AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Review

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Review

Introduction

The last of the reviews I wrote which you should have read already but were lost when the server coughed it’s guts up is the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. Thank you for bearing with us during what has been a difficult week and hopefully all the issues have been solved and we can get back to reviewing things on time instead of stuff we’d done a week ago. We love you all.

The Radeon RX 6800 absolutely blew our socks off, returning the Radeon brand name to the heights it has always deserved to be, but hasn’t necessarily always been. One of our favourite cards ever was the HD 4850 because you could clock the hell out of it and get 4870 performance for a significantly lower investment. To see some of the GPUs they’ve released in the intervening years has been depressing to say the least. I know many of you believe we have a preference for one brand or the other here at OC3D but we’re totally brand loyalty free. We want the best possible product at the lowest price, and we want all the manufacturers to push each other to make things work faster and be priced cheaper, regardless of who it is. We’re on the consumers side.

With the success of the RX 6800 and 6800 XT we were hugely excited to see what performance AMD have squeezed from their new flagship card, the RX 6900 XT. With a significant price hike over the RX 6800 we’re hoping for big things.

Technical Specifications

Now we’re the first to admit that performance on paper is nearly meaningless. History has taught us that how good something looks isn’t always representative of how it performs in the real world®. Nonetheless seeing how little extra heft the RX 6900 XT has when compared to its RX 6800 XT – for what is a fifty percent price hike – doesn’t exactly fill us with excitement. But that’s what our tests are for.

  Radeon RX 6800 XT Radeon RX 6900 XT
Architecture RDNA 2 RDNA 2
Manufacturing Process 7nm 7nm
Transistor Count 26.8 Billion 26.8 Billion
Compute Units 72 80
Ray Accelerators 72 80
Stream Processors 4608 5120
Game Clock Up to 2015 MHz Up to 2015 MHz
Boost Clock Up to 2250 MHz Up to 2250 MHz
Single Precision Performance Up to 20.74 TFLOPS Up to 23.04 TFLOPS
Half Precision Performance Up to 41.47 TFLOPS Up to 46.08 TFLOPS
Texture Fill Rate Up to 648 GT/s Up to 720 GT/s
ROPs 128 128
Peak Pixel Fill Rate Up to 288 GP/s Up to 288 GP/s
Infinity Cache 128 MB 128 MB
Memory 16GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth 512 GB/s 512 GB/s
Memory Interface 256-bit 256-bit
Board Power 300W 300W

Now to see them it the flesh..