AMD claims its Radeon RX 6900 XT brings powerful enough technology to challenge Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090. There are some qualifications, though, and AMD added footnotes to clarify some points about how its benchmark tests were set up. Understanding what AMD did can help to make the differences easier to understand. Of course, availability is also important and that actually could play a crucial role in deciding between these two graphics cards.
Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 30 series in September, dazzling fans with its biggest generational leap ever. The top-end RTX 3090 can sustain 60 frames per second (FPS) gaming while outputting 8K resolution, the first GPU to achieve this feat, aided by 24-gigabytes of GDDR6X memory. Nvidia increased CUDA cores and ray tracing capabilities in what it calls its ‘Big Ferocious GPU’ or BFGPU for short. The very large card features three fans and draws 350-watts of power. Since 8K output is such an upgrade over 4K, this is an amazing advancement in performance.
AMD claims its newly announced Radeon RX 6900 XT can stand head-to-head with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 at 4K resolution and showed frame rate benchmarks from several popular games to back the claim up. The RX 6900 XT has 80 compute units, 80 ray accelerators, and runs at up to 2250MHz. The 128-megabyte Infinity Cache pairs with the 16-gigabyte GDDR6 memory to double the performance of AMD’s previous generation. AMD was quite proud of its performance per watt and boasts that its card uses only 300-watts of power. Selling at $999, the Radeon RX 6900 XT costs a third less than Nvidia’s RTX 3090 at $1499, providing a clear challenge to what remains the most powerful GPU on the market, and the only 8K gaming card currently available.
Best Value GPU & Benchmark Clarification
Based on AMD’s frame rate benchmarks, it’s clear that AMD’s RX 6900 XT is a less expensive alternative to Nvidia’s RTX 3090. 4K gaming is the standard at the moment, so except for those that are building a top-end 8K system from scratch, this is how these cards should be compared. Both offer a huge amount of memory, certainly enough for 4K, both use the latest technology available, and both show major improvements over the previous generation. AMD now offers ray tracing, matching Nvidia, but how this will play out in gaming won’t be fully known until units start arriving in homes. The biggest of the two Big Navi cards will launch on December 8, 2020 and AMD is planning to avoid the supply issues that have troubled Nvidia. This could mean shoppers may be able to order an RX 6900 XT card long before Nvidia’s RTX 3090 becomes readily available.
The AMD benchmarks do come with some disclaimers. When comparing to the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, AMD ran its RX 6900 XT with Smart Access Memory, which requires the use of the company's new Ryzen 5000 CPU. When running against Nvidia’s current best, Rage Mode was also enabled, which is an overclocking feature that AMD makes easily available. Smart Access won’t work with an Intel processor, or even older generation AMD CPUs. Overclocking is generally not done when looking for long-term reliability and while AMD didn’t share any warnings, there is always the chance of heat issues or increased noise if Rage Mode is enabled. Due to these caveats, those RTX 3090 comparisons may be over-reaching to some degree and it may be safer to consider the new AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT as standing somewhere between Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090, as the pricing implies.