Navi Dicussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ra...-xt-review

After the more recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, jumping up to a $1000 graphics card feels ludicrous. Sure, it's fast and can sometimes even beat Nvidia's top-shelf RTX 3090. Overall, however, the RX 6900 XT fails to impress relative to the RX 6800 XT. It's such an incremental bump in performance that it hardly seems worth the trouble. That's even assuming that there will be enough cards to meet the demand, which if recent history has taught us anything, there won't be.

By the numbers, the RX 6900 XT is only 4 to 7 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT, but it costs over 50 percent more. Okay, sure, you can't find the 6800 XT in stock for $649 right now, but at some point in 2021, that will no longer be the case. If you want the best high-end AMD graphics card, our pick still goes to the RX 6800 XT. But if you're open to other options, AMD has a tougher time of things.

Toss out ray tracing performance, and the RX 6900 XT looks very competitive, chalking up several wins against the RTX 3090. But if you're willing to spend over a grand on a new graphics card for gaming purposes, we simply can't overlook the ray tracing performance and current lack of a DLSS alternative. Yes, Super Resolution is coming, possibly by the time most of these GPUs are actually available for purchase, but DLSS 2.0 is here already and works great in quite a few games. However, even without DLSS, the RTX 3080 already leads the 6900 XT by an average of 25 percent at 1440p in ray tracing games.
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As a professional card, the RX 6900 XT again has some potential. There are certain applications where AMD is more generous than Nvidia when it comes to optimized drivers. If you happen to use one of those apps, this could be the best overall value, but again the 6800 XT has the exact same features and specs, only with a few fewer shader cores.

That's the real difficulty with the top of the pecking order. You often get radically diminishing returns going from the second- or third-tier GPU to the fastest card. The RTX 3090 has the same problem, and we don't recommend it as a general gaming solution for the same reasons. However, there are still rumblings of an RTX 3080 20GB card (possibly called RTX 3080 Ti), which could offer both a memory and performance advantage over the 6900 XT when/if it comes out. If Nvidia releases that card in the next few months and prices it at $849, that could be worth waiting for. Which is fine, since anyone wanting a new GPU is likely going to be waiting regardless.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31807...-xt-at-999

My own take (I’ve reviewed the 6800 XT but not the 69000 XT) is that the 6900 XT is AMD’s way of signaling it intends to compete in the high-end of the graphics market once more, but that the company is still playing catch-up in some regards. This is not automatically a bad thing. If we look back to 2015, we see AMD nearly-match the GTX 980 Ti, only to fall short of the mark with the Vega 64 in 2017. From 2016 – 2019, AMD’s most-competitive positioning was between $100 – $300. In mid-2019, Navi debuted at higher prices with the 5700 and 500 XT, and demonstrated that AMD was still capable of competing with Turing. With Big Navi in 2020, AMD has demonstrated that it can compete with Nvidia in the upper market once again — but Biggest Navi is still a bit of a reach.

Part of the reason for this, it should be said, is because AMD chose to emphasize high VRAM loadouts and relatively high clocks for its lower-end cards. AMD chose to weaken the RX 6900 XT’s positioning by improving the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, and while that makes their top-end solution a little bit of an underwhelming step up, it looks this way for the best possible reason.

Most Radeon gamers will, I suspect, be best-served by either the 6800 or the 6800 XT. Nevertheless, the 6900 XT sends a message to investors and enthusiasts that AMD intends to compete robustly in GPUs as well.

When you’ll actually be able to buy one of these cards is anyone’s guess. A recent PR from Swiss retailer Digitec revealed that the company had received just 35 cards for launch, implying that this GPU is going to be extremely difficult to find. In that sense, the entire discussion is academic, since you won’t really be able to buy a card until 2021 unless you want to pay 1.5x – 2.5x over list price. There are RTX 3090’s going on eBay for $2,000 to $2,500, and some that list for even more, so the chances you can buy a new RDNA2 GPU before Christmas are small, no matter what.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-r...xt/41.html

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is AMD's return to the fight for the high-end graphics performance throne. The new Radeon flagship is surprisingly similar to the RX 6800 XT, with the biggest difference the eight additional compute units, which brings the total shader count to 5,120 as opposed to 4,608 on the RX 6800 XT. Theoretically, this would suggest a 11% performance increase. Increasing the CU count also increases TMUs and ray accelerators because these are part of every CU. All the other specifications are identical: same ROPs, clocks, memory, L3 cache, TDP, and cooler. We confirmed with AMD that the L3 cache is running at the same frequency as on the RX 6800 XT. The only other change we noticed is that the GPU voltage circuitry has an additional power phase. Probably the most important facet that has remained the same is the 300 W TDP, which is important for power efficiency, heat, and noise.

