The 6900 XT the direct competitor to the RTX 3090. It is not $1000 cheaper. The 6900 XT was announced as $999 and the RTX 3090 is priced at $1499. The RTX 3090 also has raytracing hardware, support for machine learning, and other things. We have yet to see how the 6900 XT behaves in less than ideal conditions and performs with raytracing on. In the end, there might be other things which justify the extra $500.