The Sapphire RX 6950 XT is a high-performance graphics card that comes in second place behind the RTX 3090 Ti in standard gaming performance, particularly at 4K ultra resolution. While it does beat the RTX 3090, it falls slightly behind the 3090 Ti. The 6950 XT’s performance is mostly influenced by its clock speed increases, resulting in an overall improvement of 11%. In individual game testing, the 6950 XT was 6% slower than the 3090 Ti but performed better in some games such as Forza Horizon 5 and Far Cry 6. The choice between the 6950 XT and 3090 Ti ultimately depends on the specific games being played. The 6950 XT offers better value, but the cost difference of paying nearly double for a 6% increase may not be significant for some.
The performance of the RX 6950 XT in games with heavy ray tracing effects has caused a significant shift in rankings. In our standard suite, the card placed second overall, but dropped to sixth place in our DXR test suite. The RTX 3070 Ti was not even tested at 4K ultra due to the RX 6950 XT’s low average of 19.2 fps across the six DXR games. The RX 6950 XT also exceeded the theoretical 12.5% increase in performance compared to the RX 6900 XT, with some games showing an 18-19% increase thanks to faster memory and higher boost clocks and power limits. FSR support in Cyberpunk 2077 was the only game out of the six tested, and it remains to be seen if FSR 2.0 can improve performance. It’s also worth noting whether RDNA 3 will include tensor core-like hardware, given that Intel has it on Arc and AMD has similar hardware on its data center MI200 series GPU.