AMD Radeon™ RX 6950 XT gddr6 Graphics Card

Product Information

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. The higher power limit also comes into play, and while Sapphire didn't specify an official TBP (Typical Board Power) and only gave TGP (Total Graphics Power, which only measures the power consumed by the main GPU chip), all told we'd expect performance to be about 10% than the 6900 XT. As we'll see in a moment, that's often the case but there are occasions where the 6950 XT delivers much higher performance. We'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!

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. Starting with Rainbow Six Extraction, we find the 6950 XT to be chart topping at 1080p with 309 fps, a 10% increase over the 6900 XT. That allowed it to budge ahead of the much more expensive RTX 3090 Ti at this lower resolution and it's an 11% boost over the RTX 3080 Ti, a GeForce GPU that's still more expensive than the 6950 XT.

That said, we are only talking about a 3% boost over the RTX 3090 Ti. The Radeon is around 45% cheaper right now though, so that's a win for AMD. When compared to the 6900 XT though we're only looking at a 6% boost, so certainly not worth the premium. 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. VforV said:I did not contradict you on the appeal of the RX 6800, I just said you mostly never found this GPU available compared to others and from now on it will be even less available to non-existent... That's all that I said.

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. But that's the case even with the RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS on, which only just barely hits 60 fps (ocassionally) in Cyberpunk 2077's benchmark at 4K with the Ultra Ray Tracing graphics preset. And, even then, that's its max frame rate, its average is in the high 40s, while without any upscaling, the RTX 3090 Ti only hits 24 fps on those settings. 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.Starting with the 1080p fps average gaming data we see that for low resolution gamers targeting maximum fps – we imagine mostly competitive shooter type gamers – the Radeon RX 6950 XT is about as good as it gets for out of the box performance. As of writing, the 6900 XT and 6800 XT are almost within the same price range and although the new 6950 XT is likely going to be more expensive, in terms of value it's probably going to be only marginally worse with the potential to be worlds better than Nvidia's high-end options since GeForce GPUs are still selling considerably higher than MSRPs. This is not a bad result for AMD in terms of value though. The RTX 3080 Ti, for example, might be 11% faster, but it also costs 16% more, while the RTX 3090 Ti costs 82% more for a 28% increase at 4K in this title. 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.

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 Consumption 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.As of January 2022, Radeon Super Resolution is compatible with Radeon RX 5000 series graphics and newer and works with games that support exclusive full-screen mode. AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.1.3 or newer is required. GD-197.

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.FSR support is still rolling out, so you may still need to make adjustments to your settings to hit the top of the parabolic curve where graphics quality and 60 fps line up. 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. Extreme performance graphics cards tend to be used at higher resolutions, and 4K ultra was the only resolution we tested where the RX 6950 XT couldn't beat the RTX 3090 Ti in standard gaming performance. It does come in second place overall, beating the RTX 3090, which is perhaps one reason why Nvidia released the 3090 Ti at the end of March. Either way, these are likely to be the two fastest cards from their respective companies until the next generation GPUs arrive this fall — and we also don't expect the top Intel Arc Alchemist GPU to be able to match either one in general gaming performance. 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.