The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is available today (November 18), and we can get an early look at the graphics card's ray tracing performance.

VideoCardz staff was able to obtain a slide showing the Radeon RX 6800 XT's ray tracing performance when running games at 1440p resolution, a resolution that is becoming increasingly popular among PC gamers. The graph shows that the $649 graphics card can deliver over 60 frames per second ray-tracing games.

In Battlefield 5, the RX 6800 XT recorded 70 fps and in Crysis Remastered, 90 fps. This is quite impressive considering the high rendering load of ray tracing. Raytracing is the real-time, realistic rendering of light and reflections, which consumes graphics card power.

It is not known on what machines AMD performed these tests. Therefore, it is quite difficult to compare the Radeon RX 6800 XT to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, a $699 graphics card that is about to take on the challenge. [However, when our colleagues at Tom's Hardware tested the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, this Nvidia GPU recorded 85 fps in Battlefield 5 at 4K with DirectX Raytracing reflection enabled. DLSS technology has the advantage of being able to smartly adjust how certain parts of the image are rendered so as not to overload the graphics card while still running the game at high resolutions. However, with ray tracing enabled, hitting 60+ fps at 3840 x 2160 resolution is very impressive.

So when it comes to high-end ray tracing performance, the Radeon RX 6800 XT doesn't look like it can beat the RTX 3080. However, in AMD's own benchmarks of the RX 6800 XT in 4K gaming without ray tracing, this new RDNA 2-based graphics card is catching up with and sometimes beating more expensive Nvidia GPUs.

AMD also released a video showcasing the Radeon RX 6800 XT's ray tracing capabilities, demonstrating the power of the RDNA 2 architecture at the heart of the graphics card.

The Hangar 21 demo is very impressive, showcasing gorgeous lighting effects and shadows. However, no actual game footage was shown, so it is difficult to get an idea of the performance offered here. [The new Radeon RX 6000 series cards feature a new core called Ray Accelerator, with each compute unit on the graphics card carrying one Ray Accelerator. In other words, the RX 6800 XT has 72 Ray Accelerators.

How it compares to the GeForce RTX 3080's RT core is unknown at this time. However, the new Radeon graphics cards will feature at least some dedicated ray tracing hardware.

It remains to be seen how these two graphics cards will compare to each other in independent tests and which PC gamers will choose. However, this competition in the graphics card arena is definitely a good thing, as it could lead to more innovative GPUs at better prices for PC gamers in 2021 and beyond.