The Radeon RX 6900 XT was released in 2020. It was launched to outperform the RX 6800 XT and to battle Nvidia’s RTX 3080. However, the latest upgrades in GPUs have made 4K gaming on this card rather difficult. The RX 6900 XT does not offer enough speed and power to run 4K gaming effectively.
At the time this GPU was a novelty, and several benchmarks were conducted, it was compared to RTX 3090, 3080, and even the red’s team 6800 XT, and the results were devastating. The high increase in price didn’t weigh up with the performance it showed.
RX 6900 XT specs
This graphic card supposedly showed an 11% improvement over the 6800 XT upon release. At the time, the former was released with a 50% higher price than the latter, and the upgrades were not enough. When talking about its competitors, the RTX 3080 Ti showed a massive improvement in this category.
| RX 6900 XT | RTX 3080 Ti | |
| GPU | Navi 21 XTX | GA102-225 |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| CUDA cores/shading units | 5,120 | 10,240 |
| Tensor cores | N/A | 320 |
| RT cores/accelerators | 80 | 80 |
| Base clock | 1,825MHz | 1,365MHz |
| Boost clock | 2,250MHz | 1,665MHz |
| Memory | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6X |
| Memory speed | 16Gbps | 19Gbps |
| Bandwidth | 512GBps | 912GBps |
| Memory bus | 256-bit | 384-bit |
| TDP | 300W | 320W |
| List price | $820 | $1,050 |
Even though both GPUs are marketed at the same mid-range level, Nvidia delivers far more improvements than AMD’s offering. The number of cores in the unit is just too small for the card to be able to perform gracefully with 4K resolutions.
RX 6900 XT 4K performance
In several benchmarks performed with games such as Death Stranding, Rainbow Six Siege (Vulkan), Watch Dogs: Legion, Assassins Creed Valhalla, and Doom Eternal, the RX 6900 XT didn’t show much improvement over Nvidia’s GPU. More importantly, it barely proved any better than the older 6800 RX.
| 4k, highest quality | Death Stranding | Rainbow Siege (Vulkan) | Watch Dogs: Legion | Assassins Creed Valhalla | Doom Eternal |
| RX 6900 XT (FPS) | 116 | 184 | 55 | 64 | 191 |
| RX 6800 XT (FPS) | 102 | 174 | 55 | 57 | 175 |
| RTX 3090 (FPS) | 113 | 201 | 61 | 59 | 209 |
To conclude, seeing the latest updates in 4K gaming, ray tracing, and the new tensor cores upgrades on performances, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT will perform well in 4K resolutions but is a too expensive graphics card for the minimum results it shows.
