Beware of the change in trend that could occur if NVIDIA does not wake up with the next generation of graphics cards for gaming. And it is that from the outset the bet that it launched a little over a month ago seems to collide directly with the latest from AMD, its RX 6950 XT , which apparently achieves a fairly high performance increase compared to its predecessor. This is the data obtained in 3DMark, will it carry over to games?
There are only a few days left to reveal all this framework and although the new RX 6000 Refresh, or I rehash as some like to call them (let each one choose what to call them) seem like a small step forward, the first results do not show that, which we are going to try explain, because it is puzzling.
AMD RX 6950 XT, AMD’s return to the top?
No one can deny that RDNA 2 has been a blow from Lisa Su to Intel as Zen 2 was at the time for Intel. The three GPUs that the red team is going to present are not only a step forward, but would dwarf NVIDIA’s options in performance and consumption, something unheard of for almost 20 years .
Three tests within the 3DMark suite: Time Spy, Fire Strike and Port Royal, three arguments to be hopeful in the fact that the red team is once again competitive in performance and much more in price, the prelude to what is to come? come with the RDNA 3 architecture and the RX 7000? It may be, but let’s see what AMD has achieved.
The first thing that we must take into account is that the tests that we are going to see have been carried out on a different and exclusive equipment for the RX 6950 XT, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU with RAM at 3,600 MHz , it is not that it gives it more or less advantage since the suite measures and differentiates the total and GPU performance, but it should be noted because the data that will be shown for this card and the other two may be somewhat optimistic in this regard, real as well, but not comparatively perfect.
Ahead of or on par with NVIDIA
We will discuss the comparisons when the reviews come to port and already in the same conditions, but what we can see here is that AMD would be ahead of NVIDIA under that PC with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The RTX 3090 Ti with the same system is claimed to be either extremely close or perhaps 1% higher , which is well within the range of error of any current measurement.
In addition, as we can see, the RX 6750 XT is faster than the RTX 3070 and it is ensured that the RX 6650 XT is also faster than the RTX 3060. Of the three tests, only in Port Royal NVIDIA is ahead of AMD with a wide difference according to the data that has been shown, but this is not new and shows the superiority of greens in Ray Tracing, but not in pure performance without this technology in play.
These data may come to nothing as soon as the assemblers launch their custom models, since they will reach higher frequencies and therefore, AMD would recover the crown of performance as such since NVIDIA already squeezes the RTX 3090 Ti almost to the maximum in its version. Reference or as they like to call it: Founders Edition.
But how is such a jump in performance possible? Just yesterday we saw the percentage differences of the cards and we took the Boost frequency as a reference. Well, it seems that these new GPUs place more emphasis on the higher gaming frequency than those of their predecessors, where they would go almost 100 MHz higher according to rumors thanks to AMD optimizations for these paired chips.
Therefore, and as we have always defended, the TFLOPS have not marked the real differences in this sense and it seems at the same time that the increase in the frequency of the memory helps the performance take off more than expected , apparently assuming a minor bottleneck on these new graphics cards.