AMD Radeon™ RX 6950 XT gddr6 Graphics Card

Product Information

The 5900X is one of the best CPUs from the previous AMD generation. It offers the most balanced price-to-performance ratio for high-end solutions. You could also go for the 5950X if you’re willing to pay a bit extra. However, we considered that the 5900X will provide power enough for any demanding task you put your rig against.

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. Long story short and without getting into the technicalities, a 192-bit bus means Nvidia had to go for 12GB of VRAM. 16GB isn't an option with a 192-bit bus. And for better or worse, 12GB is marginal when it comes to the most demanding current games. Even if every attempt at a new technology doesn't end up being used everywhere, Nvidia has been doing more over the past few generations. Ray tracing hardware and features have increased substantially since the RTX 20-series, and the tensor core hardware powering DLSS and AI applications is proving particularly useful these days. Now it has DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, and the uptake for DLSS 3 has been much faster than previous versions. One of the benefits of DLSS 3 is that it also requires the games to support Nvidia Reflex, so owners of other Nvidia GPUs also benefit. Moving on to the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 6950 XT is able to command top spot at 1080p, delivering 201 fps on average, which is an 8% increase over the 6900 XT. It's also a 5% boost over the RTX 3090 Ti, 12% over the RTX 3090, and 13% over the RTX 3080 Ti. The 6950 XT is the flagship solution of the AMD previous generation; even though it might seem a bit low. Considering today’s 7000-series, this is a fast and strong GPU capable of delivering great results for content creators, professional power users, and even gamers. Although, we’d normally not recommend using an x950 with only gaming purposes in mind. The AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT has a peak single precision compute performance of 23.65 TFLOPS, which is quite powerful and allows for smooth and efficient processing of large amounts of data.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. 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.

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. This is important when pairing with the RX 6950 XT, as the card will be used for demanding tasks. So, providing a large number of cores will ensure smooth performance. Then there's upscaling, which lowers the demands on VRAM, and the extra L2 cache Nvidia's slapped onto its Ada GPUs means it has the bandwidth, too. While AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution is an impressive upscaler in its own right, the company is still playing catchup with DLSS and even more so now that Nvidia has dropped the RTX 40-series' not-so-secret weapon: Frame Generation. 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.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 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.

Interestingly, as AMD’s RX 7000 series XT graphics cards become more evolved, power consumption remains an important aspect. The new arrival has a TDP 75 W below the older card, It’s also higher than the 200 W of the RTX 4070 though – so it’s not super efficient. Team red has a little way to go. RX 7800 XT vs 6950 XT: Performance It's not enabled in every game, and needs to be coded in by the devs, but it's being baked into game engines now and will certainly become more widely used. I don't want to find myself with an RX 6950 XT, proud of its old school raster performance, when I really want to be running some shiny new lighting effects at 4K in a new game. You can see my full results in the table above. There isn’t much to highlight outside of ray tracing performance. In Cyberpunk 2077,the RX 6950 XT massively underperforms compared to Nvidia’s cards, just like the RX 6900 XT. AMD’s current-gen cards aren’t great when it comes to ray tracing — read our RX 6500 XT review for another example — and the RX 6950 XT doesn’t change that. Content creation Jacob Roach / Digital Trends It's not just gaming technology, either. We don't know if the RTX 40-series support for FP8 calculations on the tensor cores will prove important in the future. The AV1 video encoding/decoding support on the other hand is already taking off. AMD and Intel offer AV1 encoding support as well, on their latest generation GPUs, but the 6950 XT is a previous generation part.Halo Infinite is rated ESRB “T” for Teen and PEGI 16. May contain content inappropriate for children. Please consult with ESRB.org, PEGI.info, or your regional game rating organization.