Averaged over our test suite at 4K resolution, we find the RX 6900 XT 7% faster than the RX 6800 XT. This feels like a bit less than what AMD made us expect, and there are several important points to make here. Our test suite is 23 games strong, a large mix of games and engines. Obviously, not all of these use APIs like DX12 and Vulkan. Ten games are based on DX11, ten use DX12 and three are built around the Vulkan API—a realistic mix, I would claim. AMD has traditionally had more overhead in DirectX 11 games than NVIDIA, which is the main reason their scores are getting dragged down a bit. Since the overhead is per-frame and the RX 6900 XT delivers more frames than any other Radeon card, this effect is more noticeable than before. Titles to check out for this are Project Cars 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2. Do look through our games and exclude those not relevant for your buying decision—that's why we present all this data. It is likely that a lot of upcoming titles use DX12, but I'm sure there will be other important games in the future that still run on DirectX 11. I'll use the Christmas holidays to take a closer look at our test suite to drop old games and add news ones, like Cyberpunk 2077.
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We were impressed by the Radeon RX 6800 XT cooling solution, and the RX 6900 XT is no different. AMD was wise not to cheap out on this important component. The heatsink uses a large vapor-chamber base that sucks up heat from the GPU quickly, after which it is dissipated by the three slow-running fans. AMD has once again found the perfect fan settings for their card. At just 30 dBA, the card is nearly whisper quiet while pumping out over 60 FPS at 4K. The Radeon RX 6900 XT is also significantly quieter than NVIDIA's RTX 3090 Founders Edition—oh, how the tables have turned. Noise levels on the AMD reference card are better than on every single RTX 3090 custom design we've tested, and we tested all the important ones. If you want low noise, you have to go AMD. As we have seen in our RX 6800 XT custom design reviews, AMD's reference card is almost too good. The super-low noise levels are very hard for board partners to match, which makes finding a convincing selling point to justify a more expensive cooler difficult. Just like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series lineup, idle fan stop is part of the Radeon RX 6000, too; fans will shut down completely when the card is idle at the desktop or running productivity applications, and while Internet browsing.

The secret sauce behind the low noise levels is power efficiency. NVIDIA learned this after the GeForce GTX 480, and AMD has finally cashed in on it now. With just 300 W in typical gaming, the RX 6900 XT uses only 20 W more than the RX 6800 XT, which has both cards exactly match in efficiency. Compared to NVIDIA's lineup, the new AMD cards are more energy efficient; RX 6900 XT is 12% more efficient than NVIDIA's RTX 3090, which runs at 366 W, but offers a bit more performance. This 66 W difference is what allowed AMD to make their cooler whisper-quiet even though it isn't as good as the one on the RTX 3090 Founders Edition.
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AMD has set an MSRP of $999 for the RX 6900 XT, which is a lot of money and new territory for AMD. The RX 5700 XT launched at $400, and the Radeon VII at $700. No doubt, AMD looked at NVIDIA's pricing and thought that with the RX 6900 XT faster than the RTX 3080, it is definitely worth more than $700; and with the RTX 3090, which can't be caught, at $1500, they made it $999, a nice three-figure number. If the market were normal, I'd be unsure about how feasible this price point would be. The RTX 3080 is very similar in rasterization performance, better in raytracing, and runs a bit louder due to higher power draw, all for $300 less—most people would probably go for it. The RTX 3090, on the other hand, offers only minimal gains over RTX 3080, but screams "over the top" due to how NVIDIA positions it as the TITAN replacement—the RX 6900 XT is different. When comparing specification sheets, it looks like a small upgrade because most specifications are identical. I'm also not sure if I would be willing to spend an additional $350 over the RX 6800 XT for roughly 10% higher performance. In all fairness, I absolutely wouldn't spend +$800 for the RTX 3090 over the RTX 3080, either.

But, as we all know, the market isn't like that as there is pretty much no stock of the new graphics cards, which has people willing to pay crazy prices just to jump on the Ampere and RDNA 2 train. Scalpers are making a killing and are probably launching their bots as we speak to gobble up what little stock exists. Merchants are jacking up prices because they know they will sell everything. Looking at recent launches from both AMD and NVIDIA, it seems MSRP prices are a fantasy true for only the first batch, there to impress potential customers, with actual retail pricing ending up much higher. Let's hope that stock levels will improve in the coming weeks and months so people can actually get their hands on these new cards.

Obviously, the "Recommended" award in this context is not for the average gamer. Rather, it means you should consider this card if you have this much money to spend and are looking for an RX 6900 XT or RTX 3090.