 They were holding out on us. AMD is launching yet another GPU and now the GPU shortages may be coming to an end. Heck, maybe you'll even be able to get one of these at MSRP. But why is this called the 6950 XT? That's weird, isn't it? And that's not the only thing that's weird about this. Let's get into it. But first, let's get into our sponsor. KiwiCo. KiwiCo ships out crates that contain hands-on projects for kids to help develop their creative confidence and problem-solving skills. Learn more at the end of the video or right now at the link below. Do you want to know why this GPU is weird? The only differences are that the memory is rated for 18 gigabits per second instead of 16 and higher core clocks. How high? Less than 5% more across the board. But the board has more than 11% higher power? What is AMD thinking? How could these tiny tweaks possibly represent enough of a difference to justify a whole new skew? Well, they didn't give us a whole lot of time to figure it out and they didn't even cede us a Founders Edition card. Instead, letting MSI handle it, giving us their Gaming X Trio skew. To compare against, we have all of the strongest cards, but the one to watch out for is the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti since on paper, it is the price competitor. Things start off well for AMD with F1 2021's traditional rasterization performance, clearly favoring TeamRes Infinity Cache implementation that puts both the 6900 XT and the new 6500 XT well ahead of the RTX 3090 Ti. As much of a strength as Infinity Cache is, ray tracing is still Nvidia's home turf and AMD loses by as much as it gains when we switch it on. This pattern holds for Far Cry 6.2, although the performance gap with ray tracing disabled isn't as wide as it was for F1. Neither is Nvidia's lead with ray tracing enabled, with the 6950 XT basically neck and neck with the 3090 Ti. Forza Horizon 4 and Hitman 3 both repeat F1 2021's results almost perfectly, with a significant lead for TeamRed's refreshed GPU, but Microsoft Flight Simulator appears to heavily favor Nvidia with a massive 24% lead in the minimum frame rates. CSGO puts a cap on it with another performance canyon, a vet with frame rates so high you're unlikely to notice anyway. Productivity though, once AMD's domain in the years before RTX cards is now firmly Nvidia's hands, with significant performance gaps in Blender and we're not even using the RTX accelerated optics render here, the performance of the 6950 XT is not unusable by any means, but you can get this level of performance with a significantly cheaper card from Team Green. Puget Bench is interesting because while the test results are more or less the same across Creative Cloud, that premiere score on the 6950 XT is a standout. More than just outpacing the 6900 XT, it pushes past even the RTX 3090 Ti to take the crown here by about as much as that card beats the 3080 Ti. LuxMark swings the pendulum back to Nvidia however, as does Indigo Benchmark. AMD's RDNA2 simply isn't as good at these tasks as Nvidia's Ampere architecture is, at least with these implementations. And we can see more of that with SpecViewperf where 3DS Max, Katia and Creo all see radiance falling behind. The bump in memory bandwidth does allow the 6950 XT to pull ahead of the pack in energy and medical tests, although SolidWorks is a bloodbath. Although it's worth noting that SpecViewperf is using SolidWorks 2022, while expanded GPU support landed in 2021. Thankfully, Spec has an application benchmark for SolidWorks 2021 and we have a license. So after forcing the RealView accelerator to run on each GPU, well, it's a lot closer, but still about 25% slower than Team Green. As with any GPU that's factory overclocked, the thermal data should be taken with a grain of salt. With that said, our MSI Gaming X Trio capped out at around the same high 70s core temperature as the AMD built 6900 XT, which is slightly higher than either GeForce card, but still pretty manageable. Why not higher? Well, the hotspot temperatures tell a different story with the 6950 XT hovering around the mid 90s at the hottest sensor and the 3090 just going to the moon. That sensor is probably memory as we've seen those in the past, but still just wow. The 3090 Ti doesn't even get the high, although it is the EGA FTW3 with a big beefy cooler. Kind of like our Swackets from lttstore.com, beefy, but not too beefy. Good most of the year up here in the great white north. Now we do need to have a discussion about power consumption. In our testing, the 6950 XT hovered around 450 watts with a peak of over 500, which is just ridiculous. Only the RTX 3090 Ti goes higher and not by all that much. AMD tells us this isn't normal behavior, so it's definitely not MSI here with their factory overclock, but it's yet another indicator of the terrifying future where GPUs and especially third party cards will draw ever more power in a bid to one up each other, even if it means that we need a dedicated circuit just for our PC, all for a factory overclock, God. For what it's worth, that factory overclock was relatively stable, although it did decline from 2.5 gigahertz to around 2.42. It's worth mentioning that stock cards will often overshoot the boost clocks if they're able to anyway, so it's tough to say what a reference 6950 XT might look based on this data alone. At the end of the day, you're paying 10% more for 10% more performance, which in the same generation is fine by me, especially considering the premium in video placed on the RTX 3090 Ti. But there are some questions that remain unanswered here. This card is the exact same silicon as the 6900 XT, which means AMD binned them so they could sell them at a higher price point rather than contribute to the 6900 XT supply. That AMD told us these GPUs will be adding to supply supports that theory. But when you look at the retail pricing for the 6900 XT as of writing, the conclusion of corporate greed you might come to becomes less clear. Yeah, some cards are available at around the original launch price, but a lot of them are as expensive or more than the 6950 XT that launches today. So you're spending less money overall for a better GPU out of the box, assuming you can get one of these for its $1,100 launch price. All of which is to say, I don't hate this. True, it's not a game changer and it's far from a good value for productivity, but it doesn't have to be either of those things. From our testing, it at minimum trades blows in gaming with a GPU that costs nearly double, depending on the game. At a time when availability and pricing for Radeon GPUs is coming back down to earth, this puts AMD in a position where paradoxically, their over $1,000 GPU is a good deal by comparison. I can't believe I just said that, but I can believe that I'm gonna tell you a better sponsor. KiwiCo. KiwiCo is a monthly subscription service to help introduce and make STEM topics fun and engaging for kids of all ages. They believe if you start learning small things today, you can produce world-changing ideas tomorrow. Each crate is designed by experts and contains everything you need to complete it with detailed kid-friendly instructions. Maybe even I can understand it. This means you don't need to run off to the store to get extra supplies like glue or scissors. KiwiCo offers nine subscription lines, each catering to different age groups and topics. The crate we have here is at a Kiwi level for kids age three and up. That teaches accounting, sorting, and fine motor skills. Another one is the Tinker level for your tweens and teens, age nine to 16, which explores air vortices and fluid dynamics with an air cannon. KiwiCo is a great way to keep kids occupied for hours so they just leave you alone and they now ship to over 40 different countries. With KiwiCo, you're not just teaching your kids to buy, you're teaching them to build. So go to kiwico.com slash ltt30 and get 30% off your first month on any crate. So thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed, and maybe after this you wanna see, well, we didn't put an AMD GPU in it, but the Hot Wheels PC. We put an RTX 3090 in it and it was fricking sweet.