AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT review round-up and where to buy

Today reviews of the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT were released alongside the card itself – in stores online. The AMD Radeon 6000 series' most powerful beast aims to deliver 4K gaming top to bottom. This graphics card has a release date that matches the date of the reviews – which is relative bad news for those of you out there waiting to see positive reviews before pulling the trigger on a purchase.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT works with 80 compute units, 80 ray accelerators, and peak half precision compute performance at a whopping 46.08 TFLOPs. This graphics card works with 5,120 stream processors, 128 ROPs, 320 texture units, and 26.8 BILLION transistors. This card is no slouch – it requires 300W power to keep it in business, with a minimum PSU recommendation of 850W.

This GPU works with 128MB Infinity Cache, 16Gbps memory speed, and a max memory size of 16GB (GDDR6). The basic card works with a single USB-C connector, 2x DisplayPort 1.4 ports with DSC, HDMI 2.1 VRR and FRL with 4K support, 4K H264 decode, and 4K H264 encode. You'll also get H265/HEVC decode and encode, as well as AV1 decode.

Reviews seem to place the Radeon RX 6900 XT just below the GeForce RTX 3090 FE in most benchmarks. This is true of HotHardware's review where benchmarks for Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the racing game F1 2020. AMD's card found its way a little lower on lists when dealing with RTX On without DLSS – usually just below the RTX 3080 FE.

Reviews like that of Tom's Hardware suggested that the 6900 XT's price over the 6800 XT is "a big jump in price for a likely minor improvement in overall performance." In-depth reviews like the guru 3D review show the temperature IDLE of the Radeon RX 6900 XT as hotter than any other card on the list – but only by a degree or two. Temperature LOAD shows this card amongst the hottest, but out-heated by Radeon RX 480, GTX 1080, and GTX 1070 Ti.

The TechPowerUP review tests every game under the sun and suggests that this card is faster than RTX 3080 and not far beyond RTX 3090. Per the PC Gamer review, "The RX 6900 XT rarely meets the RTX 3090 in games, except those where the RX 6800 XT also manages to top the RTX 3080, which is not all that often."

If you're looking to buy this card, you might be out of luck. You'll want to check the AMD Radeon RX 600 series site where "OUT OF STOCK" is currently the bright red button that'd normally say BUY. You could also check Scan Computers (sold out), Newegg (not available for purchase), Best Buy (coming soon), Micro Center (if your local store has one in stock).