If literally all you care about is gaming the 3080 and 6800XT are excellent cards (at normal pricing), and like the article pointed out, there's literally nothing different between the 6800XT and 6900XT except the cores. Memory and everything else is the same. Might save 50% price for 10% performance. 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. We ran every game in 1080p, 1440p and 4K with its graphical settings cranked to max. Compatible titles were also tested with ray tracing and DLSS on/off. Unless otherwise indicated the games ran using Direct X 12.

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.

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: Although it’s a disappointing release, the RX 6950 XT is still a supremely powerful graphics card. It should last several years before you need an upgrade, especially considering its modest power requirements. Should you buy it? 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. 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. Here the RX 6900 XT delivered playable, post 60fps, speeds in every resolution running the game’s internal benchmark. It failed to offer a significant lead on the cheaper RTX 3080, however, which is slightly surprising.

Perhaps the most noteworthy function added with RDNA 2 is ray tracing capability, however, made possible by the inclusion of AMD's Ray Accelerators.The first cost per frame graph focuses on 1080p. Here we're seeing that the 6900 XT comes in 47% more costly per frame when compared to the 6800 XT, so that's kind of terrible. It represents the same kind of value as something like an RTX 2080 Super. It does look great in terms of value when compared to the RTX 3090, but that's just how bad the 3090 is. But the RX 6900 XT has a significant leg up over the competition in other ways to make up for it. A seriously capacious 16GB of GDDR6 memory helps the RX 6900 XT at least despatch fears of some future VRAM hog eating up all your buffer. That's fed by the same 256-bit memory bus as the other cards, yet as we know that's not quite the end of the story with RDNA 2. 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.

When looking at performance per watt we see that the 6900 XT is only slightly better than the RTX 3090. Another example would be Fortnite which is basically broken with RT enabled on the 6900 XT in terms of performance. The performance hit is pretty disgusting on the RTX 3090 as well, and even DLSS struggles to get us anywhere near native performance. This title becomes visually impressive with RT enabled, but it's not a game you'd necessarily play with this feature turned on given its fast paced action and need for high fps. On paper, the RX 6900 XT is set to be no more than 11% faster than the 6800 XT while costing over 50% more, at least according to the suggested retail price. That's all you need to know about the 6900 XT, but of course, we'll put it to the test, because that's kind of what we do here. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is available on select games and requires developer integration. See https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-super-resolution for a list of supported games. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is “game dependent” and is supported on the following AMD products: AMD Radeon™ RX 6000, RX 5000, RX 500, RX Vega series graphics cards, RX 480, RX 470, RX 460, and all AMD Ryzen™ Processors with Radeon™ Graphics if the minimum requirements of the game are met. AMD does not provide technical or warranty support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution enablement on other vendor's graphics cards. GD-187.Yet I will say this in its favour: The RX 6900 XT delivering anything close to RTX 3090 performance is something of an engineering marvel from a company that for the longest time has washed its hands of high-performance graphics cards in favour of the volume mid-range market. The AMD RTG (Radeon Technology Group) has set itself up with a solid foundation with the so-called 'Big Navi', if only as a point to build upon with the coming generations. Next we have Watch Dogs Legion and at 1440p the 6900 XT was 11% faster than the 6800 XT, jumping up to 85 fps to 94 fps, nudging it ahead of the RTX 3090. Radeon™ Boost is compatible with Windows 7 and 10 in select titles only. Hardware compatibility includes RX 400 and and newer consumer dGPUs, Ryzen 2000 and newer APUs, including hybrid and detachable graphics configurations. No mGPU support. For a list of compatible titles see https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-boost. GD-158

At least with 3090 you get 24GB of VRAM so content creators will love that. Plus it's faster than the 6900XT so people looking for the "absolute best" will go for the 3090 instead of AMD. 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. Engineering speak aside, the consequence is that not every game will support Ray Tracing on both AMD and Nvidia cards. As it stands custom ray tracing exclusives for Nvidia include things like Minecraft and Quake RTX. But AMD’s also got a few, like Godfall, which will only work with its cards initially.The other big difference is that the 6900 XT uses GDRR6 VRAM, not the newer more expensive GDDR6x seen on Nvidia’s equivalent priced cards. AMD claims this is because its Infinity Cache tech removes the need for it. This is also a key reason it has a lower TDP than the Nvidia RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, and the 6900 XT will comfortably run on 850W PSUs and above.