Is AMD getting the crown back? Radeon RX 6900 XT 16 GB review with benchmarks and a deeper technical analysis

1 - Introduction, Data and Test Setup 2 - Teardown: PCB, Power Scheme and Cooler 3 - Borderlands 3 4 - Control (+DXR) 5 - Far Cry New Dawn 6 - Ghost Recon Breakpoint 7 - Horizon Zero Dawn 8 - Metro Exodus (+DXR) 9 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider 10 - Watch Dog Legion (+DXR) 11 - Wolfenstein Youngblood 12 - World War Z 13 - Power Consumption and Efficiency in Gaming 14 - Power Consumption in Detail, Voltages and Standards 15 - Transients and PSU Recommendation 16 - Clock Rate and Temperatures 17 - Fan Curve and Noise 18 - Summary and Conclusion

Power consumption and efficiency with DXR

If you activate DXR and use the various raytracing functions, the image of the absolute, average power consumption in watts over the whole benchmark corresponds roughly to the values that you could expect without DXR, if a full load is generated correctly

In terms of efficiency, the performance disadvantage spoils the better positioning of the Radeon cards, because although the power consumption of the current GeForce cards is higher, the performance is still adequate in proportion. SAM helps, but not much.

Power consumption and efficiency Rasterization Only

If DXR is left out, the Radeons suddenly show their strength. The absolute measured power consumption of the Radeon RX 6900 XT is more than 50 watts below the only slightly faster GeForce RTX 3090 FE and AMD didn’t have such an efficiency advantage in the last years. This is really impressive and shows that the GeForce RTX 3080 and even more so the RTX 3090 FE have to work far above the sweet spot to be slightly ahead in performance.

You can see it in the efficiency evaluation that only the GeForce RTX 3070 FE can push itself between the new Radeons, which is quite remarkable. The GeForce RTX 3090 FE is even a bit more efficient than the RTX 3080 FE, but stays far behind. But at least all the current cards stay below the values of the old NVIDIA flagship RTX 2080 Ti. This is also a realization that you can take with you.

In Ultra-HD the absolute values of the power consumption of all cards increase a bit, which isn’t surprising due to the high GPU load. Here NVIDIA would certainly score big points with DLSS if this feature were implemented more extensively. But it is again over 50 watts that the red top model needs less than the green one.

In terms of efficiency, the picture is very similar to WQHD, where the Radeon RX 6800 XT only has to admit defeat due to the GeForce RTX 3090’s poorer decimal place. The RX 6900 XT is once again the most efficient of the “big” cards.

For all further details about power consumption I have of course two more chapters, because especially the details are already important, also when buying a power supply.