I did not have high hopes that this generation of graphics cards would be sold at prices close to those established by the manufacturer. Look here though, a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC for less MSRP ($950 off). What world!
The Radeon RX 6000 series was presented at precisely the wrong time: December 2020. The world was dealing with a continuous disruption of almost everything due to Covid-19, and graphics cards were about to enter the worst era of scarcity I’ve ever had. I experienced personally. It was also a real disgrace, as AMD had created an RDNA 2 graphics architecture that could, in fact, compete with Nvidia’s high-end cards.
It is true that the RX 6900 XT was not the most productive in the organization at the time. The RX 6800 XT is a much more impressive counterpart to Nvidia’s RTX 3080 than the RX 6900 XT of the RTX 3090. The SKU of the RX 6900 XT was presented at $999, which looked like a huge amount of cash for a GPU at the time; little did we know it would only get worse from there.
However, Nvidia’s later releases with higher values, such as the 12GB RTX 3080 and rtX 3080 Ti, made the RX 6900 XT age older than its competitors. You can now get a three-fan Gigabyte RX 6900 XT for $950, less than the 12GB RTX 3080 is offered for and under the reference MSRP. In fact, it’s not a bad value for an ultra-high-end GPU that pulls out 4K gaming as if it were pong and comes with a GDDR6 memory buffet, with 16GB in total.
The ray tracing functionality of the RX 6900 XT leaves a bit to be desired, and it’s not the fastest of all games, but it looks as much like a GPU of passionate elegance as it does this price point.
Perhaps one of the reasons AMD’s RX 6900 XT is less expensive is its imminent replacement in the smarter 6000 series stack with the RX 6950 XT. The same GPU will offer faster GDDR6 18 Gbps memory to give a little more flavor to games.
Similarly, AMD will update the RX 6000 series with its next-generation GPUs later this year, which will use the new RDNA 3 architecture. It’s true that all the rumors about those next-gen chips seem quite appealing to PC gamers, however, it may still take a while before they hit the shelves.
We still love the RX 6900 XT. Si well it’s still an expensive acquisition, the top load of the cards it competes with makes the RX 6900 XT a strangely smart acquisition right now.
Jacob got his first signature writing for his own tech blog from his hometown in Wales in 2017. From there, he earned his professional degree as a hardware editor at PCGamesN, where he would later gain command of the kit cabinet as a hardware editor. . Today, as a senior hardware editor at PC Gamer, he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the gen and gaming industry. When you’re not writing about GPUs and CPUs, you’ll find it looking to get as far away from the global fashionable as you can imagine through camping wildly.
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