AMD Radeon RX 6800M Review - krakertheiven

If you think Nvidia's GeForce has long had a lock on desktop GPUs, it's nothing fewer than Fort Knox on gambling laptops, where it plainly dominates all. That could vary, however, with AMD's original RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, which forebode solid competitor to the overflowing-flying GeForce chips.

To find out just how swell AMD's new GPU and CPU do, we took the bran-new Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition around the stuff. If you're looking for more CPU tests, we recommend that you read our retrospect of Intel's 11th-gen Panthera tigris Lake H, where we look at the same CPU used in the G15.

What's different in the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition is plainly the GPU: AMD's Radeon RX 6800M, which features 40 compute units, 12GB of GDDR6 RAM, and 96MB of Infinity Memory cache on a 192-bit memory user interface—and at length, actual contest in gaming laptops.

How we reliable

For the gaming tests we confined our tests to three nicely outfitted laptops that would light into the "performance" category of gaming laptops. They aren't sumo-wrestler beefy, just neither are they marathon-contrabandist stringy:

Gigabyte Aorus 17G with Intel 8-core Core i7-10870H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 105 watts, and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM. The laptop also features 32GB of DDR4/2933 in dual-channel mode and a 1TB NVMe SSD, along with a 300Hz, 17.3-inch FHD screen. The laptop computer weighs about 6.1 pounds and is high-powered by a 230-watt power brick.
Asus ROG Strix G17 with 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 130 watts, and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM. The laptop computer features 32GB of DDR4/3200 in twofold-channel mode and a 1TB NVMe SSD, along with a 360Hz, 17.3-inch FHD sort. The laptop weighs all but 6 pounds and is powered by a 240-watt power brick.
Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition with 8-pith AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX and AMD Radeon RX 6800M with 12GB of GDDR6 Random access memory. The laptop also features 16GB of DDR4/3200 in dual-channel mode, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. It weighs 5 pounds and is powered past a 280-watt power brick. AMD spec's the Radeon RX 6800M at 145+ Watts but net ball's just enjoin information technology clearly could usance Thomas More.

Synthetic Performance

We'll kick this turned with UL's democratic synthetic 3DMark bench mark, which measures DirectX12 graphics performance. Although not an actual game, it's a very reliable and very repeatable test. The dozens as wel dissect both the general performance, which slightly factors in the CPU physics performance as well as pure GPU performance. For the charts below, the bars that are solid red indicate an all-AMD laptop computer, which is the Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Radeon RX 6800M. Bars with red and green indicate a Ryzen CPU with a Nvidia GPU, while a blue-and-green bar indicates an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.

The whole mark for 3DMark Time Undercover agent puts the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Variation with its all-AMD components in a pretty good spot, rectify between the other two laptops. That's a dry win even if it doesn't issue forth out on top, since neither of the two GeForce RTX 3080 Laptops-based units are slouches.

6800 3dmark time spy overall — Longer bars indicate meliorate performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Blood-red indicates AMD components.

Digging into pure GPU performance, we undergo the Radeon RX 6800M separated by just 3 percent from the 130-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. With the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop at a more relaxed 105 watts, the Radeon RX 6800M actually outpaces it aside about 8.9 percent.

6800 3dmark gpu — Longer bars indicate better carrying out. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Ray tracing performance is the brave new world of gaming. It can greatly deoxidise the sum of work game developers have to practise for break lighting and reflections, just it's computationally pricey. While Nvidia has dedicated cores in its 20-serial publication and 30-serial GPUs for ray trace, AMD uses its existing shader cores along with a dedicated ray accelerator unit—one for apiece CU.

AMD is still playing catch-upwardly with Nvidia which jumped in with some feet with its 20-series GeForce cards. You can see the impact in 3DMark's Port Royal, which uses Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing to measure reflection and shadow performance. The Radeon RX 6800M is at a 21-per centum shortfall against the 130-W GeForce RTX 3080, and is 13 percent slower than the 105-watt GeForce RTX 3080.

6800 3dmark port royal — Longer parallel bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

The report gets even worse for AMD as you increase the trouble of the shaft tracing. While Port Royal exploited DXR for just shadows and reflections, the newer 3DMark DirectX has since added a DirectX Raytracing examination that is a "pure" electron beam tracing test. That means rather than use DXR for just kindling and shadows, the entire scene is ray-traced. With this much harsher (and perhaps unrealistic) test, the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptops bulge 145 percent and 122 percent quicker than the Radeon RX 6800M. That's a crushing public presentation divergence.

We tell "unrealistic" because pure ray-traced modern games, and ironware with performance you'd want to play at, are likely years away quiet. Yes, it's pretty amazing to see an entirely ray-traced Quake II RTX jetting, simply that game came unconscious in 1997.

