So, AMD's top-of-line card, the 6900 XT, just launched this week, and as most of you know, it’s
supposed to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s best—the RTX 3090—while undercutting it in price by $500.
And as always, the number one question we get, especially when there is a big difference in
price like that, is: Should I buy it, and if not, what should I buy instead?
The very short answer is, if you’re a gamer or even a content creator, you should
probably skip this card. If you want to know why, let's dive into the details,
and then I’ll give you our recommendation of what to get instead.
We'll start with 4K performance. Across the 11 games that we tested
using our standard benchmarking system, the 6900 XT beats the 3090 in 3 games,
roughly ties it in another 3, and loses to the 3090 by more than 5% for the rest. If you take
the average of all our benchmark results, the RTX 3090 outperforms the 6900 XT by about 9%.
Now, when you drop down to 1440p, the 6900 XT does turn in a better performance.
It matches or even slightly surpasses the 3090 in some games,
and when you look at the average of all our game benchmarks, the 3090 leads by a much slimmer 2%.
When smart access memory is turned on, the 6900 XT’s performance does get a boost across the
board, and that helps it gain several victories over the 3090 as compared to our standard tests.
Turning SAM on also narrows the gap a little in average performance at 4K,
shrinking Nvidia’s lead to 8.5% versus the 9% on our standard test bench. I will note that because
I’m giving a very condensed version of performance here, the average doesn’t quite show the hit or
miss nature of using SAM. In some games like Horizon Zero Dawn, where the margin wasn’t big
to begin with, SAM helps give the 6900 XT the edge. But in other games like Strange Brigade,
the performance difference is more like a huge canyon that just can’t be filled.
As for ray-tracing performance, the lack of an AMD version of DLSS really hurts the 6900 XT.
You can only play ray-traced games at 1440p on it. If you want to play at 4K,
you’ll have to make significant compromises on graphics settings.
When it comes to noise, power draw, and temperature,
the 6900 XT wins in the first two areas as AMD promised, but understandably underperforms
the 3090 in the third. The card does run very quietly and under load, it consumed
73 watts less than the 3090. But its smaller size means higher temps—it runs 15 degrees
hotter. Say what you will about the 3090’s massive size, but it runs stone cold.
All right, so finally we come to our recommendation on what to buy.
Well—in all of its marketing, AMD pushes the 6900 XT as a no-compromises gaming card.
But as you’ve seen from our benchmarks, that’s not what the numbers say.
Nvidia largely retains its crown at 4K—at that resolution, the 3090 tends to be faster
and it also supports ray-tracing. It still wins by a small amount at 1440p, too.
If you move down the stack and pit the 6900 XT against the 6800 XT and the RTX 3080,
you only see a 6.6% lift in performance at 4K
and 4.1% at 1440p. That is objectively better, but not enough to clearly outstrip
and outshine those cards, especially since the 6900 XT costs $350 more than the 6800 XT.
Gaming isn’t the only aspect to consider when evaluating these high-end graphics cards, either.
On the content creation side of things, the 6900 XT still sits an awkward spot. The RTX 3090
leads in bleeding-edge content creation—it has 24GB of memory to handle 8K content,
and better software support exists for Nvidia’s CUDA cores and Optix API. And while we didn’t
have time to run content creation benchmarks for the 6900 XT, I’ll just note that the 6800 XT
offers the same 16 gigs of memory, making it equally capable of 4K content workloads.
AMD has indicated that the 6900 XT should overclock the best among all the Radeon 6000
series GPU, but we don’t like to count on that because of the inherent luck of the silicon
lottery. We consider any overclocking headroom a nice bonus, but not a factor in our evaluation.
So all this said, AMD has a spectacular card here, but it’s hard to recommend. To be clear, we’re
not saying it sucks—not in the least. The 6900 XT proves that AMD is once again able to spar at the
high-end. Given how many years that hasn’t been the case, this GPU marks an important milestone.
But when you all ask us this question, “Should I buy the 6900 XT?”, you’re not asking if you should
pay for an achievement. You want to know what will make the most of your hard-earned money. And
so even though the 6900 XT is a superb 1440p high refresh rate card, and also a respectable 4K card,
most gamers should still buy the 6800 XT and save several hundred dollars. Alternatively, if you’re
an enthusiast and price is no object, or you’re a bleeding-edge content creator, then the RTX
3090 is your better bet and you’re not going to care about that additional outlay of $500-bucks.
Of course (just to reiterate!), you’re not wasting money on a 6900 XT.
So if you want to fly your flag for AMD, or you’re at the mercy of whatever is
actually available at stores, you don’t need to feel bad if you pick one up.
Okay, so that does it for this video. If you’d like more details on our testing setup
and the individual results for each game in our testing suite,
you can find my colleague Brad Chacos excellent review on the 6900 XT on PCWorld.com, along with
other information like ultrawide benchmarks. For any questions, comments, or suggestions,
leave them below or catch us live during one of our weekly The Full Nerd shows
and ask then. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you in the next video.