AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

Hello ladies and gentlemen and I found you well. Thank you for joining us today to enjoy together one of the most interesting battles of this year, namely the fight between AMD and Nvidia for the crown in the segment of high-end video cards. I hope you easily found our site and made yourself comfortable in front of the screen, be it notebook, desktop or smartphone. The weather conditions are favorable, with a temperature of 3 oC and showers in the form of snow, during the night, respectively rain, at the time of writing these lines. Furthermore, I invite you to sit down comfortably, warm yourself with a hot chocolate or a cup of freshly ground coffee and go through the following pages with us.

On 28 October, during an event broadcast live, CEO- AMD’s Lisa Su announces the new generation of graphics cards, flattered by Big Navi. From then until now, I’ve seen what AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and AMD Radeon RX 6800 look like, then we have seen how it behaves in practice and last but not least what benefits Smart Access Memory technology brings. Together, we concluded that AMD returned to competition in an impressive way, competing on a par with the top of the range Nvidia in rasterization, even if the performance in real-time raytracing remains the prerogative of the green giant.

This is natural, as Nvidia is already on the second architecture that implements computing units dedicated to real-time raytracing, while AMD has just taken the first steps in this direction, by launching the RDNA2 architecture. On the other hand, if we talk about rasterization, RX 6800 XT proved to be a formidable competitor for RTX 3080, as a result we were all happy because we have competition in the high-end segment again.

And yet, the last time I checked not RTX 3080 was the top of the range Nvidia, this honor goes to the monstrous RTX 3090, the most powerful implementation of the Ampere architecture so far. Well, as they promised on 28 in October, AMD launched not only a competitor for RTX 3080, in the person of AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, but also a competitor for RTX 3090, named AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.

It is officially launching today, so let’s see how it compares to the top of the range Nvidia, during two dedicated articles. The first article, which you are reading now, will compare the two monsters using our test methodology for graphics cards, the version 2020, while the second article will analyze the performance together with AMD Ryzen 9 5950 X, with and without Smart Access Memory.