author: Bart Woldanski
First Reviews: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT - Almost Like RTX 3090 and Cheaper
First reviews of AMD's top-shelf GPU Radeon RX 6900 XT, which was supposed to compete even with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, appeared on the web. Did it close the performance gap?
Today at 6:00 AM PT, benchmarks of AMD's flagship GPU Radeon RX 6900 XT, which, according to preliminary results, was supposed to compete even with the more expensive Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090, were released. What is AMD's top-shelf chip like in reviews published by industry websites? We invite you to familiarize yourselves with the list of opinions by selected experts.
Radeon RX 6900 XT - selected benchmark results
TechSpot
"The Radeon RX 6900 XT was never going to make sense, not unlike the GeForce RTX 3090, even though Nvidia's card does get you a lot more VRAM. Essentially, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is the same as a 6800 XT with a few extra cores enabled for a ~5-10% performance boost. For the 6900 XT to make sense from a value perspective, it shouldn't exceed the $750 price point, assuming you could buy a 6800 XT for $650 which you really can’t right now, but we’re hoping for that come early 2021. In a world where GPU availability wasn’t an issue, there is literally zero reason to buy the 6900 XT. The same is also true for the RTX 3090 over the 3080, unless you required the extra VRAM for some reason. Short of that, there's no reason to spend much more money for the basically the same product," that's what the author of the review on TechSpot concluded.
Guru3D
"AMD has been able to deliver a GPU that offers super-strong shading (rasterizer) performance, but it lacks a bit in Raytracing. The product performs truly great overall at RTX 3080/3090 performance levels but drops a little in stamina at Ultra HD. If you are less interested in what Raytracing and DLSS bring to the table, then the 6800/6900 XT with it's 16GB graphics memory is a recommended choice over the $699 USD GeForce RTX 3080 and that expensive 1499 USD 3090 (not that you can purchase any atm). But if that is reversed for you and you want maximum Hybrid raytracing performance, then AMD's miss is the lack of some sort of hardware Tensor cores and a DLSS equivalent. If you think flagship Raytracing is the bull's balls, we'll steer you to RTX 3090. For premium rasterizer performance, however, you can save a third of the money with that 6900 XT," you can read in the review summary on Guru3D.
Tom's Hardware
"After the more recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, jumping up to a $1000 graphics card feels ludicrous. Sure, it's fast and can sometimes even beat Nvidia's top-shelf RTX 3090. Overall, however, the RX 6900 XT fails to impress relative to the RX 6800 XT. It's such an incremental bump in performance that it hardly seems worth the trouble. (...) the RX 6900 XT is only 4 to 7 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT, but it costs over 50 percent more. Okay, sure, you can't find the 6800 XT in stock for $649 right now, but at some point in 2021, that will no longer be the case. If you want the best high-end AMD graphics card, our pick still goes to the RX 6800 XT," reads Tom's Hardware's review.
Radeon RX 6900 XT is AMD's top offer, but is it worth the money?
Suggested price of Radeon RX 6900 XT was set at 999 dollars. Although the card is clearly cheaper than GeForce RTX 3090 ($1499), the price difference compared to Radeon RX 6800 XT is so large that AMD's top model is not a very viable choice. The advantage of ADM's top chipset over the weaker one equal to a dozen or so percent, and often does not exceed several. And we are talking about a card that is 50% more expensive than Radeon RX 6800 XT.
AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT lands perfectly between GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. It happens that the card succeeds in defeating Nvidia's flagship model, but generally speaking, it is often closer to RTX 3080. In addition, the advantage of RX 6900 XT over RTX 3080 decreases with higher resolutions, in which the GeForce RTX 3000 series performs better. In games with ray-tracing, except for the differences, Radeon also usually performs significantly worse, but that's no surprise. The plus is that it has achieved such high performance with significantly lower power consumption compared to RTX 3090 (the TBP is the same as RX 6800 XT at 300 watts, while the corresponding TGP of Nvidia's top GPU is 350 watts).
To sum up, Radeon RX 6900 XT with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory is the strongest card in AMD's offer, which can only be of interest to the most demanding gamers, expecting absolutely top performance regardless of price. Contrary to appearances, more memory than RTX 3080 does not come in very handy in 4K because of the bottleneck in narrower data bus (256-bit), which is not remedied even by the additional Infinity Cache, which increases memory bandwidth. The card performs better than RTX 3090 only because of its significantly lower price, but Nvidia is reported to be preparing a response for January 2021 in the form of RTX 3080 Ti with 20GB of GDDR6X memory, which would cost the same as RX 6900 XT reviewed today. This move from the competition would not be without an impact on the profitability of this AMD's GPU.
Although the card's market debut took place simultaneously with publication of benchmark results,we won't find Radeon RX 6900 XT on virtual store shelves. Big hardware stores got a few dozen units at most. Users waiting for custom designs will have to wait longer, so for now it's a launch "on paper". Availability is expected to improve in a few months.