Ray Tracing Performance Deep Dive: AMD Radeon RX 6800XT vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080

Many thanks to XFX for the RX 6800 XT Speedster Merc 319 Black sample. Yes, we've seen the benchmarks - and it's undeniable that Nvidia's second generation ray tracing technology is faster than AMD's debut offering in the BIG NAVI line-up of RDNA 2 graphics cards. But we wanted to know more - what are the strengths and weaknesses of the respective architectures? Is Nvidia really a full generation ahead of AMD performance or is the answer a little more complex? And how does this all break down when considering different forms of ray tracing? Alex Battaglia loves ray tracing, loves telling you about it - and he has everything you need to know.