`- They were holding out on us.
AMD's launching yet another GPU,
and now with the GPU shortages
(knocking wood)
maybe coming to an end heck!
Maybe you'll even be able to get one of these at MSRP.
But why is this called the 6950 XT? That's weird isn't it?
And that's not the only thing that's weird about this.
Let's get into it. But first, let's get into our sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
- Wanna know why this GPU is weird?
Well, it's because it is the exact same GPU
as this one, the 6900 XT.
Almost literally nothing has changed.
It's the same silicon, same amount of memory,
same infinity cache, same almost everything.
The only differences are that the memory
is rated for 18 Gigabytes per second instead of 16,
and higher Core Clocks.
How high? Less than 5% more across the board.
But the board has more than 11% higher power?
What is AMD thinking?
How could these tiny tweaks
possibly represent enough of a difference
to justify a whole new SKU?
Well, they didn't give us a whole lot of time
to figure it out.
And they didn't even seed us a founder's edition card,
instead letting MSI handle it,
giving us their Gaming X Trio SKU.
To compare against, we have all of the strongest cards,
but the one to watch out for is the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti,
since on paper it is the price competitor.
Things start off well for AMD with F1 2021's
traditional rasterization performance
clearly favoring team red's infinity cache implementation
that puts both the 6900 XT and the new 6500 XT
well ahead of the RTX 3090 Ti.
As much of a strength as infinity cache is,
ray tracing is still Nvidia's home turf
and AMD loses by as much as it gains when we switched it on.
This pattern holds for Far Cry 6 too,
although the performance gap with ray tracing disabled
isn't as wide as it was for F1,
neither is Nvidia's lead with ray tracing enabled.
With a 6950 XT basically neck and neck with 3090 Ti.
Forza Horizon 4 and HITMAN 3
both repeat F1 2021's results almost perfectly,
with a significant lead for team red's refreshed GPU
but Microsoft Flight Simulator
appears to heavily favor Nvidia
with a massive 24% lead in the minimum frame rates.
CS:GO puts a cap on it
with another performance canyon event
with frame rates so high, you're unlikely to notice anyway.
Productivity, though, once AMD's domain
in the years before RTX cards,
is now firmly in Nvidia's hands,
with significant performance gaps in blender
and we're not even using
the RTX accelerated optics render here.
The performance of the 6950 XT is not unusable by any means,
but you can get this level of performance
with a significantly cheaper card from team green.
PugetBench is interesting
because while the test results
are more or less the same across Creative Cloud,
that premiere score on the 6950 XT is a standout.
More than just outpacing the 6900 XT,
it pushes past even the RTX 3090 Ti to take the crown here
by about as much as that card beats the 3080 Ti.
LuxMark swings the pendulum back to NVIDIA, however,
as does Indigo Benchmark.
AMD's RDNA 2 simply isn't as good at these tasks
as NVIDIA ampere detector is,
at least with these implementations.
And we can see more of that with SPECviewperf,
where 3DS Max, CATIA and Creo
all see Radeons following behind.
The bump in memory bandwidth does allow the 6950 XT
to pull ahead of the pack in energy and medical tests,
although Solidworks is a bloodbath.
Although it's worth noting
that SPECviewperf is using Solidworks 2022
while expanded GPU support landed in 2021.
Thankfully, SPEC has an application benchmark
for Solidworks 2021, and we have a license,
so after forcing the real view accelerator to run on HTPU,
well it's a lot closer
but still about 25% slower than team green.
As with any GPU that's factory overclocked,
the thermal data should be taken with a grain of salt.
With that said, our MSI Gaming X Trio capped out
at around the same high 70s core temperature
as the AMD-built 6900 XT,
which is slightly higher than either G-Force card,
but still pretty manageable.
Why not higher?
Well, the hotspot temperatures tell a different story,
with the 6950 XT having around the mid-90s
at the hottest sensor, and the 3090 just going to the moon.
That sensor is probably memory,
as we've seen those in the past, but still, just... wow.
The 3090 Ti doesn't even get that high,
although it is the EVGA FTW3 with a big beefy cooler.
Kind of like our swackets from lttstore.com.
Beefy, but not too beefy.
Good most of the year up here in the Great White North.
Now we do need to have a discussion about power consumption.
In our testing, the 6950 XT hard around 450 Watts,
with a peak of over 500, which is just ridiculous.
Only the RTX 3090 Ti goes higher, and not by all that much.
AMD tells us this isn't normal behavior,
so it's definitely like MSI here
with their factory overclock,
but it's yet another indicator of the terrifying future
where GPUs - and especially third party cards -
will drop ever-more power in a bid to one up each other,
even it means we need a dedicated circuit just for our PC.
All for a factory overclock, God.
For what it's worth,
that factory overclock was relatively stable,
although it did decline from 2.5 GHz to around 2.42.
It's worth mentioning that stock Hertz
will often overshoot the boost clocks
if they're able to anyway,
so it's tough to say what a reference 6950 XT might look
based on this data alone.
At the end of the day, you're paying 10% more
for 10% more performance.
Which, in the same generation, is fine by me.
Especially considering the premium Nvidia placed
on the RTX 3090 Ti.
But there are some questions that remain unanswered here.
This card is the exact same silicon as the 6900 XT,
which means AMD binned them
so they could sell them at a higher price point
rather than contribute to the 6900 XT supply.
That AMD told us these GPUs will be adding to supply
supports that theory.
But when you look at the retail pricing
for the 6900 XT as of writing,
the conclusion of corporate greed you might come to
becomes less clear.
Yeah, some cards are available
at around the original launch price,
but a lot of them are as expensive or more
than the 6950 XT that launches today.
So you're spending less money overall
for a better GPU out of the box,
assuming you can get one of these for its $1100 launch price
All of which is to say I don't hate this.
True, it's not a game changer,
and it's far from a good value for productivity,
but it doesn't have to be either of those things.
From our testing it at minimum trades blows and gaming
with a GPU that costs nearly double, depending on the game.
At a time when availability and pricing for Radeon GPUs
is coming back down to Earth,
this puts AMD in a position
where paradoxically they're over $1000 GPU
is a good deal by comparison.
I can't believe I just said that.
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and maybe after this you wanna see...
Well, we didn't put an AMD GPU in it, but the Hotwheels PC,
we put an RTX 3090 in it and it was freaking sweet.