If you’re lucky enough to be stuck choosing between the GeForce RTX 3070 and the Radeon 6700 XT, you may have a new reason to push you over to Team Green. Fans of games that still use the DirectX 11 graphics API may want to know that there looks to be a fairly large difference between what AMD and Nvidia’s latest generation of graphics cards can offer.
The evidence was collected by PCMag, who noticed that the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT and 6800 XT suffered when playing DX11 games. To test this further they decided to put AMD’s 6700 XT up against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070, by measuring the frames per second (FPS) each can achieve in various titles at the same graphical settings.
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DirectX 11 – otherwise known as DX11 – is what is known as an application programming interface, or API. This interface essentially helps your operating system to ‘talk’ to your components such as graphics cards, memory, and sound cards, allowing them to work together and produce what you see onscreen.
The results from this experiment were pretty stark. When testing the graphics cards with more modern games that run DirectX 12, the FPS performance differences were negligible. Swapping over to DirectX 11 shows an entirely different picture.
In some cases, when testing games like Sleeping Dogs, the Nvidia card managed an average FPS that was 70% more than what the AMD card could achieve. For games that could utilize eitherDX11 or DX12 – such as F1 2020 – the AMD 6700 XT performance improved by nearly 50% with the more modern graphics technology at times.
Why does this matter?
For some titles, at specific resolutions, there was a much smaller difference between AMD and Nvidia’s graphics cards. However, AMD’s GPUs were still outperformed every time when running DirectX 11.
This is bad news if you like playing Apex Legends, Destiny 2, or Final Fantasy XIV, as these each still run on DirectX 11. Modern classics like the Dark Souls franchise and Halo: The Master Chief Collection are also stuck on the older graphics API.
So unfortunately for AMD fans, it looks like Nvidia still looks to have some serious advantages over Team Red, especially given we’re still waiting for the release of Fidelity FX Super Resolution to rival the popular DLSS feature available on GeForce RTX cards. We’ll have to wait and see if AMD can address these issues, otherwise, Nvidia GPUs like the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 might become even more elusive due to demand.
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