Introduction

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT Pure is a premium custom implementation of the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT launching alongside the RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT today in what is a mid-life refresh of the RX 6000 RDNA2 series, as graphics card prices are finally cooling down and gamers are expected to seek out the fastest available graphics cards for the Summer. The RX 6950 XT is being launched as the company’s new flagship graphics card, pushing down the RX 6900 XT one level. This means it’s positioned above even the special “XTXH” variants of the RX 6900 XT that were almost 10% faster than the reference design.

The Radeon RX 6950 XT is based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture powering the rest of the RX 6000 series. Even the underlying “Navi 21” silicon is the same, built on the 7 nm (TSMC N7) process. What’s new is that AMD significantly dialed up engine clocks (GPU clocks), used faster memory, and claims to have given the RX 6950 XT certain “secret sauce” enhancements at the firmware and driver levels. The RX 6950 XT is being priced at US$1,099, exactly US$100 above the launch price of the RX 6900 XT. Although they’re coming down, we expect real-world prices to be higher than, and MSRP continues to be a fantasy figure. The introduction of the RX 6950 XT doesn’t remove the RX 6900 XT from the product stack, which will remain, probably at prices well below the $1,000-mark.

The Radeon RX 6950 XT has the same exact core-configuration as the RX 6900 XT, as both SKUs max out the Navi 21 silicon. You get 5,120 stream processors spread across 80 RDNA2 compute units, 80 Ray Accelerators that perform the most compute-intensive part of ray tracing, 320 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The card is endowed with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, which seems narrow compared to the high-end GeForce RTX 30-series “Ampere,” but AMD has an ace up its sleeve—namely, Infinity Cache, a 128 MB on-die cache that operates at 1.5 TB/s bandwidth, lubricating the memory sub-system.

The first enhancement the RX 6950 XT has over its predecessor is engine clocks. The “game clocks” of the RX 6950 XT are set at 2100 MHz, up from 2015 MHz on the RX 6900 XT, which puts the game clocks into the league of some of the fastest XTXH silicon-based factory-overclocked cards, but without the fancy cooling requirements. The typical board power of the RX 6950 XT at its given engine clocks is rated at 335 W compared to the 300 W of the RX 6900 XT, and AMD is confident that the reference cooler can handle the extra heat just fine. In comparison, XTXH-based RX 6900 XT cards rely on elaborate cooling solutions as the power-tuning was in the hands of board partners.

The second enhancement is the memory. AMD is using 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, compared to 16 Gbps GDDR6 on the RX 6900 XT. This results in a cool 12.5 percent increase in memory bandwidth, up from 512 GB/s to 576 GB/s. Since the company is using faster 18 Gbps-capable memory chips, we’ll explore the memory overclocking headroom on offer. The third area of enhancements is at the firmware and driver (software) levels, based on AMD’s “learning” of the RX 6900 XT over the months. While AMD didn’t go into specifics, we’ve noticed some nice gains, especially in titles that are CPU limited, or DirectX 11-based.

The Sapphire RX 6950 XT Pure sees the return of the “Pure” brand-extension from the company, which denotes white-colored products (from way back when it made motherboards with white PCBs). It’s being resurrected under the Sapphire NITRO+ series, making this a premium custom-design board. Sapphire is also debuting its latest-generation Ice Storm air cooler that is over three slots thick and uses an extremely airy-looking cooler shroud with an intricate set of heatsinks underneath for the various components. The card comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 2162 MHz (vs. 2100 MHz reference), while the memory is untouched at 18 Gbps. Sapphire is pricing the RX 6950 XT Pure at $1250, a $150 premium over the $1,100 AMD baseline.