Radeon RX 6900 XT
The Radeon RX 6900 XT is the flagship product of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture. Development of the RDNA 2 architecture began immediately after the release of the first generation of RDNA and continued for several years. AMD's goal was to increase performance and power efficiency, as well as add support for new graphics technologies such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
AMD announced the Radeon RX 6900 XT on October 28, 2020 at its next generation graphics card event. The official release took place on December 8, 2020.
Detailed architecture and specifications
The Radeon RX 6900 XT is based on the Navi 21 GPU, manufactured using a 7nm process technology. The video card has 5120 stream processors divided into 80 computer units (CUs). It features 16GB of 512Gbps GDDR6 VRAM and 128MB of Infinity Cache for improved memory bandwidth and power efficiency.
The base frequency of the GPU is 2015 MHz, and the turbo frequency reaches 2250 MHz. The TDP of the video card is 300W.
Prices and Availability
The recommended price for the Radeon RX 6900 XT was $999 at the time of the announcement. However, due to problems with the availability and demand for video cards, the price in the secondary market could significantly exceed the recommended one.
Gaming performance at launch
The Radeon RX 6900 XT was designed to compete with NVIDIA's flagship products such as the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. In most games at the time of release, the graphics card showed excellent performance in 4K resolution with maximum graphics settings.
The performance of the Radeon RX 6900 XT was comparable to the GeForce RTX3080, and in some cases even surpassed it. However, in games with ray tracing enabled, the graphics card lagged behind the competition, as AMD's ray tracing technology was less mature and optimized.
However, with the introduction of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology, the Radeon RX 6900 XT has become even more competitive, delivering better performance and image quality in 4K resolution with support for upscaling and graphics enhancement.
Interesting facts about the video card
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The Radeon RX 6900 XT was AMD's first hardware-accelerated ray tracing graphics card. This technology has become the standard for modern gaming graphics cards and allows you to create more realistic lighting and reflections in games.
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The RX 6900 XT graphics card also introduced Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology, which allows the processor to directly access all of the video memory, improving performance in certain scenarios.
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The Radeon RX 6900 XT is one of the few graphics cards with 16GB of VRAM, allowing gamers to enjoy larger textures and extra data in high resolution games.
In conclusion, the Radeon RX 6900 XT represents an important step for AMD to take on NVIDIA's flagship graphics cards. It offered players high performance, support for new graphics technologies and a large amount of video memory. Despite some shortcomings, such as ray tracing performance, this graphics card has earned its place in the market and became the basis for future AMD products.