Get the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT for £800 (was £1100)
It was only two weeks ago that we reported that the RX 6950 XT had dropped to £850 over at Scan, and now we’re £50 lower for the same AMD reference design. This includes three axial fans in a double-slot design with one HDMI 2.1, two DisplayPort 1.4 and one USB-C port (which can easily be turned into another DisplayPort with a simple adapter). So how fast is the RX 6950 XT? At 4K, expect the RTX 3090 to offer around the same to slightly better frame-rates (~10%) in almost all titles. There are some outliers, like Death Stranding, Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, where AMD can even claw a narrow margin over the Nvidia alternative. But realistically, you are getting only slightly better performance than from the RX 6900 XT, which costs around £60 less, so this is less about overall value and more about getting the fastest possible Team Red card that’s available right now. Happily, this means the Digital Foundry RX 6900 XT review can at least be a relatively accurate guide to the sort of performance you can expect. (I’d have linked to the RPS review, but the 6900 XT hasn’t received one in these hallowed halls.) It’s worth thinking about features too. AMD has historically lagged behind Nvidia, with a generally-accepted-to-be-worse media encoder and no answer to the temporal upsampling (and frame-rate boosting) provided by DLSS. However, that is starting to change, and while RT performance from AMD’s first-gen implementation isn’t as strong as that of Nvidia’s second-gen alternative, the release of FSR 2.0 (and the enterprising modding community that added it to a bunch of DLSS games) means things are slowly improving for the red team. That’s great to see. In any case, you know the score by now with these flagship GPU sales. I’ll keep an eye out for discounts to more mainstream GPUs in future, but until then keep your stick on the ice!
