Radeon RX 6900 XTX Reportedly In The Works To Crush GeForce RTX 3090

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By Zhiye Liu
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Big Navi's daddy

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XTX

(Image credit: CyberPunkCat/Twitter)

Twitter user CyberPunkCat has shared an alleged AMD slide that reveals a new upcoming addition to the Big Navi family. The Radeon RX 6900 XTX reportedly arrives with higher clock speeds and faster memory to destroy Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090, one of the best graphics cards on the market. The rumored specifications fall in line with the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled, which was only available to OEMs. The age of the leaked slide is unknown. It‘s either old information on the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled that's already released or it a hint for a new SKU, which would mean that AMD may launch the graphics card for the retail market.

AMD's Navi 21 silicon is widely used in the Big Navi family. Currently, there are four variants of the Navi 21 die if we don't take the professional SKUs into account. The Navi 21 XL and Navi 21 XT dies power the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, respectively. On the other hand, the Navi 21 XTX die is at the heart of the vanilla Radeon RX 6900 XT whereas the Navi 21 XTXH gives life to higher-binned models, such as PowerColor's Radeon RX 6900 XT Red Devil Ultimate.

The Radeon RX 6900 XTX will most likely use the Navi 21 XTXH silicon, which is the fastest out of the lot. On this occasion, the graphics card won't just arrive with improved clock speeds, but allegedly with faster memory as well. The slide claims that the Radeon RX 6900 XTX delivers a FP32 performance up to 24.93 TFLOPs. That's an 8% increase in comparison to the regular Radeon RX 6900 XT. Assuming that the amount of stream processors don't change (and they probably won't), the Radeon RX 6900 XTX should debut with a 2,435 MHz boost clock.

While the regular Radeon RX 6900 XT features 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, the slide shows the Radeon RX 6900 XTX with 18 Gbps memory. The maximum theoretical memory bandwidth on the former works out to 512 GBps, while the latter is up to 576 GBps. Therefore, the Radeon RX 6900 XTX offers up to 13% higher throughput.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT's performance was already very close to the GeForce RTX 3090. With the new makeover, the Radeon RX 6900 XTX should have no problem beating the GeForce RTX 3090, but we'll have to wait on concrete benchmarks to find out for sure.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • nitts999
    The only thing anyone cares about is availability. The rest is hypothetical details.
    Reply
  • sepuko
    "The new Rolls-Royce Phantom will be even more opulent than the previous model, rejoice poor people, rich people are gonna have it even better!"
    Reply
  • watzupken
    nitts999 said:
    The only thing anyone cares about is availability. The rest is hypothetical details.
    This is precisely the point. In fact, I feel AMD should be restocking RX 6800 series and not 6900 because the latter in my opinion is mostly unattractive since it costs a lot more and performs just marginally better.

    On air cooling, there is a limit on how much they can do to push clock speed. And I am not sure if the changes here will make the 6900 XTX any faster at 4K, as compared to the RTX 3090. And while there is no information on the price, I've seen 6900 XT cost almost in some more exotic models, cost more than a RTX 3090. So if it is priced very closely to a RTX 3090, I feel the 3090 is still a better deal in terms of 4K performance, features and other usage for CUDA cores.
    Reply
  • JesseJonkman
    AMD what are you doing... get your priorities straight. Your market share is dwindling from low to nothing and you pour money and time into R&D for a new model that literally 10 people will afford when it hits this market at $5K above MSRP, when you should be busting your balls restocking current models for normal prices. Maybe start bidding for Arm ltd. as well. What a joke!
    Yes I'm salty i can't upgrade my rx480
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    I like they idea they are going to bring out a card faster than Nvidia fastest card should push Nvidia to do better, which should then make AMD do better again.