Still, ray tracing is, and has been, the Achilles heel for Radeon happening desktops, and it's the indistinguishable in laptops.

6800 3dmark dxr feature test — Longer parallel bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Downcast indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

One survive test from 3DMark we should depict you is the PCIe bandwidth test. This measures the amount of data that bottom be passed across the PCIe bus between the GPU and CPU. Although the desktop CPUs feature PCIe 4.0, the laptop versions father't. The laptop Ryzen CPUs likewise feature article less lanes, with the PCIe 3.0 crowned at x8 versus the x16 of Intel CPUs. With some GeForce RTX 30-serial publication and Radeon RX 6800 featuring 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0, 3DMark's PCIe feature try shows you that bandwidth detonator in technicolor. Our graph doesn't even include Intel's latest 11th-gen Tiger Lake H CPUs, which feature 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 and push 20GBps.

The unspoiled news for AMD is that IT's soundless very difficult to receive innovative games that use that much bandwidth. How long that holds isn't known, merely for most people playing today's games, it's not a big wheel—just something to cost aware of for the future.

6800 3dmark pcie — Longer bars bespeak improved public presentation. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Gaming Performance

If you've had enough of the synthetic results, we'll cut to the actual gaming public presentation. For these initial tests, we opted to disable DXR. We did this because the resistless amount of PC games still don't expend information technology, and there's more value for to the highest degree users in seeing accepted gaming carrying into action.

If, however, you think ray tracing is the future you want to bet connected, we'd recommend that you plainly occlusive reading and jump aboard the GeForce train, because in the here and now, Nvidia's embryonic recko gives IT a major advantage.

Although AMD and Nvidia are pushing their top GPUs As better suited for 1440p gaming, the vast majority of gaming laptops today are actually 1080p, using highschool refresh rates of 144Hz, 240Hz, 300Hz, OR 360Hz. Because you can't play at a higher resolution than the one in your laptop (unless you're using an external presentation), all of our testing was conducted at the native resolution of the laptops: 1080p.

The first game result is from Shadow of the Tomb Spoiler set to its highest preset. Even with ray tracing disabled, both the GeForce chips lead the way by 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively. The Radeon RX 6800M comes up close behind.

6800 sotr highest no rt — Longer bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Flushed indicates AMD components.

Moving on to Underground Exodus and using the Extreme planned, we actually get word the Radeon RX 6800M extract dead-even with the 105-W GeForce RTX 3080 in the Intel 10th-gen laptop, piece the 130-watt GeForce RTX 3080 paired with the same Ryzen 9 5900HX is about 10.5 per centum faster. Again, Radeon RX 6800M doesn't win, but being in the neighborhood of Nvidia's top GPU is nothing to gib at.

6800 metro exodus extreme 19x10 — Longer bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

We did so visualise incidents where Team Red pulled in front. Red Utterly Redemption 2, e.g., saw the Radeon RX 6800M about 7.5 percent in front of the 130-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop paired with the same Ryzen 9, and 17 pct faster than the 105 watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop with its 10th-gen Intel CPU.

6800 rdr2 favor quality — Thirster parallel bars indicate better functioning. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Up succeeding is Sensible horizon Zero Dawn set to flooding quality. We over again see the Radeon RX 6800M sandwiched between both GeForce RTX 3080s, which we again think of a solidified carrying into action.

6800 horizon zero dawn — Longer bars suggest amended carrying out. Immature indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

The future game is Far Cry New Dawn, which in reality sees the 105-James Watt GeForce RTX 3080 with the 10th-gen Intel CPU leading the pack. The Nvidia/Intel combo, in fact, is a decent 14.5 pct quicker than both Ryzen-based laptops. Why? Although well-nig games tend to be rattling GPU-focused, the Far Call out series has tended to run better connected Intel-based CPUs. On the screen background Ryzen 5000 that's no more really true, but the laptop Ryzen version is not quite the same chemical formula, and we see the Intel vantage cultivate risen again.

Even if the CPU is a operative factor here, the fact that we have both Asus ROG Strix laptops using the same Ryzen 9 5900HX is perhaps the better comparison. When some are using the Sami Ryzen 9, we in reality pick up a very capitalist backwash between GeForce and Radeon.

6800 far cry new dawn ultra — Thirster bars indicate better carrying out. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Keep reading for more gmaing benchmarks.

Moving on to "eSports"-class games that father't tend to follow every bit graphically intense, we start with the immensely popular Counter Strike: Global Operations. Both GeForce RTX 3080's actually end up being generally a wash despite the different CPUs and the different-wattage GPUs. Even though both Asus ROG Strix laptops use the same CPU, the one with the GeForce GPU spits out 35 percent more frames per second compared to the one with Radeon RX 6800M.

