Stepping down to 1440p helps AMD's GPUs, as the Infinity Cache hit rate improves, and thus the effective memory bandwidth goes up. At the same time, CPU bottlenecks start to factor in as well. Overall, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT performed 3% faster than the Asus RTX 3090 Ti, and 9% faster than the RX 6900 XT reference card.
In the individual game results, Nvidia claimed a few victories, with Flight Simulator, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Total War: Warhammer 3 favoring the 3090 Ti by 6% to 21%. Nvidia could also get another 10%–20% with DLSS Quality mode in the games that support it, but AMD gets the win at native rendering.
Ray tracing once again punishes AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. It does hang on to sixth place, even with the 3070 and 3070 Ti now in the mix, but the RTX 3080 and above all take a decent lead, with the RTX 3090 Ti delivering a 55% advantage. Of course, the RTX 3080 Ti and above also cost more than the RX 6950 XT, so there's that. But if you care about complex ray tracing in games, the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 12GB are a much better choice than any of AMD's current generation GPUs.
Turning to the individual game charts again, the RX 6950 XT now breaks 30 fps in nearly all of the games, Cyberpunk 2077 being the sole exception — and it has FSR support to get you there if you want. That makes DXR technically playable at 1440p, though it's not a great experience for the most part. Minimums still dipped well below 30 fps as well in several of the games.
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