Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Vs AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: Which Is The Best Flagship GPU?

The biggest gun in Nvidia’s GPU arsenal, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, is now hitting the shelves carrying a price tag of $2000 for the Founders Edition. So, naturally, folks looking for a top-tier future-proof graphics card will be looking at competition from AMD before they drop north of a couple of thousand dollars. Thankfully, Team Red has an enthusiast-class GPU that challenges Nvidia’s best, and it goes by the name AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. AMD’s offering has an MSRP of $999, but the partners like MSI and Sapphire hawk their custom versions for around $1,300 via online and offline outlets.

AMD, as usual, is undercutting its rival in terms of pricing, but there are a few aspects worth keeping in mind before going with either choice. Starting with the areas where the AMD GPU reigns supreme, the Radeon RX 6900 XT offers a boost GPU frequency of 2250 MHz, while its Nvidia rival can only reach 1860 MHz, and the same applies for base frequency figures as well. In addition, the AMD flagship also draws in 300W of power and can run on an 850W power supply unit, while the RTX 3090 Ti has a 450W requirement.

But there are a few critical areas where the RTX 3090 Ti leaves its AMD competitor far behind. The top-tier Nvidia graphics card pushes the raw performance to 40 teraflops, while the Radeon RX 6900 XT only musters up to 23.04 teraflops of computing power. Nvidia’s flagship comes armed with 24GB of GDDR6X memory ticking at 21 Gbps and offering a peak bandwidth of over 1000 Gbps. AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT offers 16GB of GDDR6 memory with a lower 16 Gbps output and half the memory bandwidth of its Nvidia rival at 512 Gbps. The memory bus width is another key parameter where the Nvidia option proves to be a better value. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has a 384-bit memory interface, while AMD’s crown-jewel employs the 256-bit memory interface.

Again, It Comes Down To Price And Power Dynamics

Coming to the core specs, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti packs in 10,752 CUDA cores. Interestingly, Nvidia is shifting away from the dual 8-pin connector seen on the standard GeForce RTX 3090 in favor of a PCI 5.0-ready 16-pin power connector. And then there’s support for the whole slate of proprietary Nvidia solutions such as DLSS, Resizable Bar, ShadowPlay, Omniverse, G-Sync and Reflex, among others. But availability remains an issue, especially in times of an industry-wide shortage and scalpers spoiling it for everyone. The only place to buy a Founders Edition RTX 3090 Ti, Best Buy, has an out-of-stock status. Zotac has the Extreme Holo Edition available, but the brand’s online store is selling it at a $100 markup.

Over on AMD’s side, the Radeon RX 6900 XT packs 80 compute units and an equal number of ray accelerators. Just like Nvidia, AMD also sells its enthusiast-class GPU with a serving of in-house technologies such as AMD Fidelity FX, Radeon Image Sharpening, FreeSync, Radeon Anti-Lag and Radeon Boost, to name a few. The AMD flagship is significantly more affordable than Nvidia’s, but the RTX 3090 Ti offers more memory that is also faster and more performance teraflops to go with it. It is hard to judge the winner here without credible third-party benchmark comparisons. But really, all one has to think about is if that additional firepower and suite of features on Nvidia’s flagship are worth the extra few hundred dollars.

Sources: AMD, NVIDIA

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