    Sadly it seems to me in market where everything you make sells and they can not keep up with demand they have decided to go with the high end and high profit end of the market. Not sure if Nvidia is any different in this. Come on AMD and Nvidia your making intel look like the good guys here!.
    Reply
  • HideOut
    JesseJonkman said:
    AMD what are you doing... get your priorities straight. Your market share is dwindling from low to nothing and you pour money and time into R&D for a new model that literally 10 people will afford when it hits this market at $5K above MSRP, when you should be busting your balls restocking current models for normal prices. Maybe start bidding for Arm ltd. as well. What a joke!
    Yes I'm salty i can't upgrade my rx480

    You can complain and whine all you want, but they are making the most possible 6xxx cards as they can. Their contracts spell out the number of wafers they get, period. Apple gets first pick then AMD later...thats it. And now prices for chips are going up 10% too so its only going to get worse.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    HideOut said:
    Their contracts spell out the number of wafers they get, period. Apple gets first pick then AMD later...thats it.
    Apple has moved to 5nm. AMD is the largest 7nm customer for TSMC. It will be interesting to see what AMD does in the coming years as it appears Apple and Intel are going to be buying up all the leading edge node capacity, which could leave AMD a node behind going forward. It hasn't mattered that Apple was doing it because AMD and Apple don't really compete head to head, but with Intel entering the fray, the scenario changes pretty drastically. Intel architecture teams have been churning along despite the issues of the manufacturing arm. If the architecture teams are suddenly handed a superior node to what AMD is using, we'll see what happens.
    Reply
  • husker
    Personally, I'm holding out for the RX6900 XTXAXBXCXXX. Because "X"s are what sell graphics cards.
    Reply
  • tom111111
    watzupken said:
    This is precisely the point. In fact, I feel AMD should be restocking RX 6800 series and not 6900 because the latter in my opinion is mostly unattractive since it costs a lot more and performs just marginally better.

    The RX 6900 XT costs not much more than the RX 6800 XT. That is why I chose the 6900 and because I want the top model, not something cheap.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    JesseJonkman said:
    AMD what are you doing... get your priorities straight. Your market share is dwindling from low to nothing and you pour money and time into R&D for a new model that literally 10 people will afford when it hits this market at $5K above MSRP, when you should be busting your balls restocking current models for normal prices. Maybe start bidding for Arm ltd. as well. What a joke!
    Yes I'm salty i can't upgrade my rx480
    This card would have hardly any additional R&D cost put into it, since it sounds like it uses the same graphics chip as the RX 6900 XT / 6800 XT / 6800, just with minor improvements to the speed of the memory chips and clock rates. It's little more than a minor refresh of their top-end card, judging by the information presented here.

    And as such, I would not expect it to "crush" the RTX 3090 by any means, as the existing 6900 XT already tends to be a little behind that card in terms of rasterized performance at higher resolutions, and further behind with RT enabled. Increasing clock rates a little could potentially allow it to roughly match the 3090 more often at 4K, but isn't going to vastly improve performance, nor will it make the raytracing significantly more competitive. And it's questionable how much the faster memory would even help, seeing as one of RDNA2's big features is its large "infinity cache" to allow the card to be less affected by memory performance. I would be surprised if the XTX version of the card managed to be much more than 5% faster than the XT.

    In any case, at their launch MSRPs, the 3090 was arguably an overpriced product compared to the similar-performing but far less expensive 3080, and the same could probably be said about the 6900 XT compared to the 6800 XT, albeit with less of a price difference separating them. With limited production capacity available though, AMD undoubtedly wants to focus more of that toward their highest-margin parts. And even their high-end graphics chips undoubtedly bring them far less profit per wafer compared to their CPUs built on the same process, so those will get priority. It would be kind of pointless for them to focus on lower-end cards right now when crypto-miners would cause their prices to double anyway.

    It's not like Nvidia has any reasonably-priced budget cards readily available at the moment either. Even for RX 480-level performance, you would likely be paying over $400 for a GTX 1650 SUPER right now, roughly double what an RX 480 could be bought for five years ago. Anyone concerned about value should avoid buying a card for now, and AMD doesn't really have the manufacturing capacity to increase supply enough to turn that around.
    Reply