AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

While I find it difficult to recommend anyone buys a card that costs (effectively) $1000, it is surprisingly good value for money compared to its main rival. I think for your modern enthusiast gamer, the RX 6800 XT is a damn fine option. However, if you need that performance edge in your life, or even in your work flow, it’s going to be hard to beat what AMD is offering right now.

You can make a few arguments in favour of the RX 6900 XT, but we feel most gamers would be better served with an RTX 3080.

The AMD RX 6900 XT is an impressive feat of sheer performance uplift generation on generation. Yet its high cost and minimal performance benefit over cheaper graphics cards make it difficult to recommend.

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, the biggest difference is that the GPU features eight additional Compute Units, which brings the total shader count to 5,120, vs 4,608 on the RX 6800 XT. Theoretically, this would suggest a 11% performance increase.

You can tell I am struggling with what to recommend you as this is a pandora's box situation really. If you think flagship Raytracing is the bull's balls, we'll steer you to RTX 3090. For premium rasterizer performance, however, you can save a third of the money with that 6900 XT. That's a solid choice in my book. A top pick for those that match my recommendations.

The fantastic Radeon RX 6900 XT goes toe-to-toe with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 for $500 less, but doesn't carve out a strong position for itself. Most pure gamers should opt for the Radeon RX 6800 XT instead, while content creators and performance enthusiasts might find the 3090 more compelling.

The RX 6900 XT is the best that Radeon has to offer, but we'd buy RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT instead and put the significant remaining cash towards games and upgrades.

The RX 6900 XT is a very competent graphics card that offers top-notch 4K gaming and features plenty of headroom for overclocking. But its price and lack of DLSS put it a step behind its Nvidia rival in a couple of key areas, including ray tracing.