Radeon RX 6900 XT benchmarks: AMD's successful return to the high-end market

Our colleagues over at TechSpot published a massive review of the new ultra-flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. The fully unlocked Navi 21 GPU is an absolute powerhouse, trading blows with the more expensive RTX 3090. However, there is no clear-cut winner here. Let's break down the details:

The test bench featured an MSI X570 motherboard, a 32GB DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM kit, and a Ryzen 9 3950X processor. At first glance, this might not seem like the ideal setup for GPU benchmarking. However, TechSpot mostly tested at high resolutions where CPU performance isn't as critical.

Let's take a look at the specs of the cards being tested:

Now let's dive straight into the actual benchmark results across modern games:

Gaming benchmarks

In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, AMD's flagship graphics card is the undisputed leader. The RX 6900 XT beats its younger sibling by 12% and outperforms its Green Team competitor, the RTX 3090, by a significant 28%.

In the new looter-slasher Godfall, things change drastically. At 1440p, the RX 6900 XT still edges out the RTX 3090 by 2%, but falls behind by about 7% when moving to 4K.

Watch Dogs Legion shows a similar trend to Godfall, except the RX 6900 XT's performance drops more sharply when switching from 1440p to 4K, allowing NVIDIA's card to pull ahead.

Averaging the results across 18 games, the RX 6900 XT shows slightly stronger performance than the RTX 3090 at 1080p and 1440p, but falls behind at 4K. This isn't surprising given that NVIDIA's flagship features a massive 24GB frame buffer.

RX 6900 XT ray tracing benchmarks

While the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT perform similarly in the relatively neutral Watch Dogs Legion, things look grim for AMD in Control. However, Remedy's title was heavily backed by NVIDIA, so it's hard to call this an objective performance metric.

Power consumption

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

Overall, the RX 6900 XT's power draw isn't far off from the RX 6800 XT, making it considerably more efficient than the power-hungry RTX 3090. Still, considering the RTX 3090's massive high-end GDDR6X VRAM and slightly superior overall performance, its power appetite is fully justified.

Due to its 256-bit bus, AMD couldn't equip its flagship with more than 16GB of VRAM (while 32GB sounds nice, it wouldn't make much sense anyway). Still, this didn't stop the Radeon RX 6900 XT from being an incredibly solid GPU. In fact, the flagship Navi 21 chip held its ground even in unfavorable scenarios, virtually catching up to the RTX 3090 at 4K.

That said, the GeForce RTX 3090 remains the ultimate solution for 4K gaming. At least until custom Radeon RX 6900 XT boards from AMD's partners, like Sapphire, hit the shelves.

Be sure to check out the full AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT review on TechSpot!

Source: TechSpot