AMD Radeon RX 6900XT | The Flagship BIG NAVI GPU?

There’s a ton of excitement currently surrounding the latest 30-series from Nvidia, with customers searching far and wide to try and get their mitts on one of the new high-performing GPUs. Whilst this occurs, AMD sits quietly in the theoretical darkness waiting for the right moment to unveil their new lineup of GPUs – the 6000 series.

Whilst there isn’t a ton of information on the latest range of AMD GPUs, leaked images have surfaced over the last couple of weeks, re-sparking anticipation for what these new cards might potentially offer to this extremely competitive marketplace.

The latest rumors from AMD enthusiasts offer consumers a glimpse of what’s to come, with three SKUs being named, the potential performance power of the flagship offerings, and the first look at aesthetics too.

The RX 6000 series is AMD’s latest lineup of GPUs, superseding the 5000 series which AMD currently offers. Right now we know very little about the 6000 series from AMD – all we have at the current moment is a few released images, a name of the lineup, and some speculative thoughts from the likes of well-known tech YouTubers.

That said, what we do know is that AMD will be releasing at least two GPUs in the 6000 series lineup, one of which offers a triple-fan configuration and the other a dual fan configuration. The triple-fan GPU looks set to be their flagship offering at this stage, however, that is still pure speculation.

After much confusion regarding the release dates of the new Big NAVI GPUs, AMD finally released a teaser video that’ll lay rest to claims. The new RDNA 2 RX 6000 series GPU lineup will finally be unveiled on October 28th, 2020. This will be the first proper look at the latest GPUs, including full specifications, release dates, and performance – we hope.

Either way, it’ll still be the official first look at what could be the most anticipated hardware offerings to be released this year.

Recent tweets from Frank Azor himself have sparked rumors (and hopes) that the AMD launch will be much better than the recent 30-series launches from Nvidia – although that wouldn’t be very hard to do. Whereas the Nvidia cards were out of stock seconds after going live, it looks like AMD may not be a paper launch and will actually have some reasonable stock levels available for people to get their hands on.

If history is set to repeat itself, the RX 6000 series GPUs will be a shade cheaper than the Nvidia RTX 30-series competition. So, what that means is, there will likely be three initial SKUs that will undercut the 3070, 3080, and 3090.

That being said, we still aren’t fully aware of what these new GPUs are going to cost. And when you factor in how well-priced the Nvidia RTX 30-series has been, it’ll be interesting to see how AMD prices this extremely important GPU lineup.

Preparing your PC for new hardware can be a tricky process, especially if you aren’t very tech-savvy. Learning the components that are best suited to a specific graphics card is a skill that takes a decent amount of knowledge to achieve.

Luckily for you, we’ve got plenty of that. We’ll be going over what you’ll need to ensure your PC is ready for the Big NAVI GPU lineup.

• CPU: As for the CPU, you want to be looking at a fairly high-end processor to ensure you don’t encounter any bottleneck when gaming.
• Motherboard: Depending on whether you go Intel or AMD, you’ll want to get one of the latest motherboard chipsets when building a PC around a GPU of this standard. Not only will it get the best out of your CPU, but it’ll also accommodate the necessary hardware to ensure you can extract the maximum potential out of big NAVI.
• PSU: One of the most overlooked pieces of hardware your PC needs for the latest RX 6000 series is the power supply. On average, I would recommend a 700W PSU for a GPU of this power. The larger of the two GPUs displayed has dual 8-pin connectors, meaning it’ll require at least 300W of power. That’s before factoring in any of the other PC components.

Whilst no official announcement has been made as of yet, there are live rumors surrounding the IDs of three SKUs released under the RX 6000 family series. Those GPUs will be as follows:

• AMD RX 6700(XT)
• AMD RX 6800(XT)
• AMD RX 6900(XT)

Despite not knowing the official IDs for these GPUs, it’s safe to say that AMD will be releasing at least three SKUs for the upcoming RX 6000 series lineup.

As we mentioned above, Nvidia has just released their impressive RTX 3080 GPU – with initial benchmark results looking very promising. One of the big questions surrounding the new GPUs will be how Navi 21 compares to the RTX 3080 and 3090.

Ultimately, we aren’t fully versed in the performance the new RX 6000 series GPUs will provide. However, there have been some leaked specifications that make for very interesting assumptions.

• The RX 6900XT will be built on last gen’s 7nm process and will support DirectX 12 ultimate
• It will support hardware-raytracing and variable-rate shading
• The die will measure somewhere in the region of 500mm and consist of 23,000 million transistors
• Navi 21 will feature 5120 shading units, 320 texture mapping units, 96 ROPS
• Operating frequency will be 1500MHz (base), 1735MHz (boost), 2000MHz+(Game mode)
• We could see 80 compute units equipped to the latest flagship offering
• Despite still having a small 256-bit bus, Big NAVI could offer a 128mb cache – infinity cache as AMD are calling it

If all the above rumors were to be true, we would almost definitely have a GPU on our hands that outperforms the likes of Nvidia’s RTX 3080 and 3090. Massive if true but, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

There you have it guys, our quick rundown of everything we currently know about AMD’s Big NAVI GPU lineup. Whilst most of the information out there is leaked rumours, you’ll be happy to know we won’t have to wait too much longer until we get real concrete data on the latest graphics cards from AMD.

The live announcement of Zen 3 will be on the 8th of October, all of which will be covered via our news section on the day. Big NAVI will be at the end of the month, 28th of October to be exact, and all coverage can be found in the same place!

Drop us a comment in the section below if you have any questions or thoughts on the latest Big NAVI GPUS. Better still, you can now head on over to our Community Hub where you can discuss everything GPU related with like-minded individuals.