Unannounced AMD Radeon GPU outscores GeForce RTX 2080 Ti by 19% in VR benchmark

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AMD is getting the big guns ready. An unreleased AMD Radeon RX graphics card has just popped up on the OpenVR benchmark results, comfortably outstripping the performance of a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

The unnamed graphics card was tested alongside one of the recently announced AMD Ryzen 7 4800H mobile processors. Even despite the mobile chipset the unannounced Navi GPU picked up at score in the VR benchmark of 103.92, compared to 88.10 from a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti / Intel Core i7-8700K 6-Core 3.7GHz combo which ran the same test.

Based on this benchmark, the AMD Radeon graphics is capable of around 19.3% faster performance than a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, even while back up by a mobile processor.

Obviously, it goes without saying that we shouldn’t read too much into these results. This is specifically a single VR benchmark and perhaps may not be indicative of wider trends. There are still a whole lot of unknowns at play here but it’s still no mean feat for AMD to manufacture a graphics card sample which can top the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. On the flip side, the RTX 2080 Ti came out in 2018 so it stands to reason AMD should at least be able to compete with Nvidia some 18 months later. 

The truth of it is though that AMD has been out of the picture at the top-end for a long, long time and so there are still serious reservations over whether Team Red is even capable of competing with Nvidia within the enthusiast segment.

With all that in mind, we’d imagine we’re probably looking at Big Navi here. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su made it pretty clear earlier this week that high-end Radeon 7nm+ graphics cards would be arriving later this year, packing hardware-level ray-tracing support. The upcoming GPUs should also be using RDNA 2 second-gen graphics architecture. Combine all of this together and we’re looking at what could potentially be a huge performance jump over the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB.

Nvidia isn’t the sort to sit back and let AMD run rampant with reports like this though. The next-gen Ampere GPUs are inbound. The rumours surrounding the next-gen GeForce graphics cards are flaky at best but the latest reports swirling suggest Ampere could be as much as 50% faster than Turing. That would put Nvidia back in the driving seat even when compared to this upcoming AMD Radeon graphics card.

With Intel getting in on the action too, and the arrival of raytracing capable consoles, 2020 is shaping up to be a mighty interesting year for graphics hardware. Whatever your personal tastes, gaming performance could be set for a seismic shift.

What do you think then, is AMD about to become a serious competitor at the top-end of the graphics card market once again? Or do you think Nvidia will sink them with the GeForce RTX 3000 series? Let us know!