Graphics Cards

GIGABYTE RADEON RX 6950 XT GAMING OC Review

AMD have been falling behind in the GPU space for a little while now in comparison to NVIDIA. Their top of the line card is still the RX 6900 XT, a card with fantastic performance that rivalled the RTX 3090 in many titles, pulling ahead in some and falling behind in others. The biggest differences we saw in performance were when the game had NVIDIA optimized ray tracing, the truth is… AMD simply couldn’t keep up. So if AMD were falling behind there, then the only way they could make up for it was in traditional rasterization performance and that’s where we commonly saw the 6900 XT pulling ahead of the 3090 whenever we ran our benchmarks on them. Not being content on “losing”, and to close these gaps in performance, NVIDIA went on to launch the newly released RTX 3090 Ti; and now this move has been quickly addressed by AMD with the announcement, and now the launch of the RX 6950 XT; the new flagship from team red.

To the average consumer, this may seem like a new GPU launch, but once you look beneath the surface, you realize that this is actually just a refresh of the previous cards from AMD. In a similar marketing move to the addition of the “Ti” on the end of NVIDIA cards; this new wave of Radeon cards has the addition of a “50” on the end of the name, much like how AMD markets the highest spec CPUs that they offer. What improvements the new card gives over the previous iteration is pretty simple; the architecture of the card is the same as the previous cards but they now feature a higher game clock, boost clock and memory speed all coupled with a higher power draw to account for these gains in performance.

Well, today it’s time to see who the real victor is and we have the Gigabyte Gaming OC model of the RX 6950 XT. With this card, while we’ll be analysing whether it stands up to the NVIDIA monster or not, we also need to look at how it compares on price too and then ultimately decide….what is the best consumer graphics card for gaming…..right now!