Radeon RX 6900 XT Launches As Flagship Card With Open-Source Drivers But Very Limited Availability

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon RX 6900 XT Launches As Flagship Card With Open-Source Drivers But Very Limited Availability

After the Radeon RX 6800 series launched just under a month ago, the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is launching today. This is currently the most powerful RDNA 2 graphics card and should work under Linux with the open-source driver stack but the card is likely to be scarcer than even the RX 6800 series...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-RX-6900-XT

[Volta]

It's rather strange AMD didn't send you one for testing. Maybe they will?

[Michael]

It's rather strange AMD didn't send you one for testing. Maybe they will?

Samples are apparently very limited but seems lots of Windows testing today at least. We'll see if anything turns up in the coming weeks.

[schmidtbag]

It's rather strange AMD didn't send you one for testing. Maybe they will?

Seeing as others seemed to not get one, I'm guessing AMD is just like "why bother sending out free press kits when all stock will be sold in minutes anyway?". The 6900XT is a bit underwhelming anyway, so in this case, less press isn't really hurting them.

[torsionbar28]

I was able to get my hands on a 9600XT, does that count? AGP interface of course.

[Veto]

Just give us the 6700 instead.... And some availability of the Ryzen 5 5600X. Who cares about paper launches??

[DarkCloud]

I think these limited launches are intensional. It's like a giant smoke test for their products. As a recall on 10k units is less costly then 100k units

[mdedetrich]

After watching reviews on the card I think its pretty much a dud product. Essentially the 6900XT is just a 6800XT with higher binned silicon + some extra compute units so the GPU can be pushed a bit further (you can verify this with the specs). Most reviews put the card at roughly 5-10% faster than the 6800XT but at more than 50% of the cost.

Although its obvious that this card is catering to the "people that have a lot of money and just want to buy the best crowd", if you are already in this demographic then you probably don't care about the value for the money so you wont bat an eye at just getting a Nvidia 3900 (which has more memory that is GDDR6X as well as having MUCH better ray tracing performance and is generally slightly faster than the 6900XT anyways).

Even for productivity scenarios the 6900XT is gimped, I agree with hardware unboxed in that the only people I see buying this card are AMD fanboys

[dylanmtaylor]

That felt like a paper launch only - despite my best efforts I couldn't manage to buy one.

[MadeUpName]

I was able to get my hands on a 9600XT, does that count? AGP interface of course.

Faster than any 6900XT card you can buy currently.