Our colleagues from TechSpot have published a large-scale test of the fresh ultra-top AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The maximum configuration of the GPU Navi 21 gave life to an extremely powerful solution, which was able to compete with the more expensive RTX 3090 video card. However, it should be noted that there was no clear leadership on either side. But first things first:
The test setup for testing the presented video cards consisted of an MSI X570 motherboard, a 32GB DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM kit, and a Ryzen 9 3950X processor. At first glance, it seems that the hardware configuration is not the best for testing video cards. However, guys at TechSpot mostly used high resolutions, where CPU speed is not that important.
Let’s take a look at the technical characteristics of the tested cards:
| Video card | GeForce RTX 3090 | GeForce RTX 3080 | Radeon RX 6900 XT | Radeon RX 6800 XT | Radeon RX 6800 |
| Recommended price | $1500 | $700 | $1000 | $650 | $580 |
| Release date | September 2020 | September 2020 | December 2020 | November 2020 | November 2020 |
| Technical process | 8nm Samsung | 8nm Samsung | 7nm TSMC | 7nm TSMC | 7nm TSMC |
| No. of transistors (billions) | 28.3 | 28.3 | 26.8 | 26.8 | 26.8 |
| Crystal size (mm2) | 628.4 | 628.4 | 519 | 519 | 519 |
| GPU Configuration (SP / TMU / ROP) | 10496 / 328 / 112 | 8704 / 272 / 96 | 5120 / 320 / 128 | 4608 / 288 / 128 | 3840 / 240 / 96 |
| GPU frequency formula | 1400 / 1700 MHz | 1440 / 1710 MHz | 2015 / 2250 MHz | 2015 / 2250 MHz | 1815 / 2105 MHz |
| Video memory size | 24 GB | 10 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Memory speed | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps |
| Memory type | GDDR6X | GDDR6X | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Memory bus / bandwidth | 384-bit / 935.8 GB/s | 320-bit / 760 GB/s | 256-bit / 512 GB/s | 256-bit / 512 GB/s | 256-bit / 512 GB/s |
| TGP | 320 W | 300 W | 300 W | 300 W | 250 W |
And let’s go directly to the test results obtained in actual games:
Testing in games:
In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the top-end graphics card from AMD is the undisputed leader. The RX 6900 XT outperforms its little sister by 12% and the green camp competitor, the RTX 3090, by a substantial 28%.
In the new Godfall, the situation changes dramatically: at 1440p, the RX 6900 XT is still ahead of the RTX 3090 by 2%, but during the transition to 4K it is already inferior to about 7%.
Watch Dogs Legion greeted us with roughly the same results as Godfall, except that when moving from 1440p to 4K, the RX 6900 XT’s performance drops more noticeably than that of the same RTX 3090, and the NVIDIA card takes the lead.
Based on averages of 18 games, the RX 6900 XT performed slightly better than the RTX 3090 at 1080p and 1440p, but was slower at 4K. This is not surprising on the whole, because the NVIDIA card has a huge 24 GB video buffer.
Тесты RX 6900 XT с активированной трассировкой лучей
In the relatively neutral title Watch Dogs Legion, the results of RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT are similar, but in Control the situation for the AMD card is extremely bad. However, it should be understood that Sam Lake’s creation was created under the auspices of NVIDIA, so there can be no question of any objective performance assessment in this case.
Power usage
In general, the power consumption of the RX 6900 XT is not very far from that of the RX 6800 XT and differs noticeably from the “gluttony” of the RTX 3090 for the better. Nevertheless, given the huge amount of top-end GDDR6X video memory, as well as, in general, slightly higher performance, the power consumption of the RTX 3090 is quite consistent with its power.
For very obvious reasons (256-bit bus) AMD was unable to increase the video memory capacity of its top-end product above 16GB (32GB would certainly not be bad, but this size would not make much sense). However, this did not stop the Radeon RX 6900 XT from actually being an extremely successful card. Moreover, the top-end Navi 21 showed solid results under conditions that were obviously unfavorable for it and actually caught up with the RTX 3090 in 4K resolution.
Nevertheless, the ultimate solution for 4K gaming is still the GeForce RTX 3090. In any case, until the release of non-reference versions of Radeon RX 6900 XT cards from AMD partners, such as Sapphire.
Be sure to check out the full AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT card review on TechSpot!
Source: TechSpot
