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, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Pure is 10% faster than the original RX 6900 XT reference design—very nice. With these gains, the card overtakes the more expensive NVIDIA RTX 3090 by 3%, but the recently-released RTX 3090 Ti is still 6% faster. Compared to the RTX 3080 Ti, which sells for $1,200, the RX 6950 XT is 4% faster. The RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT are roughly 15% 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, and 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 get them to 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.

With the "Pure," Sapphire is introducing a new graphics card to their lineup. I still remember the Sapphire Pure white motherboards; that was 17 years ago, oh how time flies. People loved the color theme back then, and I have no doubt that the white styling will sell very well today. Sapphire not only picked white, they also designed the rest of the product accordingly, using straight lines and smooth curves. The RGB illumination is pretty nice, too, even though I feel like "RGB off," pure white will look best. For the Pure, the company designed a new quad-slot thermal solution, which makes a lot of sense. With multi-GPU technologies dead, the vast majority of gamers will have plenty of slots available in their PC—most of them having only one PCIe card installed, the graphics card, so going bigger is totally reasonable. Sapphire's thermal solution achieves good temperatures of 76°C and fantastic noise levels of only 29 dBA, which makes it the quietest RX 6950 XT tested so far. 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. Sapphire includes a dual BIOS capability with the Pure, but it's not the usual "quiet" BIOS we've seen on other cards. Instead, the company chose to install an "OC" BIOS which runs the card at higher frequencies—no overclocking software needed. With the OC BIOS active, temperatures are the same, but fan noise is a little bit higher. With 31 dBA, it's still very quiet, so good job, Sapphire! Just like all other Radeon RX 6950 XT cards, the Sapphire Pulse 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 380 W during gaming for the Sapphire Pure, which is almost 100 W more than the original RX 6900 XT. Considering the performance gained, this results in a 5% loss in energy efficiency. Still, the RX 6950 XT is more energy-efficient than the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. It seems higher power draw and, consequently, 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 of 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 only use one connector per power cable.

Graphics card prices have come down a lot this year, and are now almost reaching MSRP levels. AMD 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 Sapphire, their RX 6950 XT Gaming OC will sell for $1,250, which is a surprisingly big increase over the AMD baseline. Maybe Sapphire is just cautious, or AMD's MSRP is way too optimistic. The fact that you can purchase the RX 6900 XT for $1,000 today, RTX 3080 Ti for $1,200, and RTX 3090 for $1,500 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. Both 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 $1,100 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.