AMD formally releases its Radeon RX 6900 XT, a true high-end Radeon graphics card that is finally able to compete in the high-end space.
AMD releases Radeon RX 6900 XT – The Biggest Navi
The Radeon RX 6900 is built using new architecture codenamed RDNA2. AMD made a major breakthrough in high-speed design which unlocked significant performance-per-watt increase. The company also introduced a ‘revolutionary’ Infinity Cache with the Big Navi series. AMD RDNA 2 architecture will support Microsoft 12 Ultimate and all its cutting-edge features. AMD will also offer its own developer tools called FidelityFX to further enhance the gaming experience using RDNA2 architecture.
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Specifications
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is based on Navi 21 XTX GPU with all 80 Compute Units enabled, which give a total of 5120 Stream Processors, 320 Texture Units, 128 ROPs, and 80 new specialized cores called Ray Accelerators that will handle hardware acceleration of ray tracing. The graphics card is equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 16 Gbps and attached to a 256-bit memory bus. AMD Navi 21 has a die size of 519.8 mm2 packed with 26.8 billion transistors. The GPU supports HDMI 2.1 with resolutions up to 8k 120Hz. It will support 8K AV1 decoding as well as 8K HEVC encoding.
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
| AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Specifications | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | Radeon RX 6900XT | Radeon RX 6800XT | Radeon RX 6800 |
| Picture |  | |  |
| GPU | Navi 21 XTX | Navi 21 XT | Navi 21 XL |
| Compute Units | |||
| Stream Processors | |||
| Ray Accelerators | |||
| Texture Units | |||
| ROPs | |||
| Game Clock | |||
| Boost Clock | |||
| Memory | |||
| Infinity Cache | |||
| Memory Clock | |||
| Memory Bandwidth | |||
| Memory Bus | |||
| Total Board Power | |||
| MSRP | |||
| Release Date | December 8 | November 18 | November 18 |
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance
AMD released a few slides featuring Radeon RX 6900 XT performance in games, with overclocking and ray tracing. Probably the most interesting slide features RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT with AMD’s Smart Access technology. According to AMD, the RX 6900 XT will be slower than RTX 3090 in 9 out of 10 games with the new feature disabled, but it will offer better performance in 5 games once SAM is enabled:
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance, Source: AMD
AMD Smart Access Memory is currently only available to Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards and motherboards supporting Resiazle BAR feature:
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance with Smart Access Memory, Source: AMD
AMD recommends fine tunning the performance manually, which may provide additional performance:
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance with Manual Overclocking, Source: AMD
AMD demonstrates the performance of its Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card with DirectX Raytracing enabled. The company also shows how much memory is allocated when ray tracing is enabled:
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance with Ray Tracing, Source: AMD
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance in Productivity, Source: AMD
AMD RX 6900 XT graphics cards design
AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6900 XT are all the same length, 26.7 cm. The graphics cards are thus the same length as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GTX 1080 Ti. The RX 6900 XT has a TBP of 300W, which is more than NVIDIA last-gen flagship models, but still less than NVIDIA’s current RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 models (350W and 320W respectively):
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT features a high-quality 14-layer PCB with 16 power stages (RX 6800 XT had 15). Both cards use the same layout and cooler design:
Availability
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has an official suggested retail price of 999 USD. Only reference models will be available for sale today. Due to the high demand and still relatively low supply for next-gen GPUs, the RX 6900 XT stock will be severely limited.
