AMD has a new flagship: the RX 6950 XT. But how does it compare to Nvidia’s top dog, the RTX 3090? We compare the two GPUs head-to-head here.
AMD has a new flagship in town: the mighty RX 6950 XT. Our AMD RX 6950 XT review shows that it’s an excellent gaming graphics card that excels with its low price. Nvidia’s competing flagship, the RTX 3090, is much more expensive. We threw both cards into the ring to see if Nvidia’s premium is worth it. For gamers, the answer is no. If you want to do more than gaming, though, Nvidia’s GPU offers features that the RX 6950 XT just can’t compete with. Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 launched on September 24,2020, for a list price of $1,500. Due to inflated GPU prices, cards sell for a little more than that in 2022. At the time of writing, we found cards in stock between $1,700 and $2,000 (as well as plenty of RTX 3090 Ti models around the $2,000 mark). AMD’s RX 6950 XT is much newer, launching on May 10, 2022. It’s significantly cheaper, too. The list price is only $1,100, and we found multiple models in stock at that price. AMD’s cards haven’t seen the steep price increases that Nvidia’s have, so we expect the RX 6950 XT will continue to sell for around $1,100. Even being generous to the RTX 3090, there’s about a $500 difference in price. At the extreme, that jumps to a $900 difference, which is enough money to build a whole new PC. Although the RX 6950 XT has some weaknesses, it’s hard ignoring the value it offers compared to the RTX 3090. It’s newer, cheaper, and more readily available, so the RX 6950 XT easily wins this section. It’s not useful comparing specs between AMD and Nvidia — they use different architectures, so core counts and clock speeds mean essentially nothing when put side-by-side.
