AMD's new RX 6800 XT might not be the Nvidia killer many fans hoped for, but it is certainly competitive, and with 16GB of VRAM, has the potential to be a real fine wine card over the stock RTX 3080 and 3070 in 4K over the next few years. One area where it has really stormed ahead of the Nvidia competition, though, is in 3DMark Fire Strike. An RX 6800 XT using stock air cooling and paired with an LN2-cooled Ryzen 9 5950X overclocked to 5.4GHz, has taken the record in HWBot's FireStrike competition, beating out even RTX 3090 cards, as per Videocardz.
One note should be said, the HWBot Fire Strike competition does allow competitors to turn off tessellation, where typically 3DMark results do not. That's why the Fire Strike hall of fame has an RTX 3090 on top — although the top ranked 6800 XT in this case is only five percent behind it, despite not being super cooled with LN2 like the 3090. It seems likely that an LN2 cooled 6800 XT, and certainly a 6900 XT, could take the performance crown in this older benchmark.
Still, this 6800 XT is amazing, as it managed just shy of 48,000 points. A monstrous score that puts even super clocked RTX 3090s (a card that costs almost two and a half times as much) to shame. When someone gets a 6800 XT or 6900 XT under LN2 as well as the CPU, it seems likely that we'll see AMD take the top crown in a number of benchmarks.
In more real world scenarios, the 6800 XT trades blows with the RTX 3080 in raw performance, though falls heavily behind in ray tracing and doesn't stand a chance in games that support DLSS. AMD's Super Resolution system needs to be implemented soon, if AMD wants its cards to remain competitive across all games, though there's no word on when that will be available.
Image source: Alva Jonathan (lucky_n00b)