AMD has launched a refresh of their current Radeon graphics lineup, and we have six reviews for you today: Sapphire RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure, MSI RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio, Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC, ASUS RX 6750 XT STRIX OC, MSI RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio, and MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X.

With the Radeon RX 6950 XT, AMD is expecting to recover ground lost to the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 Ti, two products that launched after the original RX 6900 XT release. The Radeon RX 6950 XT is based on the same Navi 21 GPU as the RX 6900 XT, with the same 5120 cores active. The difference is in the GPU clock speeds, power limits, and memory subsystem. The memory chips are now Samsung-based 18 Gbps instead of 16 Gbps like on the original RX 6900 XT.

Averaged over our 25-game strong test suite, at 4K resolution, we find the Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC 9% faster than the original RX 6900 XT reference design—very nice. With these gains, the card is able to overtake the more expensive NVIDIA RTX 3090 by 1%, but the recently released RTX 3090 Ti is still 7% faster. Compared to the RTX 3080 Ti, which sells for $1,200, the RX 6950 XT is 3% faster. Both the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT are roughly 13% behind. While performance is always near the top, it does vary greatly between games, so make sure to check out the titles you're playing. AMD's new Radeon RX 6950 XT is the perfect choice for gaming at 4K. With the newest drivers, AMD seems to have improved performance in situations where the games ended up CPU-limited; older DirectX 11 titles also show good gains.

Where AMD does have the weaker offering than NVIDIA is ray tracing. This is due to AMD's architecture, which executes some RT operations in shaders, while NVIDIA has dedicated hardware units for it. The Radeon RX 6950 XT still achieves very respectable performance, comparable to the RTX 3080. In many newer titles, which have less demanding (and less impressive) ray tracing effects, differences are smaller, though. I don't think RT performance is a dealbreaker for the RX 6950 XT, but it's something you should be aware of. If ray tracing is the only thing that matters to you (it shouldn't be), the RTX 3080 Ti might be an alternative to consider. AMD is also actively engaged with all major developers to have them optimize their games for AMD's architecture, and the driver performance improvements in this review confirm that AMD's driver team is always looking for opportunities to improve performance.

The Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC comes with a solid thermal solution that achieves impressive temperatures of only 68°C. Unfortunately, noise levels are pretty high with 36 dBA. Other cards we tested today do much better here. Gigabyte's card includes a dual BIOS capability, and the "quiet" BIOS is slightly quieter with 33 dBA, but given load temperatures of 70°C, I feel like Gigabyte could have dialed fan speeds way down and still have good cooling performance with very little noise. In our apples-to-apples cooler comparison, we confirmed that all three cards tested today have coolers that are nearly identical in their capability. Differences between them are minimal, so it's all down to the settings. Just like all other Radeon RX 6950 XT cards, the Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC includes idle fan stop, which will shut down the fans completely in idle, desktop work, internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

While NVIDIA has dialed up power consumption to unseen levels with their RTX 3090 Ti, the RX 6950 XT is more gentle in its power usage. We measured 390 W during gaming for the Gigabyte Gaming OC, which is almost 100 W more than the original RX 6900 XT. Considering the performance gained, this results in an 8% loss in energy efficiency. Still, the RX 6950 XT is more energy efficient than the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. It seems that higher power draw and increased heat output are things we'll have to live with on the highest-end SKUs of this generation, and possibly going forward. During testing, I noticed that all my RX 6950 XT cards sometimes caused system shutdowns, not sure why yet, maybe due to power spikes, but it's strange that the RTX 3090 Ti cards ran fine on the same hardware. I'll do more testing. Either way, make sure to pair the RX 6950 XT with a high quality PSU, and use one connector per power cable.

Graphics card prices have come down a lot this year, and are now almost reaching MSRP levels. AMD has announced a $1,100 MSRP for the RX 6950 XT. I suspect we'll see something like $1,150 in the near-term. According to Gigabyte, their RX 6950 XT Gaming OC will sell for $1,300, which is a surprisingly big increase over the AMD baseline. Maybe Gigabyte is just cautious, or AMD's MSRP is way too optimistic. The fact that you can purchase the RX 6900 XT for $1,000, RTX 3080 Ti for $1,200, and RTX 3090 for $1,500 today sets limits on what the RX 6950 XT has to sell for to be attractive to buyers. I've plotted a few theoretical price points in the Performance per Dollar section of this review to give you a feel. The RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti are just way too expensive unless you need the 24 GB VRAM. What's a solid alternative is the RTX 3080 Ti—for $1,200, it offers better ray tracing performance but slightly lower gaming performance. In order to match the value of the RX 6900 XT, the RX 6950 XT will have to be $1100 at most, or you'll be paying a premium for the 10% performance gained. Still, the RX 6950 XT is a solid new competitor for the absolute high-end, and probably the final Navi 21 graphics card release.