AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT review: powerful and expensive

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AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has officially become AMD’s new halo product, surpassing Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 By providing a fully enabled Navi 21 GPU with 80 computing units.The latest generation GPU is on top of us GPU benchmark Hierarchy and rate as some Best graphics card Currently available (if we use the term “available” loosely). The 6900 XT is also the most expensive AMD graphics card we have seen in a long time-the last time AMD sold a GPU for $1,000 or more was the Radeon Pro Duo (2016), which is a very limited number Dual GPU cards.With the RX 6800 XT replacing the RTX 3080, the goal is clear: AMD wants to provide competitive performance GeForce RTX 3090 At the same time, Nvidia’s price was reduced by 500 dollars.
All this is good, but there are a few problems when comparing GeForce RTX 3080 And 3090 to Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT. First, the VRAM of the RTX 3090 is more than twice that of the 3080. It also has a wider memory bus and a 20% shader core. Finally, it increases the power target by 10% and often provides superior performance in professional workloads. In contrast, the number of shader cores of the RX 6900 XT is 10% more than that of the 6800 XT. That’s it.
Let us get to the point. On paper, the RX 6900 XT does not seem to be a bargain.We are not saying that RTX 3090 is a better one Used for gaming purposes, but at least it offers some tangible benefits over RTX 3080. If the rumors of the 20GB RTX 3080 (aka RTX 3080 Ti) are true, it would be a better point of comparison. Of course, all of this is somewhat academic now, because it turns out that the supply of the latest generation of graphics cards is severely insufficient. If you can buy the RX 6900 XT for $999, then buy it! But we expect it to sell out as quickly as its little brother-in fact, it sells faster, because we expect the supply of the RX 6900 XT will be more limited because it requires a fully enabled Navi 21 chip. We doubt whether the output of chips of this quality will be higher than the partially banned chips in the 6800 XT, which are still far from sufficient to meet demand.
Graphics card | RX 6900 XT | RX 6800 XT | RX 6800 |
---|---|---|---|
architecture | Navigation 21 XTX | Ship 21 XT | Shipped 21 XL |
Process technology | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 |
Transistors (billions) | 26.8 | 26.8 | 26.8 |
Mold size (mm^2) | 519.8 | 519.8 | 519.8 |
CU | 80 | 72 | 60 |
GPU core | 5120 | 4608 | 3840 |
Unlimited cache (MB) | 128 | 128 | 128 |
Ray accelerator | 80 | 72 | 60 |
Basic clock (MHz) | 1825 | 1825 | 1700 |
Boost clock (MHz) | 2250 | 2250 | 2105 |
Video memory speed (Gbps) | 16 | 16 | 16 |
Video memory (GB) | 16 | 16 | 16 |
Video memory bus width | 256 | 256 | 256 |
ROP | 128 | 128 | 96 |
TMU | 320 | 288 | 240 |
TFLOPS FP32 (boost) | twenty three | 20.7 | 16.2 |
Bandwidth (GBps) | 512 | 512 | 512 |
TDP (watts) | 300 | 300 | 250 |
Dimensions (mm) | 278x107x50 | 278x107x50 | 278x107x39 |
weight / g) | 1505 | 1504 | 1389 |
Launch date | December 20 | November 20 | November 20 |
Launch price | 999 USD | 649 USD | 579 USD |
There is really nothing to say about the specifications that we have not yet covered. RX 6900 XT has all 80 CUs and 5120 shader cores provided by Navi 21 GPU. The remaining specifications, including memory speed and TDP, are the same as RX 6800 XT. This is not to say that there is no difference in silicon.
Sorting and sorting chips from silicon wafers is nothing new, but the best chips usually come from closer to the center of the wafer, where there are fewer defects. Since the 6900 XT requires a fully functional Navi 21 chip, it can almost guarantee that other characteristics (such as power and voltage requirements) will be better. How important is this in practice? If you want to overclock and achieve maximum performance, Silicon Lottery can make you earn a few percent more. Considering that the cost of the 6900 XT is already 50% higher than that of the 6800 XT, however, the overall performance may be slightly improved, and the price has risen sharply.
