The Radeon RX 6950 XT is the quickest AMD graphics card on the earth, and can stay so till at the very least November when AMD is anticipated to announce a brand new vary of next-gen GPUs. It initially debuted at $1000, undercutting the RTX 3090 Ti at $1500, however third-party fashions may price far more – akin to this $1200 PowerColor Red Devil. Today although, with that complete ‘impending launch of higher graphics playing cards’ factor, the 6950 XT is all the way down to $800 at Amazon, which is an superior deal for the extent of graphics efficiency on provide.

I’ve examined a couple of Radeon 6000-series Red Devil playing cards, they usually’ve all the time been quick and quiet in my testing. Apart from the hellish identify and pink color scheme, you get some indication of the efficiency from the fairly hefty heatsink, which is technically two slots (however bodily occupies about three) with loads of fin stacks and warmth pipes to maintain issues comparatively chill. There are two fan modes too, an OC mode and a silent mode, with increase clocks of 2435MHz and 2324MHz respectively – the latter being the default increase clock for the RX 6950 XT and the previous being a wholesome 5 p.c overclock.

So how briskly is that this RX 6950 XT? At 4K, anticipate the RTX 3090 to supply across the similar to barely higher frame-rates (~10%) in nearly all titles. There are some outliers, like Death Stranding, Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the place AMD may even claw a slender margin over the Nvidia various. But realistically, you’re getting just a few share factors higher efficiency right here than from the barely older RX 6900 XT at $690, so that is much less about total worth and extra about getting the quickest doable Team Red card that is accessible proper now. Happily, this implies the Digital Foundry RX 6900 XT evaluation can at the very least be a comparatively correct information to the type of efficiency you may anticipate; sadly there is no RPS evaluation for the RX 6950 XT or RX 6900 XT that I can discover amongst the archives to hyperlink to as an alternative.

It’s value interested by options too. AMD has traditionally lagged behind Nvidia on this division, with a worse media encoder and no reply to the temporal upsampling (and frame-rate boosting) supplied by DLSS. However, that’s beginning to change, and whereas RT efficiency from AMD’s first-gen implementation is not as robust as that of Nvidia’s second-gen various, the discharge of FSR 2.0 (and the enterprising modding group that added it to a bunch of DLSS video games) means issues are slowly enhancing.

So: if you would like AMD’s quickest card for a couple of weeks, get the RX 6950 XT at $800. If you need a fantastic 4K card for much less, get the RX 6900 for $690. If you wish to get the very best worth 4K choice from AMD… perhaps contemplate ready till subsequent month to see their RDNA3 choices, for those who’re keen to place up with the chance that the primary items to be shipped are a) overly costly or b) all offered by the point you attempt to snag one.

Anyway, thanks for testing the article, and tune in once more tomorrow for extra offers as and after I discover them!