Tested: 5 things you need to know about AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT

Don’t have time to sift through benchmarking charts? Read this instead.

- BRAD CHACOS

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is finally here, and it’s Team Red’s first enthusiast-class graphics card to hit the streets in a long, long time.

AMD’s $1,000 GPU manages to meet or beat Nvidia’s monstrous GeForce RTX 3090 (go. pcworld.com/39fe) in many games for a whopping $500 less and stay quiet while doing it, but that doesn’t make this beast an automatic must-buy. Our RDNA 2 architecture explainer (go.pcworld.com/2rdn) and comprehensive Radeon RX 6900 XT review (go.pcworld.com/69xt) wade deep into the details and benchmarks, but if you don’t have time to read thousands of words and parse dozens of performance graphs, here are five key things you need to know about AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT.

1. IT’S OUTRAGEOUSLY FAST

This is AMD’s first card to challenge Nvidia’s flagship GeForce offering in many, many moons, and it’s easy to see why the company released it: The Radeon RX 6900 XT smokes. Even with all the eye candy cranked to maximum in games, AMD’s card is fast enough to spit out enough frames to keep 4K displays and high refresh rate 1440p monitors fed very well. The $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 is faster, yes—by 9.2 percent at 4K and a mere 2.2 percent at 1440p across our standard testing suite—but it costs a staggering $500 more. AMD also manages to beat the RTX 3090’s performance flat-out in select games on our system, including at 4K. (It also loses in some games by a considerable margin.)

If you want some of the absolute best 1440p gaming possible, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is worth considering, especially given the RTX 3090’s steep price premium.