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Radeon RX 6900 XT: the most pointless graphics card of the year?

8.12.2020

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

Today, AMD’s largest graphics card yet, the RX 6900XT, is going on sale. The launch is being accompanied by initial independent reviews, some of which I’ll summarise for you here.

AMD has struck gold in terms of performance with the Radeon 6000 series. For once, I won’t mention the availability, except that it’s abysmal. The RX 6800 beats out Nvidia’s RTX 3070 and the RX 6800 XT goes head-to-head with the RTX 3080. The RX 6900 XT launched today aims to take on the RTX 3090.

The GPU itself

The RX 6900 XT is manufactured in a 7nm process by TSMC. It’s based on the same Navi-21 chip as the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. However, all 80 compute units are enabled on the RX 6900 XT. The RX 6800 XT only has 72 CUs. The game clock is set at 2015 MHz and the maximum boost clock at 2250 MHz. This results in an FP32 value of 20.6 TFLOPS in contrast to the 18.6 TFLOPS of the RX 6800 XT. With an MSRP of $999, it’s $500 cheaper than the RTX 3090. To make the card stand out a bit more from the 6800 XT, it can theoretically be overclocked up to 3000 MHz.

The reviews

Computerbase writes that the RX 6900 XT brings 9 per cent more FPS in UHD than the 6800 XT. This doesn’t justify the 350-euro extra charge. Compared to the RTX 3090, the 6900 XT is 7 per cent behind in UHD. At lower resolutions, the difference is about the same. As with the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, the difference in ray tracing effects remains large compared to Nvidia’s competitors.

It’s a similar story at Techpowerup. With UHD, the 6900 XT is 2 per cent faster than the RTX 3080. This means that the 6900 XT is twice as fast as last generation’s RX 5700 XT while simultaneously being more energy efficient. However, NVIDIA’s flagship, the RTX 3090, is 8 per cent faster, according to them. Their review also praises the cooling on the reference model, which has been adopted from the 6800 XT.

Techspot thinks that the RX 6900 XT makes no sense. They believe it’s just an RX 6800 XT with a few more cores that give the card a 5 to 10 per cent performance boost. There’s no reason to spend much more money for more or less the same product. Or to quote the review directly:

Do not buy. Otherwise, the next GPU generation will be even more expensive. However, we already said that about the RTX 3090 and they’re selling like hot cakes. Budget gaming is doomed.

Techspot

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Kevin Hofer

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Radeon RX 6900 XT: the most pointless graphics card of the year?

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