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. Chances are you won't really see it though, but that's ok because Gigabyte's Aorus Fusion 2.0 will let you program 16.7 million different color options into the Gigabyte logo along the visible edge, including several different patterns like color wave, color pulse, and more, that adds some additional RGB flair to your build. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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! 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. 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.

Sapphire RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure tested

We've tested 11 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, of which we'll go into more detail for a few of them before looking at our 11 game average data and cost per frame analysis. Benchmarks We should note though, there's still some market manipulation going with GPUs when multiple products are sharing the same silicon. As we noted in the cost per frame analysis, the more affordable RX 6800 is meant to cost 21% more than the 6700 XT, while the 6800 XT is meant to cost 35% more. However, the RX 6800 currently costs 55% more, while the 6800 XT costs 76% more. The simple explanation is that the 6800 and 6900 series share the same silicon. 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.

Even at 1440p, the Radeon GPUs maintain a decent performance advantage over GeForce competitors and here the 6950 XT was 12% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, 21% faster than the RTX 3090 and 23% faster than the RTX 3080 Ti. Those are impressive margins, though it was just 5% faster than the original 6900 XT. 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.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. And we do want to stress that this is a gamer's graphics card, without a doubt. It does better than every other AMD card on our creative benchmarks, but it still way behind where even the RTX 3060 Ti is across Blender's three benchmark tests. It's a bit difficult to go hard after AMD for raising prices in this segment given how much cheaper Radeon GPUs are than their GeForce competitors. Of course, AMD would love you to pay more, but they simply don't have the mindshare to get away with it the same way Nvidia can. In other words, AMD is not intentionally doing gamers a favor, but it works out kind of nice for consumers that don't have eyes only for the green team. 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.