AMD Radeon RX 6000 appears to be slower in ray tracing than NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series

During yesterday's Radeon RX 6000 series reveal, AMD didn't pay a lot of attention to ray tracing. The company said its cards are ray tracing ready and showed a lot of traditional rasterization benchmarks, which painted a very competitive picture of the Navi 21 GPUs. Ray tracing performance wasn't explicitly mentioned, which could be a sign that this is an area where AMD's Big Navi isn't that good in.

Hardware sleuths did manage to draw some comparisons based on some results AMD shared from the Microsoft DXR SDK tool called Procedural Geometry. VideoCardz writes it looks like AMD's Navi 21 GPUs are slower than NVIDIA's Ampere when looking at ray tracing:

This means that GeForce RTX 3080 is around 33% faster than Radeon RX 6800 XT in this particular benchmark. OF course, there are few things that need to be taken into the account such as the testing platform and DXR benchmark resolution (AMD did not clarify, hence we used default).

The stock GeForce RTX 3090 has a framerate of 749, according to the screenshot posted by Hassan Mujtaba (Wccftech). This means that RTX 3090 is 59% faster than AMD RX 6800XT in this DXR test.

For better benchmarks we'll probably have to wait 2-3 more weeks.