSS continues to improve, so does ray tracing with more and more titles offering ray traced effects, and those that use it well generally see performance tank on RNDA2 based products. We feel it's easy to argue in favor of the RTX 3080 given those features, especially so if you're keen to check out ray tracing and think you'll play the latest titles with it enabled. A GeForce GPU is a must as performance is typically much better then.
See Also
AMD Ryzen 9 9900X Benchmarked in Geekbench 6, Beats Intel's Best in Single-Core Score

Choosing the Radeon over the GeForce would be justified if you are not interested in ray tracing and you could save some money in the process. On that note, our benchmarks were conducted using a Ryzen 5000 system with resizable BAR enabled. This favors Radeon GPUs more than GeForce, so if you have a system that doesn't support resizable BAR yet, the RTX 3080 will look slightly better overall compared to what's been shown here, though it's a marginal difference.

64Gbps PCIe 4.0 x4 over 80Gbps Intel Thunderbolt 5 / USB4v2 ETA starting 2024 • eGPU Bandwidth Reference • eGPU Setup 1.35

2018 15" HP ZBook Studio G5 (Q P1000) [8th,6C,E] + RX 6700 XT @ 32Gbps-M.2x4 (ADT-Link R43SG) + Win10 22H2 // compares M.2 NVMe vs TB3 & RX 6700 XT vs RTX 3070 eGPU, 2.06kg triple-M.2 NVMe slot budget Workstation [info]

2018 14" HP EliteBook 840 G5 [8th,4C,U] + RX 6700 XT @ 32Gbps-M.2x4 (ADT-Link R43SG) + Win10 22H2 // compares M.2 NVMe vs TB3 & RX 6700 XT vs RTX 3070 eGPU, 1.48kg dual-M.2 slot budget UltraBook [info]

2015 15" Dell Precision 7510 (Q M1000M) [6th,4C,H] + GTX 1080 Ti @ 32Gbps-M.2x4 (ADT-Link R43SG) + Win10 1803 // compares M.2 NVMe vs TB3 eGPU performance inc unoptimized H-CPU BIOS [build link]