Is AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT worth buying in 2023?

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT was launched back in 2020 as a flagship offering from the red camp. The video card was directly competing against RTX 3090, Nvidia's best-in-class GPU at the time. However, the AMD product never went for the performance crown. It offers great performance with regard to its price today.

The 6900 XT was launched with a hefty price tag of $999. However, the price has been slashed to $700. This makes it one of the cheapest 4K gaming video cards to purchase at the moment.

Thus, many gamers looking to put together a high-performance gaming GPU are considering this graphics card over the other high-end but costlier options. However, there are a few more things to consider before one can finalize the 6900 XT for their build.

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RX 6900 XT shaping out to be solid option for high-end builds

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT reference edition card design (Image via AMD)

The biggest drawback of high-end video cards is their steep prices. The latest RTX 40 series cards all cost over $1,000, and the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti is rumored to be expensive as well.

In this market, the slightly older RX 6900 XT is a solid option for most gamers. The card can run almost any modern video game at 4K resolution without major framerate drops. It is based on the Navi 21 graphics processor, which is the 520 mm² RDNA 2 flagship GPU die. The processor packs 5,120 steaming processors, 320 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 128 Render Output Units (ROPs), and 80 RT cores.

The GPU also comes with 16 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 video memory based on a 256-bit memory bus. The VRAM has a bandwidth of 512 GB/s.

	AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
GPU Name	Navi 21
Streaming Processor Count	5,120
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)	320
Render Output Units (ROPs)	128
Ray Tracing (RT) Core Count	80
Tensor Core Count	320
Video Memory Size	16 GB
Video Memory Type	16 Gbps GDDR6
Video Memory Bus Width	256 bit
Base Clock Speed	1825 MHz
Game Clock Speed	2015 MHz
Boost clock speed	2,250 MHz
Memory Clock Speed	2000 MHz
MSRP	US$999

Thus, on paper, the RX 6900 XT is quite a powerful card. Moreover, these specs translate pretty well to video games.

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AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has quite a few caveats

However, the GPU has a few downsides as well. Ray tracing is not AMD's strength, especially with the RX 6000 series cards. Team red's options fall apart in ray-traced heavy games when compared to the Nvidia RTX cards. With the launch of the RTX 40 series cards, the gap between the brands' products has increased, to say the least.

Additionally, AMD's temporal upscaling formula, FSR, is not as polished as Nvidia DLSS. While FSR can offer solid performance gains while maintaining solid image quality, the output is not as crisp as what DLSS can push out.

Nvidia's CUDA defeated AMD's OpenGL in almost every creative software like Adobe Premiere Pro, Autodesk Maya, and more. Thus, professionals should avoid the RX 6900 XT and side with an Nvidia RTX 30 series or 40 series video card.

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Verdict

Overall, the RX 6900 XT is a solid video card for high-end gaming. Considering the item's affordable price tag, it's a great option compared to other premium GPUs on the market.

However, the 6900 XT has a few downsides that make it a bit underwhelming for creative professionals. The card does not pack solid ray tracing performance either. Thus, users will have to compromise in these aspects if they buy these cards.