AMD Radeon™ RX 6950 XT gddr6 Graphics Card

Product Information

I will agree with the 6800 is going to become really scarce now, maybe more than before, when it drops further in price if it gets squeezed from above. So while the Nvidia RTX cards are definitely the reigning champs at ray tracing, in many cases you simply won't be using ray tracing, since even on the top-tier Nvidia GPUs, you're still looking at a 4K slideshow without upscaling tech like DLSS and FSR, and not every game has implemented those technologies yet. In the case of most games you will be playing for the next couple of years, you're much more likely to need to lean on rasterization performance as you always have. As of February 2022, the number of FreeSync technology-enabled displays available is ~2000+, compared to the publicly available listings of competing product solutions at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/g-sync-monitors/specs/ which lists 308 screens. GD-130.

We'll set up our cost per frame analysis with the mythical MSRP, just to visualize what would be, even if it's not relevant to the current market. The margins remained the same at 1440p. The 6950 XT edged out the RTX 3090 Ti by a tiny margin and boosted performance over the 6900 XT by 11%. Then at 4K the RTX 3090 Ti takes over, beating the 6950 XT by a 7% margin. Still the 6950 XT was just able to edge out the RTX 3090 and 3080 Ti, with a 12% boost over the 6900 XT. Cost Per Frame In fact, the RX 6950 XT only starts to beat out Nvidia cards in Blender starting at the RTX 3060, and even then it's just barely in only one of the three tests. Similarly, it's Adobe Premiere performance lags about 50 points behind the RTX 3060, and the RTX 3060 is about a third of the price of the RX 6950 XT. If you're a creative, you have a lot better options out there that will offer you a much better value for the workflows that you need. The Radeon RX 6950 XT does well against the RTX 3090 Ti at a dramatically lower price point, so in that sense it does a great job and is an excellent competitor. It's also not bad in terms of value next to the original 6900 XT.Fran- said:What a terrible model... The Sapphire is way way better, like always. MSI didn't even try to make this card decent; more like just fulfilling commitments or quotas.

JarredWaltonGPU said:In the US, the RX 6800 has been in relatively short supply and the price has been significantly marked up for basically ever. At present, retail prices are roughly as follows: The Radeon GPUs don't fare quite as well in The Outer Worlds as evidenced by these 1080p results. The 6950 XT was only slightly slower than the RTX 3090 Ti, but this is the first sample we have where it wasn't faster at 1080p. We're looking at similar performance between the RTX 3080 Ti, 6900 XT, RTX 3090, 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti. As usual, it's 4K that proves to be a challenge for RNDA2 in its battle with Ampere and now it's the RTX 3090 Ti that leads the 6950 XT by an 8% margin. We're looking at a 12% performance boost for the 6950 XT over the 6900 XT, and that was enough to put it just ahead of the RTX 3090 and 3080 Ti. As such, it is a great option for gamers out there who can afford a premium card, but aren't actually giant, human-shaped, walking piles of money – it least it would be, if RDNA 3 wasn't right around the corner. AMD's next-gen graphics cards are likely to make some major advances in terms of ray tracing and hardware-assisted upscaling tech that should blow the current generation of AMD cards out of the water, so buying anything premium from this generation right now is iffy at best.In this wishful scenario, AMD and Nvidia would have been evenly matched in terms of performance and value. Looking at the Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3080 10GB, a slight premium for the RTX 3080 can be seen, but that product probably does command a slight premium. We're going to wrap up the individual game data with a look at F1 2021, and of course, we'll start with 1080p. We find another example where the 6950 XT is unable to beat the RTX 3090 series at 1080p, this time trailing the RTX 3090 Ti by an 8% margin, though it was a little faster than the 3080 Ti which is technically a good result. Interestingly, MSI lists a power consumption of just 340W for its RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio, but that feels more like the TDP for the GPU rather than the full card power. We've actually tested two different cards (the first died after a couple of days for unknown reasons), and both consumed far more than 340W at their default settings. In fact, the second card used a few more watts than the initial card. We'll get to the actual power measurements later, but we saw closer to 430W out of MSI's card, and enabling Rage mode (with its 10% bump in power limits) pushed that up to 440W. Basically, it was right in the same ballpark as the RTX 3090 Ti.

