NVIDIA is positioning itself ahead of AMD in terms of graphics card performance. AMD isn't taking this lying down, and Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has more than one trick up her sleeve. Is the new RX 6900 XT, also known as Big Navi XT, which houses a Navi 21 XTX GPU, more powerful than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090? On October 28th, AMD will unveil its new cards, but in the meantime, let's take a closer look at the information we can glean from the PCB image of the RX 6900 XT.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT PCB
The GPU isn't visible, but its size can be estimated from the image. This card will consume less power than the RTX 3090 because the phase system is composed of 16 digits (14 + 2), although it will still require a power supply . We note that the two half-size heatsinks protecting the VRAM are not in direct contact with the main GPU heatsink. The fan system will cool everything, but this architecture prioritizes better heat dissipation for the GPU. The solder points suggest that the card will have either 8 or 16 GB of memory .
Source: GPUMAG.COM
RX 6900 XT configurations
7-nanometer process . This is a slight advantage over its competitor, which uses Samsung's 8-nanometer process. It features 5120 shader processors and operates at a gaming clock speed of 2.04 GHz. In boost mode, its 23 billion transistors switch at 2.33 GHz . The Big Navi XT card is equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory bus. Its competitor, the RTX 3090, however, boasts 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and its GPU operates at a boost clock speed of 1.7 GHz . The RX 6900 XT consumes an estimated TDP of 255 W compared to 350 Watts for the Geforce RTX 3090. In terms of connectivity, the AMD card has 1 HDMI port, 2 DisplayPorts and 1 USB-C port.
8K HDR images . Furthermore, it leverages AI to push its capabilities to the limit (DLSS sampling, Ray Tracing, etc.). However, according to the latest rumors, the Big Navi XT significantly surpasses the RTX 3080 in terms of performance and is just behind the RTX 3090. We'll have to wait until we get our hands on this new card to benchmark it. In any case, if this proves true, AMD cards will have doubled their performance, and AMD will be catching up to NVIDIA.
As a reminder, the RTX 3090 graphics card is already available for purchase on NVIDIA's website and Amazon . We expect AMD and its sales team to offer the RX 6900 XT at a slightly lower price to attract more customers. Stay tuned for more details on October 28, 2020.
