The Radeon RX 6900 XT is now AMD’s fastest GPU. However, it’s only incrementally faster than the RX 6800 XT, making the $1,000 asking price a tough sell.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is officially AMD’s new halo product, surpassing the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 by offering the fully-enabled Navi 21 GPU with 80 Compute Units. The latest generation GPUs sit atop our GPU Benchmarks hierarchy and rate as some of the best graphics cards currently available (if we use the term “available” loosely). The 6900 XT is also the most expensive AMD graphics card we’ve seen in quite some time — the last time AMD sold a GPU priced at $1,000 or more was the Radeon Pro Duo (2016), a very limited quantity dual-GPU card. With RX 6800 XT taking on RTX 3080, the goal is clear: AMD wants to offer competitive performance to the GeForce RTX 3090 while undercutting Nvidia’s price by $500.
All of that is sort of a moot point, of course. Even eight months after the official launch, the RX 6900 XT remains virtually impossible to find in stock, just like all of the other RX 6000 and RTX 30 series graphics cards. Our GPU pricing index looks at eBay prices for the various cards, and while the RX 6900 XT technically only costs 55% more than the MSRP, it’s still a lot more than we’d recommend paying. We’re refreshing this review with the latest details but keeping the original performance results. You can see the full view of how performance stacks up in more recent reviews like the RTX 3080 Ti, but until prices reach something approaching normalcy, buying a latest generation graphics card remains a serious pain in the nether regions.
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