6800 csgo high — Longer bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Carmine indicates AMD components.

Gobbler Clancy's Rainbow Sextet Military blockade is another graphically low-cal, but vastly popular eSports game. The Radeon RX6800M keeps up better than it did in Counter Strike, but it's silence clearly in third place, with the GeForce units 9.5 percent and 13.7 percent faster, respectively.

6800 rainbow six ultra — Longer bars argue better performance. K indicates Nvidia components. Low-spirited indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

We'll close tabu the gaming benchmarks with a score from Strange Brigade, which we run victimization its Radical preset and the Vulkan API. Regrettably, the Ryzen/GeForce laptop computer refused to guide the game. We can learn from the Intel/GeForce laptop computer that GeForce still holds the lead, but Ryzen/Radeon is respiration down its neck.

6800 strange brigade ultra — Thirster parallel bars indicate better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Content Conception and Compute Performance

While these mature gaming laptops are often purchased for gaming, a superior GPU bathroom help with applications atomic number 3 well. For the pursual content-creation and data processor performance tests, we'll admit scores from older and lower-end GPUs much atomic number 3 the GeForce GTX 1650, GeForce RTX 2060 Goop-Q, and GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop in the results. Like the charts in a higher place, parallel bars that mix blue and green indicate Intel and Nvidia; charts that use red and common point AMD and Nvidia; while an all-red barroom indicates wholly-AMD.

Our first of all result is the popular Geekbench 5.4.1 test. The OpenCL test measures GPU performance on such tasks A particle physics, speedy fourier transform, Gaussian blur, and face detection techniques.

The big winners are the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs, which have a sizeable lead terminated the Radeon RX 6800M. Although we don't have a GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop result, we'd imagine it would twin or surmoun the Radeon, Eastern Samoa the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop is looking right over its shoulder.

6800 geekbench 5.4.1 opencl — Longer bars show better performance. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Our future test uses UL's Genus Procyon benchmark, which measures the performance of Adobe First Pro spell exporting a video project with various personal effects applied. Dissimilar the late OpenCL trial run, Adobe Premiere Pro 15.1 is greatly influenced by the CPU. That makes the whole winner the newest G Aorus 17G, with its 11th-gen Core i7-11800H and 105-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU.

If you're looking for a more direct compare that reduces the CPU influence concluded the score, that would be the Asus ROG Genus Strix G17 and the ROG Strix G15, which both usance the same Ryzen 9 5900HX but differ in GPUs. That gives the 130-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop a healthy 18.5-percent public presentation advantage against the Radeon RX 6800M.

We'd guess some of that performance gap comes from NVidia's early involution with Adobe and GPU acceleration of its products.

6800 procyon video dgpu on — Longer parallel bars indicate improve performance. Leafy vegetable indicates Nvidia components. Profane indicates Intel components. Bloody indicates AMD components.

Our final content creation test switches gears to photo editing, using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Classic and a set of scripted runs from Procyon. Both applications are very dependent on CPU carrying into action but can see a boost from a fast GPU. The overall winner is Intel's Core i9-11980HK paired with a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU. It antimonopoly edges out the Core i7-11800H paired with a GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop. Panthera tigris Lake H is no joke, folk.

Just to highlight the CPU's encroachment, notice that although both of the Gigabyte Aorus 17G laptops use the same GPU with the assonant rated wattage, the older 10th-gen Core i7 handily loses to the newer 11th-gen Kernel i7-11800H Tiger Lake H.

But what about the Ryzen/Radeon jazz band? If you're trying to hone in connected the Radeon's performance against the GeForce in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, look again to the ROG Strix G17 and the ROG Strix G15, which manipulation the same Ryzen 9 CPUs. The GeForce-based laptop comes in at 15.6 percent faster than the Radeon-settled laptop.

6800 procyon photo dgpu on — Longer bars point meliorate functioning. Green indicates Nvidia components. Blue indicates Intel components. Red indicates AMD components.

Power consumption

General, we think the Radeon RX 6800M shows off OK in gaming, with the results slotting rightmost around, or better than, a 105-watt GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. One take we're certain Nvidia would remove with that interpretation is the fanlike range of wattage of the GeForce card game, from 80 watts to 150 watts or more. We know Nvidia will say a 130-W GeForce vs. a '145+'-watt Radeon isn't fair.

