AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion is a 2020 action-adventure game published by Ubisoft and developed by its Toronto studio. It is the third instalment in the Watch Dogs series, and the sequel to 2016’s Watch Dogs 2. Legion was released on October 29, 2020 for Microsoft Windows and has received generally favorable reviews.

Watch Dogs Legion Built-in Benchmark

We tested this game title using the built-in benchmark with the ‘very high’ graphics quality setting with the DirectX 12 API. We benchmarked at 1080p, 1440p and 4K display resolutions with and without Ray Tracing enabled at the ‘High’ quality setting.

Watch Dogs Legion Very High Image Quality Settings

Each test was run three times and then we charted the average 0.1% minimum frame rate along with the average frame rate. This adds up to 18 benchmark runs per card and we tested 15 graphics cards, so you are looking at well over 250 benchmark runs on just this one game title.

Performance of the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT was mighty impressive on this game title with ray tracing turned off. The new Radeon RX 6900 XT beat all the other cards at 1080P and 1440P display resolutions. At 4K display settings the Radeon RX 6900 XT came in behind only the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 by about 6 FPS or around 8%. Not bad considering the price difference between the 6900 XT and 3090!

With ray tracing enabled and set to high the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT performed about the same as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 at 1080P and 1440P. At the tougher 4K resolution the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT fell back in the pack a bit and was slower than the GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Ti with regards to average FPS. The 0.1% lows on the Radeon RX 6900 XT were still better than both of those cards at 4K.

So, AMD has really strong performance on this game title when ray tracing is not turned on and struggles to compete with NVIDIA’s latest cards when it is enabled.