GIGABYTE RADEON RX 6950 XT GAMING OC Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Money, a lot of money, how much money? Lots.

Oh… you want an exact amount? Well you can expect this card to cost around $1099 for the reference spec, but as this is a Gaming OC card, you can expect a price premium of around $80 to $100 more. Yes, it’s expensive but compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, which sees similar and sometimes worse results in many of our tests, it’s a bargain, and that comes in at a whopping $900 more, so I guess from a value for money perspective, this is a bit of a winner.

So it’s not cheap, I know, but does it justify the cost? Kind of, yeah. For the price compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, this card is frankly amazing and compared to the 6900XT, it’s only a little bit more, and for that, you get, a little bit more, in terms of performance.

Overview

The 6900 XT is a beast of a card, especially when you take Ray Tracing out of the equation and this card just improves upon that and truly does feel like a proper competitor to the RTX 3090 Ti. In traditional rasterization the card performs like a beast, consistently ending up being the top of our charts for its high scores in both 1080p and 1440p. Unfortunately for the RX 6950 XT, its performance in 4K leaves something to be desired, frequently dipping below lower-rated and lower-priced cards. As well as dipping below in 4K tests, the card still suffers in Ray Tracing performance when compared to the NVIDIA equivalent cards. By now, we’re all aware that this is nothing of a surprise given the move to ray tracing that’s being pushed by team green and their greater hardware support for it and who knows, maybe the next generation of cards from AMD will bring things more in-line, but given time NVIDIA could shift forward even more.

Summing it up, this card feels like a true powerhouse, under the right conditions and it wouldn’t surprise me to see scores pop up in 3DMark Firestrike and the like as it’s adopted by overclockers in the hope of gaining new world records. It’s only a matter of time.

Should I Buy One?

If you don’t plan on playing in 4K and don’t plan on using ray tracing, then this card is the best you can get, it’s no simpler than that, but with a price tag like this, is it worth the extra cash? I’m not so sure. While it’s true that this card is a beast, you can get cheaper cards with performance only just under this, while saving yourself a pretty penny. What I’m trying to say is that it’s a niche product, for a niche market, but that’s not to say that it’s bad or anything, because it is technically, the most powerful GPU on the market, right now…Ray Tracing aside.

So, to answer the question of if you should buy one? I have a few answers, so pick whatever one applies to you. If you want the best rasterizing performance available, then yes, buy it. If you don’t care about the price, then buy it. If you want bang the very best bang for your buck or the most performance per dollar/pound/(insert local currency here) then this might not be the card for you, but there is no doubt about it, AMD has created a god-tier GPU, and if this is what they have to offer now then I’m excited to see what they have in store for the next generation of GPUs, and that may be a lot sooner than what you think.