The RTX 3090 or BFGPU as NVIDIA's CEO
called it has been nicely toppled by a card that costs a nice 23 as much. At
least that's what the nice guys at AMD would like us to believe. And this is
it. The RX6900 XT. It looks nice. It feels nice. It
even smells nice. But can it really be that simple? Just tack a few more
compute units onto the 6800 XT and
suddenly you're the top dog. Well, that would be nice, but it's also not quite
that easy.
After the announcement, we hoped that AMD was doing more under the hood than
just increasing the number of compute units because the RX6900 XT, at least on
paper, is otherwise exactly the same card as the RX6800 XT. Same RDNA2
architecture, same core clocks, same memory, same power draw. Hey, wait a
minute. AMD pulled a fast one here. The
rated graphics power is the same, but the recommended power supply is 100
watts higher for the 6TN00 XT. So, it
seems that in spite of those extra compute units and the cooler being
identical, barring what AMD calls minor tweaks, the sixtyn00 XT is in fact being
pushed quite a bit harder in boost than its sibling. Well, okay, mystery solved
then. That's exactly what AMD says is happening. And the sixtyn00 XT is in
fact a highly binned part capable of overclocking much more reliably than the
6800 XT can. It's an impressive feat considering just how fast some of those
cards can go. Of course, we can't just
take AMD at their word. This is Lionus Tech Tips. We've got to test it for
ourselves. So, we grabbed the three fancy new Radeons and their
corresponding GeForce cards and took them all for a spin. As you might expect
by now, AMD crushed it in traditional rasterization, coming close to the
RTX3090 in Shadow of the Tomb Raider despite
costing $500 less. Though, they fell
well short of even the RTX3080 when it
came to real-time rayraced lighting. Minecraft RTX tells a similar story with
AMD choking hard enough here that the sixt
managed only half of the RTX3080s
performance. To be fair though, ray tracing wasn't AMD's focus for this
generation. And as much as we keep pointing it out, and it is the future,
path tracers like this aren't common
yet. So, turning back to more traditional rendering, Wolfenstein Young
Bloodood looks like a win for the RTX3090,
except that given the six-t managed numbers halfway between the 3080 and
3090, the price difference makes AMD's offering look very compelling here.
Microsoft Flight Simulator didn't do AMD any favors. Yeah, the SixT is a better
value than the 3090, but then the 3080 makes both of them look like a ripoff,
and Counterstrike is nearly a win across the board for Team Red with the RTX3090
only pulling ahead in minimum frame rates. Of course, all of this changes if
you're willing to accept DLSS upscaling as a viable option. And in these cases,
the NVIDIA cards unquestionably dominate AMD in terms of raw FPS. Love or hate
it, DLSS is here. Customers are using it
and it looks pretty darn good. So AMD,
you guys need to get on Fidelity FX Super Resolution and stat. In our review
of the RX6800 series, we noted that AMD's productivity performance lagged
behind, and it's no different here. AMD
says they focused first and foremost on gaming performance, and that's fair
enough, but it did cost them. It's not like it's bad at productivity if you
find the right workloads. I mean, just look at how it handles the more memory
intensive Specview perf subtests. But
there is one glaring exception where AMD firmly falls short, and honestly, I
consider it unacceptable. Radeon Pro Render. We called out AMD's poor
rendering quality in the 6800 series review. And in response, they gave us a
tweaked version of the tests to play around with, and okay, it's fast, but
the problem is that it still looks like hot garbage. This is useful maybe as a
preview, but it is not good enough for a final render. So, sorry AMD. Until you
get hardware ray tracing support baked into the Blender cycles renderer like
NVIDIA's optics engine, this is not even remotely a fair fight. Unlike our prices
at ltstore.com, they're always fair. Oh, and we've got the ABCs of gaming in
stock. Once again, smart access memory, while
arguably the star of the show for gaming that pushed them into their competitive
position, continues to do little or nothing for productivity. AMD reasons
that while NVIDIA and Intel are both working on enabling the resizable bar
feature that makes up smart access memory's core functionality, there is
far more that goes into the special sauce. Specifically, they claim that
significant driver optimization is required to help smart access memory
reach its full potential. If that's true, then there is significantly more
work ahead for team blue and team green than just toggling a switch. Or at least
in theory. ASUS has apparently already enabled this functionality in their
Intel Z490 motherboards, and early performance looks about as good as what
we might see on an AMD platform. So, I suppose we're going to have to
investigate that. Get subscribed so you don't miss our coverage. Thermally, the
RX6900 XT is similar to, but on average
a smidge hotter under load than the RTX3090 with the notable exception of
those memory bandwidth intensive tests at the end that we pointed out in our
6800 series reviews. Compared to the 6800 XT, the bigger card doesn't take as
long to heat up, but they both end up in roughly the same thermal envelope by the
end of the test. At 2.6 6 GHz. The sixtyn00 XT's core clocks are
consistently 100 MHz higher than the 6800 XT. And like that card, these
clocks appear to be quite stable. This hints that tinkerers might get great
results from an undervolt, either to reduce power consumption and heat or to
potentially improve thermal or power headroom for better boost behavior. As
for power consumption, this is becoming a bit of a pattern this generation. On
average, power consumption is usually lower than the RTX3090,
but the sixtyn00 XT experiences spikes
that can go much higher. Check out this
462 W spike. These kinds of
instantaneous loads can trip up sensitive power supplies, and we
actually had to swap out our test bench's CSIC 1,000 W unit for a Corsair
one to avoid tripping the overcurren protection during benchmarking. Compared
to the RX6800 XT, at least, it looks to average just about 50 watts higher under
load at any given point in time. This is pretty crazy considering that it's got
exactly the same cooler design as the 6800 XT, although it does have a beefier
16-phase power delivery setup to go along with the 14 layer PCB that they
share. Of course, AMD goes out of their way to point out that they're using
standard sizes for their coolers and standard dual eight pin power
connectors, which sounds like it shouldn't be something to brag about,
but turns out to be a sick burn on the 3090 with its behemoth size, not to
mention proprietary 12pin power connector. Oh, and the sixtyn00 XT has
RGB. Checkmate, NVIDIA. Before I close
out, I can't talk up AMD's promise of overclocking without actually doing some
overclocking, can I? Yes, I can. You'll
just have to wait for us to pit the RX6900 XT against the RTX3090 in a
head-to-head overclock off to see who can pull off 8K gaming the best. Stay
tuned. For now though, make no mistake,
the RX6900 XT is a powerful card, and at
$999, it undercuts NVIDIA's best by a
significant margin, even if it doesn't always beat or even meet it, and falls
well short in productivity. This card looks like another classic AMD look for
the gap in the market and fill it move. And given how expensive the RTX3090 is
and how relatively uncommon ray tracing still is in gaming, having a
ballsto-wall fast card that while not optimized for real-time ray tracing, can
do it is still a pretty big deal. It
would just really be nice if there were any to buy because if you've waited this
long to pull the trigger, I can almost guarantee that they are gone by now. How
do I know? Well, the RX6800 series was
weaponsgrade unoptanium when it launched. And uh 3 weeks later, supply
still hasn't caught up with demand. Then given that 6900 XTs are pretty much
cherrypicked 6800 XTs, I think it's pretty safe to say that for the few of
you who will be able to get your hands on it at MSRP in 2020, well, enjoy it,
you lucky so. For the rest, maybe next
year will be better. Thanks for watching, guys. If you
enjoyed this video, go check out our review of the RX6800 series to learn a
little more about the whole RDNA2 thing that makes this card tick.