AMD FineWine Technology, as the community loves to call it, is a situation where a Radeon GPU is seemingly able to catch up or even surpass its corresponding GeForce rival SKU due to the performance gains it undergoes during its life cycle. In essence, it gets better as it ages, something like a high-quality wine would do.
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The gains it achieves are a consequence of subsequent driver updates as well as more favorable game optimizations. The FineWine phenomenon generally starts to kick in a couple of years into a GPU generation. However, the RX 6000 series (Big Navi) GPUs, that launched last year and aren"t even a year old at this point appear to be showing these signs already.
According to a performance analysis done by German media 3DCenter, while both RTX 30 series cards, based on Ampere architecture, and the RX 6000 series, based on Navi 2X architecture, have gained quite a lot over launch day numbers, its the Team Red figures that are far more impressive.
The data shows that on average, AMD cards have gained more than 10% performance in the last six months with the biggest gains seen at 1080p. Nvidia cards see the biggest improvement at QHD resolution likely indicating the CPU bottlenecks that was suggested by a report earlier.
The performance gains of individual cards have also been presented for those interested to look at how each of the cards has done so far over its life span. There are three charts (click on them to enlarge) for this data one each for the resolutions 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.
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Overall, these are good signs for AMD and also for its fans and users and it"s possible we could see this trend continue as it generally has done in previous generations. However, things could be different this time and Nvidia could fight back too. The graphics landscape is after all changing as new cutting-edge technologies like Ray-Tracing are taking shape, and for now, Nvidia clearly has the upper hand in this.
Source and images: 3DCenter