AMD RX 6900 XT Review

1. Introduction2. AMD RX 6900 XT3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Borderlands 37. Control8. Death Stranding9. The Division 210. F1 202011. Far Cry New Dawn12. Gears 513. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint14. Metro Exodus15. Middle Earth: Shadow of War16. Red Dead Redemption 217. Shadow of the Tomb Raider18. Total War Saga: Troy19. Watch Dogs: Legion20. Performance Summary (14 Game Average)21. Cost Per Frame Analysis22. Ray Tracing - Control23. Ray Tracing - Shadow of the Tomb Raider24. Ray Tracing - Watch Dogs: Legion25. Productivity Benchmarks26. Clock Speed27. Temperatures28. Acoustics29. Noise-Normalised Temperatures30. Power Consumption31. Performance Per Watt32. Overclocking33. Closing Thoughts34. View All Pages

After getting our first look at RDNA 2 when the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 both launched on November 18th, today our attention turns to AMD's new flagship GPU – the RX 6900 XT. Priced at $999, or £899.99 here in the UK, the RX 6900 XT comes with 80 Compute Units, giving a total of 5120 stream processors. Designed to take the fight to Nvidia in the ultra high-end market, let's find out if this GPU really is the RTX 3090 killer.

With the RX 6800 XT, AMD has a highly competitive product that can really challenge the RTX 3080 with its £600 MSRP. Now, AMD has set its sights higher with the RX 6900 XT, with its marketing materials suggesting this new flagship will offer similar performance to Nvidia's RTX 3090, but at several hundred pounds less.

Of course, we need to find out just how true those claims are, so today we look at the RX 6900 XT's performance across 14 games, while also looking at power draw, thermals, overclocking and more.

	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 5700 XT	RX 5700
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	519 mm²	251 mm²	251mm²
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60	n/a	n/a
Compute Units	80	72	60	40	36
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840	2560	2304
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 1755MHz	Up to 1625MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 1905MHz	Up to 1725MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 23.04 TFLOPS	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 46.08 TFLOPS	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 720 GT/s	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	128MB	n/a	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	300W	250W	225W	185W

While the RX 6900 XT is a new model, it has many similarities with the RX 6800 XT. Still fabricated on TSMC’s 7nm process node, it uses the same Navi 21 GPU, measuring 519 mm². The key difference is that the RX 6900 XT silicon is fully populated, with 80 Compute Units (CUs) compared to 72 for the 6800 XT. This means the new flagship has an extra 512 Stream Processors, giving a grand total of 5120 shaders.

Rated clock speed is also identical between these two RDNA 2 GPUs. This means the RX 6900 XT has a rated game clock of 2015MHz and a rated boost clock of up to 2250MHz. To put that into perspective, the RX 5700 XT has a rated game clock of 1755MHz.

AMD has also increased the memory capacity, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory found on every RX 6000 SKU (so far). The memory is clocked at 16Gbps, and operates over a 256-bit memory interface for total bandwidth of 512 GB/s. However, AMD has also implemented a 128MB Infinity Cache on the Navi 21 GPU, to significantly increase effective memory bandwidth without excess power draw.

Speaking of power, the RX 6900 XT has a rated total board power (TBP) of 300W, and this is exactly the same as the RX 6800 XT – despite having 512 more cores. From what we were told in a press briefing, it sounds like AMD has binned the 6900 XT parts for efficiency, which lets them keep to the same 300W mark while increasing core count.

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