Is RX 6950XT worth buying for gaming in 2022?

Last week, AMD released their flagship GPU, RX 6950XT which is probably the last card of the 6000 series. This GPU is more or less the same as the AMD Radeon 6900XT, but with only minor changes. Both GPUs have the same core, silicon, memory, infinity cache, and compute units, but it is $100 more expensive than the latter.

The difference is that AMD RX 6950XT's memory speed is higher than RX 6900 at 18 GBPS, and it also has a higher core clock with a difference of less than 5%. So, is it worth spending $100 more on a card that offers such negligible upgrades?

The specifications of the AMD Radeon RX 6950XT are as follows:

• Compute Units: 80
• Base Frequency: 1890 MHz
• Boost Frequency: Up to 2310 MHz
• Ray Accelerators: 80
• Stream Processors: 5120
• TFLOPs: 47.31
• Memory: 16 GDDR6 @ 576 GB/s
• Memory Speed: 18 Gbps
• Infinity Cache: 128 MB
• Minimum PSU Recommendation: 850 W

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The RX 6950XT offers better performance per dollar

Performance to price ratio comparison (Image via AMD)

The RX 6950 XT is the flagship GPU of AMD, but is a minor upgrade over the RX 6900 XT. The performance gain of the card over the previous flagship is in the vicinity of 5-10%. Also, it is a downgrade over the previous card in terms of total power usage as it consumes up to 19% more power while overclocking, which could be an issue for some PSUs.

When Nvidia released a tweaked flagship card, the RTX 3090 Ti, it came with a huge price bump of $500, which was not worth it, for most gamers, who would rather pay for the RTX 3090. AMD's tweaked flagship card offers a 1:1 price-to-performance increase, with a 10% performance increase and a 10% price bump.

When games are played at 1080p and 1440p, the performance using a 6950 XT is 4-8% faster over the RX 6900 XT, and at 4K, the increase in FPS is 12-15%. This GPU will compete against Nvidia's Geforce RTX 3080 Ti in terms of price, and according to the benchmarks, the AMD GPU performs 4-8% faster in games at 1440p resolution, which is not noticeable in real-life scenarios.

So is it worth getting the RX 6950 XT? It depends on whether you are willing to spend $1100 on a GPU. There is no reason to get a flagship card if you are gaming at 1080p, but at higher resolution, there are bigger differences and more reasons to go for the flagship.

The RX 6900 XT is a beast of a card for $1000, but if you want more performance, the 6950 XT is a better choice when compared to the Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, as the value the AMD card offers is way better than any Nvidia cards in terms of price and efficiency.