AMD will produce a high-end Radeon graphics card named RX 6900 XT . The announcement is scheduled for October 28. In the meantime, a photo of the GPU appears online. The launch of next-generation AMD video cards based on the RDNA2 architecture is now a matter of weeks. AMD will officially present these new solutions at the end of this month. The release on the market will therefore normally be immediately or a few days later at most.
Meanwhile, the Coreteks Twitter channel has uploaded the first image of the Navi 21 GPU . Many discussions arise from it on the internet to analyze its characteristics. The GPU has a fairly beefy build according to the available image. It will be the central heart of the new AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT card.
Analysis of its characteristics
It's apparently a 536 mm square chip with 23,000 million transistors, built with 7 nanometer production technology by Taiwanese firm TSMC. Which confirms previous rumors which estimated the size of this new GPU at more than 500 square mm. From the image we can draw some conclusions: HBM2 memory combined with GPU should be ruled out. The Navi 21 GPU is therefore probably associated with GDDR6 memory. The characteristics of the memory bus have not yet been revealed by AMD. But we estimate 16 GB video memory, 256 or 512 bit bus. This type of bus has not been used too much on consumer video cards due to its structural complexity, but it has been used by AMD for Radeon family cards. This Navi 21 supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12.2). It supports Ray Tracing, VRS (Variable Rate Shading) and many other features used in the latest video games. A less efficient version with 12 GB of memory may also be released and will be named: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Generally, for gaming cards, AMD uses GDDR6 memories. This is a solution proposed for cards intended for the general public because it is easy to implement. HBM2 is more intended for professionals and data centers.
We are already looking forward to October 28 to confirm or deny our analyses. All that remains is to wait a few weeks and AMD will announce the technical characteristics of its new family of video cards. We estimate its cost between €500 and €650. This same day, the commercial debut of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 video cards is also expected. These are new generation graphics cards from the Ampere family in the mid-high end category for gamers.
