RX 7900 XTX vs 6950 XT
It can be a hard decision to make at the top end so should you go for old or new?
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Both AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT desktop GPUs are replacing the still-capable RX 6950 XT flagship from the previous generation. The Radeon RX 7900 XT and its slightly more powerful sister, the 7900 XTX, will go on sale in the market on December 13th.
The RX 7000 lineup’s initial wave of releases will start with this. And the RDNA 3 architecture is set to improve the performance of the Radeon cards. Even if it means overtaking the previous leader of the generation.
But before shelling out for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, it’s crucial to assess how much the new GPU will advance the existing flagship.
On November 3, the RDNA3 architecture GPUs were introduced. And the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT are the first GPUs that use RDNA3 technology. This new design is more sophisticated than the RDNA2 formerly employed by the RX 6950 XT.
Specifications
| RX 7900 XTX | RX 6950 XT | |
|---|---|---|
| GPU | Navi 31 XTX | Navi 21 KXTX |
| GPU process | TSMC 5+6nm | TSMC 7nm |
| Shaders | 6,144 | 5,120 |
| Base clock | 1,900 MHz | 1,860 MHz |
| Boost clock | 2,500 MHz | 2,310 MHz |
| Memory | 24GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Memory clock | 20 Gbps | 18 Gbps |
| Memory bus | 384-bit | 256-bit |
| TBP | 355W | 335W |
Price
The latest Radeon RX 7900 XTX is more sophisticated, but the price is still reasonable. It costs $999, whereas the predecessor RX 6950 XT could be purchased for between $900 and $950 with discounts.
This does offer a better deal in general. But you can also expect the previous cards to go on sale, as they are surpassed in performance and features.
Performance
Radeon RX 7900 XTX from AMD is quicker than Radeon RX 6950 XT. AMD revealed some benchmark results at the time of the introduction, showing that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX outperformed the Radeon 6950 XT by up to 1.7 times in pure rasterization and by roughly 1.6 times in ray tracing at 4K.
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is superior, which is not surprising given that AMD increased the specifications compared to the previous generation. For instance, the RX 7900 XTX has 96 Compute Units as opposed to the RX 6950 XT’s 80 and a clock speed of 2.3 GHz, which is higher than the latter’s 2.1 GHz.
Is the 7900 XTX better than the 6950 XT?
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is worthwhile because it performs better than its predecessor and costs less than the Nvidia RTX 4090 and 4080 cards. Specifically, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX performs 8K better than the RX 6950 XT. Furthermore, compared to the Radeon RX 6950 XT’s 16GB of GDDR6 memory, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX features 24GB of GDDR6 memory.
