Synthetic benchmarks:
Our first series of tests is dedicated to synthetic benchmarks. These are often used for overclocking competitions, but are also very interesting for comparing different GPUs. We’ll be focusing on benchmarks from the 3DMark series.
We’ll be testing the following benchmarks:
- Fire Strike (1080p)
- Fire Strike Ultra (2160p)
- Time Spy (1440p)
- Time Spy Extreme (2160p)
- 3DMark Speed Way (1440p)
- DirectX Raytracing
- Intel XeSS
- 3DMark DLSS Feature Test (2160p)
3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra :
Let’s start with 3DMark Fire Strike, one of today’s most widely used benchmarks. It consists of two graphics tests, a CPU test and a fourth test that combines GPU and CPU. Don’t forget to deactivate the demo, which makes no contribution to the final score and prolongs the benchmark’s duration (unnecessarily). The version used for these tests is, of course, the latest.
Our first benchmark is with this PowerColor Red Devil RX 7800 XT, and it gets off to a strong start, beating the RTX 4070 by 3031 points.
Under Fire Strike Ultra, the results are identical, but let’s not forget that the Fire Strike benchmark series is well in favor of AMD cards.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme:
The second test is 3DMark Time Spy. Although this one is performed in 1440p, its main feature is that it uses DirectX 12. It consists of two graphics tests and a CPU test. As with Fire Strike, don’t forget to disable the demo. The first two benchmarks are provided by UL Benchmark.
The performance obtained in Time Spy is often representative of what we’ll get in games. Here, our sample of the day scores 19761 points, putting it ahead of the RTX 4070. We should therefore have an RX 7800 XT ahead of the RTX 4070 in rasterized games.
Under 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, we obtain a good score of 9338 points, representing an 8.8% performance gain over NVIDIA’s RTX 4070.
3DMark Speed Way
Ulbenchmark’s latest benchmark, and it’s nice to be able to say that we’re going to have a good time on this Speed Way. It uses DirectX 12 and defaults to 1440p. We haven’t modified anything, so we’re using the original benchmark.
Here, too, our PowerColor Red Devil RX 7800 XT scores 3949 points, putting it behind the RTX 4070 for the first time. In this benchmark, NVIDIA cards fare best.
3DMark DirectX Raytracing:
UL Benchmarks has added a new test to its series of benchmarks for measuring Ray Tracing performance. The idea is to use the 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing test to compare the performance of Ray Tracing hardware dedicated to graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, and now also from Intel!
The 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing test is designed to make Ray Tracing the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the entire scene is traced and drawn in a single pass. The test result will depend entirely on Ray Tracing performance. This makes it easy to measure and compare the performance of different cards.
This benchmark has always been dominated by NVIDIA cards, and so our sample of the day logically lags behind with a score of 33.2 FPS, but this still puts it ahead of the previous generation, the RX 6800 XT, as well as the RX 6950 XT!
3DMark Intel XeSS
UL Benchmarks, in collaboration with Intel, will be adding this new benchmark to the 3DMark suite. We had early access to this new test for our tests. This Intel XeSS test is designed to evaluate and compare the performance and image quality of XeSS (Xe Super Sampling). There are four XeSS modes to choose from: Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced and Performance. The 3DMark inspection tool helps you compare image quality with a side-by-side view of XeSS rendering and native resolution rendering. You need a graphics card that supports Intel XeSS to run this test.
So we’ll have two scores, a number of FPS with XeSS disabled and then, on the right, with XeSS enabled. The mode chosen is “Ultra Quality”, which is actually the benchmark’s default mode.
In this new benchmark, all graphics cards without exception benefit from XeSS, but it’s Intel that reaps the greatest gain. ARC models see a gain of 50%, while NVIDIA and AMD models see a gain of between 25 and 35%.
