GeForce RTX 4090 vs Radeon RX 6900 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which has a core clock frequency of 1825 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 5120 SPUs, 320 Texture Address Units, and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		300 Watts
GeForce RTX 4090		450 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 4090 should perform much faster than the Radeon RX 6900 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1042432 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6900 XT		524288 MB/sec
	Difference: 518144 (99%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 4090 should be much (about 96%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 6900 XT. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1144320 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6900 XT		584000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 560320 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 4090 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		393360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 6900 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 159760 (68%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.