Dec 09, 2020 20:00:00

Review summary of overseas media about AMD's RDNA2 architecture top GPU 'Radeon RX 6900 XT'

Among AMD's RDNA2 architecture GPU-equipped grabbo announced in October 2020, the top model ' Radeon RX 6900 XT ' will be released on December 11, 2020. Since reviews were published from various media prior to the release, I summarized what kind of evaluation the Radeon RX 6900 XT is from overseas media.

◆ Game performance
Tom's Hardware, which publishes reviews of various hardware, incorporates seven graphics boards, including the Radeon RX 6900 XT and competing GeForce RTX 3090, into a PC with an Intel Core i9-9900K and 32GB of DDR4 memory. , I measured the average frame rate when running the latest 13 kinds of games at the maximum 4K setting. The result is the graph below. The average frame rate of the Radeon RX 6900 XT is 85.0fps, which is lower than the 93.6fps of the competing GeForce RTX 3090, but higher than the 82.6fps of the GeForce RTX 3080, which is the high end of rival NVIDIA. You can see that it has the performance to compete head-on with the GPU.

Comparing the frame rates of each game, the Radeon RX 6900 XT shows a frame rate close to 75.5 fps and the GeForce RTX 3090's 75.9 fps in '

Borderlands 3 ' optimized for AMD GPUs, and Radeon with manual overclocking The RX 6900 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 3090 at 80.5fps.

On the other hand, in '

Final Fantasy XIV ' optimized for NVIDIA GPU, the average frame rate of Radeon RX 6900 XT is 108.6 fps, which is lower than GeForce RTX 3090 as well as GeForce RTX 3080. It was.

Furthermore, when measuring the frame rate with ray tracing enabled in the late lacing compatible game '

Watch Dogs Legion ', the Radeon RX 6900 XT is 20.6 fps, which is far from the 29.8 fps of the GeForce RTX 3080. In this test, DLSS , which is NVIDIA's load reduction function, is disabled. According to Tom's Hardware, enabling DLSS will further increase the performance difference.

The tech site PC World combined an overclocked Intel Core i7-8700K with a graphics board that included the Radeon RX 6900 XT to measure the average frame rate at Horizon Zero Dawn . The result is the graph below. The red line shows the average frame rate at 1440p and the blue line shows the average frame rate at 4K. The Radeon RX 6900 XT records 143fps at 1440p and 89fps at 4K, both of which exceed the average frame rate of the GeForce RTX 3090.

Next, by measuring the average frame rate of '

Metro: Exodus ' at 4K resolution, we investigated the difference in the average frame rate with and without ray tracing and with or without DLSS. In the graph below, the green line indicates ray tracing enabled / DLSS enabled, the red line indicates ray tracing enabled / DLSS disabled, and the blue line and the orange line of the Radeon RX 6900 XT indicate ray tracing disabled / DLSS disabled. I am. The average frame rate of the Radeon RX 6900 XT with and without ray tracing is lower than the average frame rate of the GeForce RTX 3090. Furthermore, in GeForce RTX 3090, if DLSS is enabled, even if ray tracing is enabled, it is possible to operate at an average frame rate close to the average frame rate when ray tracing is disabled, and it is clear that DLSS is effective. I will.

According to PCWorld, AMD is working on the development of DLSS-like load reduction function 'Fidelity FX Super Resolution', but since there is no compatible game at the time of writing the article, it is big for NVIDIA GPU in ray tracing. It is said that there is a difference.

PCWorld said, 'The Radeon RX 6900 XT has a 4.2% performance improvement at 1440p and a 6.7% performance improvement at 4K compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, but the price is 53% higher. The highest performance among AMD fans. It's worth buying the Radeon RX 6900 XT if you want, but most gamers will be happier if they win the Radeon RX 6800 XT or the GeForce RTX 3080, which are significantly cheaper with similar performance. '

◆ Creative performance
'

HotHardware ', which deals with hardware-related news, evaluates the performance of the Radeon RX 6900 XT in creative tasks by measuring the performance of calculation processing software.

The graph below shows the results of measuring the image processing performance by GPGPU with 'SiSoft SANDRA 2020', which measures the performance related to scientific analysis and image processing. The Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT rank high and score higher than the GeForce RTX 3090.

On the other hand, looking at the benchmark score of '

IndigoBench ' which measures 3DCG rendering performance by GPU, the score of Radeon RX 6900 XT is not only GeForce RTX 3090 but also GeForce RTX 2080 Ti of NVIDIA's previous generation top GPU The result was inferior.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 3090 in some applications. In addition, the RDNA2 architecture used in the Radeon RX 6900 XT is also used in the latest game consoles such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, so optimization by game developers will be prioritized and in the future. It can be expected that the original performance will be brought out.

◆ Availability
Anandtech , a tech news site, says the biggest problem with the Radeon RX 6900 XT is its 'low availability.'

The Radeon RX 6900 XT, like the other Radeon RX 6000 series and AMD's latest CPU, the Ryzen 3000 series, is manufactured on a 7nm process. In addition, the Radeon RX 6900 XT needs to carefully select and use wafers with a large area of 519 mm2 for a GPU, so it is expected that the yield will be poor and the number of wafers on the market will decrease. thing.

In Japan, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is scheduled to go on sale at 19:00 on December 11, 2020, and the domestic price is undecided at the time of writing the article.