Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC 16GB Graphics Card GV-R69XTGAMING OC-16GD

Product Information

Heat and power consumption are also solid. The card operated at a stable 78 degrees running the Time Spy Extreme stress test and saw a peak 429.3W system power drawer. The latter showing it to be less power-hungry than its Nvidia rivals. Should I buy the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT? The fact of the matter is: The RTX 3080 already makes the RTX 3090 look bad for gaming, that's why Nvidia went out of its way to bill that card as something more—effectively a Quadro on the cheap. That's helped along by the sizeable memory buffer on the RTX 3090: 24GB of GDDR6X.

However, RDNA 2’s ray tracing works a little differently to Nvidia’s. Architecturally this is because the two companies achieve ray tracing using different methods: AMD does it by loading dedicated ray-tracing accelerators to its cards, while Nvidia powers it with custom RT cores. It's worth mentioning the RTX 3090 as the 6900 XT wouldn't exist without it. We're sure you've noticed over the years how mainstream video gaming has become, if you're under the age of 30 and don't play video games, you're now considered an outlier. As gaming grew in popularity, PC hardware demand surged, and while some people assume that increased demand means mass production and therefore lower prices, that isn't always the case.

Card Notes

At 4K, the RX 6900 XT struggles to get anywhere close to the RTX 3090, and often falls even behind the RTX 3080 in titles where AMD's graphics cards are less suited. Whether that's set to change with future titles is hardly a consideration we can make today, but even so it only furthers the erratic performance we're already seeing game to game. It’s hard to find a spot for the RX 6950 XT in the current graphics card market. AMD seems so focused on competing with the RTX 3090 that it forgot to factor in the base RX 6900 XT. Based on my results, the RX 6950 XT is actually a little worse than the RX 6900 XT, though it still manages to beat the RTX 3090. And so the RX 6900 XT often ends up trading blows with the cheaper RTX 3080, a battle it doesn't stand a chance of winning with ray tracing performance factored in; it doesn't look to topple the RTX 3090 for pro creators either, as it is not intended to be a replacement for AMD's professional cards (granted, it does offer improvements offer past GPU generations); and it struggles to offer much reason to go for it over the RX 6800 XT, a significantly better deal for much the same hardware. Doom Eternal saw the 6900 XT delivering a 7% performance boost from the 6800 XT at 1440p, though that meant it was still 4% slower than the 3090. The margin to the 3090 grew at 4K as here the 6900 XT was 9% slower, though it was also now 9% faster than the 6800 XT. Testing done by AMD performance labs April 30, 2021, on a Radeon RX 6900 XT, 6800 XT, 6800, 6700 XT (Driver 21.5), Nvidia RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, 3060Ti (Driver 466.11), AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, 16GB DDR4-3200MHz, QogirAM4 X570 motherboard, Win10 Pro 64. Performance may Vary. RX-658

And yes, that is confirmation that there will be third-party models of the RX 6900 XT. These will arrive shortly after launch. For now, however, the RX 6900 XT will only be available in reference garb, the exact same heatsink and cooler design found on the RX 6800 XT. That's one way that the RX 6900 XT has the RTX 3090 immediately beat, too, it's nowhere near as huge. Yet it is still plenty capable of managing the heat produced by that 519 mm2 GPU, running slightly hotter than the RX 6800 XT under load at 74°C, to the second-tier card's 68°C. The 6900 XT is on average 10% faster than the 6800 XT at 4K, but also 6% slower than the RTX 3090. Given the performance you're getting from the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT, it's quite clear neither the 6900 XT or RTX 3090 make an ounce of sense. Ray Tracing Performance AMD has followed suit and created the RX 6900 XT, allowing them to cash in on gamers with more money than sense. The premium may be less drastic, but you're also getting less gains with no added perks. At least the RTX 3090 offers over twice the VRAM capacity at 24 GB vs. 10GB for the 3080. As we mentioned a moment ago, the 6900 XT shares the same 16GB configuration as the 6800 XT, which makes it less special. What kind of gaming performance is the 6900 XT capable of? AMD’s benchmarks suggest this graphics card is insanely powerful, and is comfortable capable of a high 4K performance. Perhaps the most noteworthy function added with RDNA 2 is ray tracing capability, however, made possible by the inclusion of AMD's Ray Accelerators.Here the RX 6900 delivered solid post 60fps speeds across the board with ray tracing turned off, exceeding the 3080 by over 10fps in 4K. Performance fell behind the Nvidia card with it turned on, where it once again fell dangerously close to below 30fps speeds in 4K. Obviously this game was developed and optimized to take advantage of Nvidia's hardware, so it should come as little surprise that it works much better and this is something we're going to see with all the RTX titles tested. To enable such a chip to operate within the same 300W TGP as the RX 6800 XT, AMD is employing a handful of other optimisations for every Navi 21 GPU destined for the RX 6900 XT. A binning process ensures the Navi 21 GPU within the RX 6900 XT is one of the best samples out of TSMC's 7nm fabs, and each one has been carefully selected for its ability to meet performance requirements while retaining power efficiency.

Then at 4K, the 6900 XT is 40% more costly per frame when compared to the 6800 XT, though it's almost 30% better value per frame than the RTX 3090. Still, with the RTX 3080 and 6800 XT offering a similar level of value, it's fair to say the 6900 XT is terrible and the RTX 3090 is horrendous. Bottom Line Moving on to Rainbow Six Siege, we see that at 1440p the 6900 XT is 7% faster than the 6800 XT, and that's about what we're expecting to see more of. The margin opens up to 10% at 4K and that puts the 6900 XT ahead of the RTX 3080 but still 8% behind the 3090. But like all the latest AMD cards, it’s what’s beneath the surface that makes them interesting. The RX 6900 XT is built on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture. This is the same architecture used in the lower end RX 6800 and 6800 XT cards as well as the current generation Sony PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles.That's going to do it for our Radeon RX 6900 XT review. In short, don't buy it, doing so will simply ensure that the next GPU generation is even more expensive. Then again, we said that about the RTX 3090 and they've been selling like hotcakes, so we guess budget gaming is doomed. Shopping Shortcuts: Then at 4K we're looking at a 12% performance increase for the 6900 XT over the 6800 XT, but that meant it was still 10% lower than the 3090. The game doesn’t have an internal benchmark so we tested performance by taking an average FPS count running through a section of the opening level. Here the RX 6900 XT offers superb performance at every resolution, offering a near 5% lead over the 3080 in most instances. At 4K, that lead worsens over the RTX 3080, where the RX 6900 XT falls within a single percent of the cheaper card, and the RTX 3090's lead grows to just under 10 percent. The same Navi 21 GPU resides within the Radeon RX 6900 XT as the two RX 6800-series graphics cards we've already reviewed, meaning you're getting an identical, and very effective, dual compute unit configuration that's tailor-made for gaming—albeit on a slightly larger scale with the 80 CU RX 6900 XT. That makes for a total of 5,120 stream processors—an 11 percent increase over the RX 6800 XT.