This is where FSR would be beneficial for AMD, but Cyberpunk 2077 is the only game with FSR support out of these six. We'll have to wait and see if FSR 2.0 can make bigger inroads, but really AMD simply needs faster hardware to handle 4K with maxed out ray tracing settings in most of these games. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition was the only game to clear 30 fps, and only barely. I don't think AMD will totally halt RX 6800 sales, but it has always been a GPU that only exists to take care of yields. If a Navi 21 isn't at least 90% functional on the CUs, and fully functional on the cache and memory controllers, it can't be sold as a 6800 XT. I do wonder if some Navi 21 chips end up as RX 6700 / RX 6750 XT, just because there will inevitably be flaws in the Infinity Cache or memory controllers. But perhaps AMD just doesn't bother with such chips.Increasing the resolution to 1440p sees the RTX 3080 Ti close in on the 6950 XT though the margin to the RTX 3090 remains much the same while the 3090 Ti was 8% faster. We're also looking at a 12% increase for the 6950 XT over the 6900 XT, or about as good as you could hope for. If you're not a gamer though, there really isn't a whole lot for you here. While the RX 6950 XT is the best AMD graphics card to hit the market, its creative workload performance still lags considerably behind the best Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, and without Tensor cores, the RX 6950 XT simply isn't up for the task of intense machine learning models and other similar research work that makes Nvidia RTX cards so prized. As for the Steam Survey. I mentioned this in the news report where the 6900XT finally appeared in it. I've had it for a good while now and I've never seen the Steam Survey pop. Same with my laptop and its 6800M. I've swapped my CPU 3 times now and I've only been survey'd once; before I even got my Vega64 to replace my RX480. All of this to just point out and reinforce the point that the Steam Survey is weird. In nearly all of our benchmarks, the RX 6950 XT falls short of the RTX 3090 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and even the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, depending on the test. But where the RX 6950 XT falters, it's not completely bowled over, and its greatest weakness is when ray tracing is being pushed to the max.

Interestingly, the 6950 XT is slightly better value than the original model at the MSRP, dropping the cost per frame by about 2%, or essentially they are about the same. The RTX 3090 Ti costs 70% more per frame than the 6950 XT based on the MSRP. Now let's move on to real-world pricing... Nvidia cards are simply better at ray tracing since their ray tracing cores are just a more mature graphics architecture at this stage than AMD's first generation Ray Accelerators introduced with AMD RDNA 2. The RX 6950 XT's rasterization performance is still just as good or better than the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090's, with the latest AMD card beating even the RTX 3090 Ti in 3DMark's Fire Strike Ultra. Finally at 4K, the 6950 XT is only able to match the RTX 3080 10GB despite offering a 12% boost over the 6900 XT. The RTX 3090 Ti is now 22% faster than the 6950 XT as well. Next we have Watch Dogs: Legion and again the 6950 XT tops the chart at 1080p, averaging 168 fps or 6% faster than the 6900 XT, and a mere 6% faster than what should be the much cheaper 6800 XT, though in reality it isn't. Finally at 4K the 6950 XT falls further behind the RTX 3080 Ti and trails the RTX 3090 Ti by a 16% margin, and that's despite boosting performance over the original 6900 XT by 13%. Power ConsumptionWe're also curious whether AMD will add tensor core-like hardware to RDNA 3 when that arrives, given that Intel has that on Arc, and AMD has similar hardware on its data center MI200 series "Aldebaran" GPU. Intel's XeSS will support the matrix engines on Arc and will use DP4a (INT8) hardware on non-Intel GPUs as far as we're aware, but maybe AMD and Intel could kiss and make up and try to make XeSS a truly open competitor to DLSS. Stranger things have happened!