AMD Big Navi performance appears to challenge the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 in 4K resolution games, but only when ray tracing is not enabled.

Yesterday (October 8), after AMD unveiled the new AMD Ryzen 5000 series, AMD closed the event with a brief unveiling of the Big Navi's performance AMD has shown that when paired with RDNA 2 architecture-based graphics cards the Ryzen 9 5900X performance metrics were revealed.

Sibling site Tom's Hardware reported that the RDNA 2 GPU in question was not explicitly stated, but is likely the Radeon RX 6900 XT. The card is set to be the top GPU in AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, a Big Navi graphics card that has been talked about but not yet revealed.

In published benchmarks, the RDNA 2 GPU ran "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare," "Borderlands 3," and "Gears 5" at ultra settings and 4K.

Tom's Hardware had already tested the RTX 3080 and knew how well Nvidia's high-end graphics card would perform at 4K and maximum settings in Borderlands 3 and how well it would perform in Gears 5. So, using a benchmark that appeared to be Big Navi provided by AMD, Tom's Hardware found that the AMD GPU nearly beat the RTX 3080 in Borderlands 3 and slightly underperformed in Gears 4. And Big Navi beat the older GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. [These games may have been run at maximum settings, but ray tracing was not enabled; one of the main features of the GeForce RTX 3000 and RTX 2000 series is dedicated ray tracing hardware, and the new GeForce cards offer a cards, which is a significant improvement over the previous cards.

With this in mind, there is a good chance that the RTX 3080 will beat Big Navi if ray tracing is enabled. We expect the Big Navi to have ray tracing capabilities, but so far, whispers surrounding this graphics card suggest that it cannot compete with Nvidia's most powerful GPUs.

All of this leads us to expect that Big Navi is not an "Nvidia killer". However, this badge was circulated at a time when the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was the most powerful consumer graphics card Nvidia had. And Big Navi seems to have surpassed it, and is arguably the killer graphics card, just a generation too late.

We will have better information on Big Navi's performance on October 28 when AMD announces the Radeon RX 6000 series. If it can offer a high-performance graphics card at a competitive price, it could be an attractive alternative to the RTX 3080.