AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT officially hits retail shelves on December 8. In the meantime, the Big Navi flagship (via Tum_Apisak) has made a quick appearance on Geekbench 5 to flex its muscles. Take the RX 6900 XT Geekbench 5 numbers with a pinch of salt, as there is currently only a single submission for this card.
Armed with the Navi 21 silicon, the Radeon RX 6900 XT aims to take down the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090. AMD's offering arrives with 5,120 Stream Processors (SPs) that operate with a 2,105 MHz game clock and 2,250 MHz boost clock. The graphics card's 16GB of GDDR6 memory clocks in at 16 Gbps, which offers a memory bandwidth up to 512GBps across a 256-bit memory interface. The introduction of the 128MB Infinity Cache is suppose to cushion the low memory bandwidth.
In the benchmarks that AMD shared, the Radeon RX 6900 XT ties the GeForce RTX 3090 in 4K performance, but outperforms the Ampere offering at lower resolutions, such as 2560 x 1440. It should be mentioned that AMD's tests with the Radeon RX 6900 XT was with Rage Mode and Smart Access Memory enabled, which likely gave it a small upperhand.
Surprisingly, the latest Geekbench 5 submissions for the Radeon RX 6900 XT show Big Navi being bested by the GeForce RTX 3080.
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Benchmarks
| Graphics Card | Geekbench 5 OpenCL | Geekbench 5 Vulkan |
|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 3090 | 202,869 | 139,439 |
| GeForce RTX 3080 | 177,724 | 126,243 |
| Radeon RX 6900 XT | 169,779 | 84,797 |
| Radeon RX 6800 XT | 151,332 | 99,297 |
As a quick disclaimer, the Radeon RX 6900 XT numbers are from one submission, while the other graphics cards' scores are an average of the entries that users have submitted to Geekbench 5. Primate Labs Inc. updates the metrics daily so the values might differ from one day to the next. As always, we recommend treating the benchmarks with a bit of salt until a thorough review comes out.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT delivered up to 12.2% higher OpenCL performance than the Radeon RX 6800 XT. However, the latter surpassed the Big Navi flagship by up to 17.1% in Vulkan performance. The margins seem plausible, considering that only eight Compute Units (CUs) or 512 SPs separate the two Navi-based graphics cards. Both the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT are held within the 300W envelope so it stands to reason that a highly factory-overclocked Radeon RX 6800 XT could potentially get within an hairline to a reference Radeon RX 6900 XT.
When it comes to Ampere, the GeForce RTX 3080 just managed to outwit the Radeon RX 6900 XT by a 4.7% difference in the OpenCL benchmark. The gap in Vulkan performance is reportedly more substantial as the math shows 48.9% higher performance in the GeForce RTX 3080's favor.
At $999, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is a more attractive deal than the GeForce RTX 3090 that's selling for $1,499. The question remains whether AMD's numbers for the Radeon RX 6900 XT are accurate, and if not, how close is the Big Navi flagship to the GeForce RTX 3090. If you think that the stock for the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT was bad, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is expected to be even more limited in supply.