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: unboxed and unpackaged
Except for the product label, the Radeon RX 6900 XT looks identical to the RX 6800 XT. However, the packaging is not exactly the same. In the main box, the RX 6900 XT is wrapped in a mouse pad. If you need a mouse pad or AMD booty, this is a nice extra feature. It is also a relatively large cushion-not enough to cover the entire table, but much larger than the basic cushion.
The RX 6900 XT is a high-density graphics card that weighs slightly more than RTX 3080, but has similar dimensions. It is a bit thick and takes up 2.7 slots, but it is also shorter by about 2 cm. You can fit it into a smaller build, but we recommend proceeding cautiously, as injecting 300W (or more) or heat into a small chassis can compromise performance. In fact, if you are making a smaller case, just save yourself some money and buy a 6800 XT-we bet that once the heat level plateaus, the performance of the two cards is almost the same.
Like the RX 6800 card, the 6900 XT includes an HDMI 2.1, two DisplayPort 1.4, and a USB-C video output. If this does not meet your needs, please pay attention to third-party cards.We heard there will It’s the RX 6900 XT card from AMD’s AIB partner (contrary to some previous rumors), which makes sense, because anyone who makes the RX 6800 XT can use the same design for the RX 6900 XT. However, we are not sure when these cards can be purchased.
There are two 8-pin PEG connectors for the power supply, each rated at 150W. Combined with the 75W power from the PCIe slot, the power should be sufficient for normal operation. We did see slight power spikes when starting certain workloads (especially FurMark), but for any quality power supply that can provide 850W of power, these should not constitute a serious problem. If possible, we recommend using a single track PSU.
Radeon RX 6900 XT overclocking
MSI Afterburner currently does not support RX 6000 series GPUs, leaving us with AMD’s built-in overclocking tools. We can just use anger mode, but it seems that it can only increase the power limit, so we started to make some manual adjustments.
Memory seems to be easy to maximize, and turning the power slider to maximum usually does not cause any problems. The rest is the GPU clock, voltage, and fan speed. We adjusted the latter to support lower temperatures rather than quieter operation. We set the RAM to 2150 MHz, reduced the GPU voltage to 1125 mV (less than 1175 mV), and then started the test.
We first cycled the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark in the 1440p limit window, and then increased the GPU clock to 2600 MHz to check the stability. We found that power limitation became a factor long before the maximum boost clock came into play. With a power limit of 115%, this makes the GPU power up to 345W, which is very close to its landing point. The clock speed fluctuates according to the needs of any game or workload that is running, and the average clock is in the range of 2400-2550 MHz.
Although heaven proved to be stable in our initial tests, we did encounter some issues in some other games, which eventually led to the slightly modified overclocking you can see above. We lowered the RAM frequency to 10 MHz to 2140 and increased the voltage to 1150 mV, which seemed to solve the problem. The extra time spent adjusting may be a bit more MHz, but for most users, most of the tedious work can be done by simply enabling the angry mode-or setting the RAM speed to 2100 and maximizing the power slider to get a little bit High results.
It is worth noting that although AMD lists the official boost clock of the RX 6900 XT as 2250 MHz, AMD’s own driver shows the boost clock as 2519 MHz. You don’t usually see that high clock, but you can use Rage mode. In this sense, AMD advertises a lower boost clock than you get in many games, thus taking a page from Nvidia’s book. We appreciate this. The combination of the increased power limit and the small increase in the maximum boost clock gives us a good result.
Overclocking results will appear in our benchmark chart, but will not appear in the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) package. The net improvement is about 5% and 7% at 4K, which is not a big improvement in performance. It is very likely that the factory overclocking performance of third-party graphics cards is better than what we achieved.
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