AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Flagship Big Navi Graphics Card Launches For $999 US, Here’s Where To Buy

Today is the day when the last and the meatiest of the Big Navi GPUs, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT launches and hits the retail segment. Featuring the Navi 21 XTX chip, the RX 6900 XT is an insane powerhouse of a graphics card that puts AMD back in the ultra-enthusiast performance segment.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is the fastest GPU that the red team will have ever produced. It aims for the ultra-enthusiast segment and is directly competing against NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090. The main difference between both cards aside from their vastly different specs is that the RX 6900 XT features a price of $999 US whereas the GeForce RTX 3090 features a price tag of $1499 US.

Note - We will be posting more links once the retail listings for the RX 6900 XT go live.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT will come packed with the Navi 21 XTX GPU which is the fully enabled die featuring 80 Compute Units or 5120 SPs. The card will also feature 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus interface, a 512 GB/s total bandwidth, and clock speeds of 2015 MHz base and 2250 MHz boost at reference specs. There are also 80 Ray accelerators for ray-tracing enablement on the graphics cards (one RA per Compute Unit). The graphics card will feature a TBP of 300W.

In addition to the standard memory, the Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card will also feature 128 MB of Infinity Cache on the GPU die. The cache will help boost bandwidth for higher performance at resolutions beyond 1080p HD. The 128 MB Infinity Cache boosts the standard 512 GB/s bandwidth by 3.25x, delivering an effective bandwidth of up to 1.664 TB/s across all Big Navi GPU based graphics cards.

With all said, both the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT do have their own advantages. To name a few, the RX 6900 XT should offer higher efficiency, better rasterization performance, and comes with Infinity Cache and SAM support which helps deliver higher frame rates. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 on the other hand offers insane content creation performance, 24 GB of GDDR6X memory (8 GB more vs RX 6900 XT's 16 GB), and features faster and better-looking ray-tracing effects.

As such, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT could end up sitting comfortably ahead of the RTX 3090 at higher resolutions and this is just one title. With the RX 6800 XT, we saw that the card gave the RTX 3080 a hard time and even came close to the RTX 3090. The RX 6900 XT with its higher number of cores and a maximum clock limit of 3 GHz should surpass the RX 6800 XT with ease.

Overall, it will be good competition from AMD, and overclocking-wise, the RX 6900 XT is going to knock the pants off the RTX 3090 but expect the card to be sold out within minutes of launch since its a very niche and high-end product with limited quantities as we have heard from several global retailers. The Radeon RX 6900 XT will also be receiving custom treatment from all major AIBs as we have already seen models from ASUS and ASRock.