the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small
THE NEWS AMD refreshes three 6000-series GPUs
Flagship GPUs launched ahead of RDNA 3 this fall
While we wait for RDNA 3, AMD has refreshed three cards, including its top dog, which is now bigger and meaner.
© AMD
WE NOW HAVE a new bestever Radeon graphics card, the RX 6950 XT. This threefan monster has, AMD says, “been engineered to deliver the ultimate 4K gaming experience”. Basically a refreshed 6900 XT, it is built around the same 7nm Navi21 GPU with 5,120 Stream Processors and 80 Compute Units. It is clocked faster though, with the game clock jumping from 2,015MHz to 2,100MHz, a four percent bump.
The maximum boost speed gains 60Hz to 2,310MHz and although memory is the same, 16GB of GDDR6, it’s now 18Gbps rather than 16Gbps, while memory bandwidth rises from 512GB/s to 576GB/s. AMD quotes the ‘effective’ memory bandwidth using the Infinity cache, now 1,793.5GB/s, up from 1,664.2GB/s. That’s some useful extra bandwidth. All of these changes have pushed the power consumption to 335W, making this a physically big, and hot card.
How fast is it? Turn to page 74 for our full review, but AMD references figures across eight games running at 4K, with the new flagship averaging an extra five frames per second. It’s a marginal improvement but faster is better. Running games at 4K has never been the Radeon line’s strength, whereas Nvidia’s Ampere architecture does well at this. While the 6950 XT has the same GPU as the 6900, it’s essentially the best Navi21 GPUs AMD could find. So if you plan on overclocking, this is the version you want.
AMD’s reference model is $1,099. There are variations from third parties, generally with colored LED lighting, stylish enclosures, and a few other tweaks, which will cost more. The base price is $100 over the 6900 XT, but you get an equivalent percentage performance boost as the price increase. At least AMD hasn’t milked the prices.