That's a good point, because despite the cleared-audible '145+,' we found that number to make up very conservative. For lesson, pushing information technology with the the power stress test Furmark, the Radeon would bump its read/write head on 185 watts. To try to get a bead on just how they compare, we took both the Ryzen 9-based Strix laptops and at the same time measured the amount of power consumed at the socket while running 3DMark Time Descry Extreme. This is probably the most possible comparison, because you pay up for the power you practice, not the superpowe equitable your GPU uses.

During our tests we handicapped all of the RGB and set some of the screens to their minimum brightness of a barely visible 12 nits. Both laptop's batteries were full as well, thus there was none additive power departure to recharge the batteries.

As you bottom see to it below, the (red line) Ryzen 9 / Radeon RX 6800M consumes well to a greater extent power than the (green line of work) Ryzen 9 / GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop computer duo. This shouldn't be a treat-breakers for virtually, only the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop computer is well winning the big businessman efficiency battle on laptops, a reversal from the background.

The test actually shows two GPU-focused tests (the first cardinal humps), and and then a Mainframe-focused test (the most recently hump), victimisation more cores at the death. The last bang could potentially beryllium a ray of sunshine. That's because we would have expected both of the laptops to settle down closer in power consumption on a C.P.U.-focused test.

We suspect AMD's SmartShift is at play. Smart Fracture plant directly betwixt AMD CPUs and AMD GPUs and lets some intelligently gauge load in real time, then shift the thermal and power budget where needed.

radeon vs geforce — We at the same time recorded the power used-up at the socket by the Nvidia-founded Genus Strix G17 (green) and the AMD-based Strix G15 (colored) while running 3DMark Time Spy Extreme.

To give you an idea of how SmartShift works, we ran 3DMark Time Spy on the ROG Strix G15 and monitored the shifting in real time. For the GPU load during the persist, the SmartShift's vary was moderately small, only more or less 3 percent to 5 percent going to the GPU. You can see this is in the graphic below, where the graph happening the left-hand side moves up the X axis to indicate a power shift toward the GPU.

smartshift gpu — AMD's SmartShift with its Ryzen 9 5900HX and Radeon RX 6800M in litigate. We see it moving about 3 percent of the power to the GPU in this GPU encumbrance.

As you saw previously, 3DMark first runs a GPU-intensive psychometric test so shifts to a Central processor-intensive psychometric test designed to measure CPU-based game physics performance. During the CPU portion, we now construe with a very sizeable 29-percent shift. You can control information technology in the screen cap below, where IT moves down the X-axis to indicate a shift to the CPU.

We should enjoin in a handful of games we looked at, SmartShift didn't put up up the same dramatic changes, even though we expected it to, so we'll continue to inquire. Only we are even nonetheless impressed aside what could come of AMD's SmartShift.

smartshift cpu — We saw an impressive 29 pct moved to the CPU's power budget during this CPU-bound test from AMD's SmartShift technology.

Conclusion

We'll fracture this down into the quaternary areas you should be implicated close to before buying your next performance laptop.

The first is beam of light trace carrying into action. Despite its rocky start with Nvidia's original GeForce RTX 20-series, ray tracing is becoming increasingly important to PC gaming. Inactive, the vast majority of games people play today do non support those advanced features, and the shift testament be gradual. Eve the games that do support ray tracing let you cut that abide and will tumble back to conventional modes. As we said previously, if you buy into that bright, shining, reflective future, then Nvidia's GeForce short letter is the best option.

The next area is capacity creation and compute performance. Although we father't think Geekbench is the final word on figure performance, the advantage appears to go to GeForce. GeForce also gets the nod for content creation in Adobe products, which is the rooms preferred by most occupants of Planet Earth. The Radeon RX 6800M performs creditably, but content creators may want to lean green.

If completely this doesn't sound great, we'll work heavenward perhaps one of the most important drivers of gaming laptops: real games. There, Radeon RX 6800M solidly trades punches with the lighter-wattage GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs. Yes, a GeForce RTX 3080 at its 150-watt configuration would likely Be even up quicker, merely Radeon RX 6800M's execution is still in the neighborhood in many of the games we tested. Consider this occluded with the last area that may matter to the most: value.

The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition you see present is expected to sell for a very aggressive cost of $1,650. Sure, in that location's just 16GB of Ram down and a moderately sized 512GB SSD, but that pricing waterfall right into the neck of the woods of gambling laptops with GeForce RTX 3060 operating room stripped-down GeForce RTX 3070 laptops—umpteen of which possess slower CPUs or lower-end displays. Our full review of the ROG Strix G15 is still in the works, but from what we've seen, we'd snap unitary upfield at this price, which may OK represent how AMD shakes this livelong thing up.

So you can understand why despite its mightiness-hungry nature and soft areas against GeForce, the Radeon RX 6800M indeed poses a real threat to Nvidia's iron-fist lock happening gaming laptops.