AMD’s fastest GPU, the RX 6950 XT, is £850 at Scan today
Yesterday we took a look at the massive price drops affecting flagship Nvidia RTX graphics cards, and now it’s time to see the best deal going on AMD’s best and brightest. As RPS reader Skiddywinks points out, you can pick up the Radeon RX 6950 XT for £850 at Scan right now – about £200 cheaper than its UK RRP.
That’s significantly lower than the £1188 we saw the discounted RTX 3090 Ti at, yet the two cards are extremely close in terms of rasterised (ie non-RT) gaming performance. (I’ve not had the pleasure of testing the 6950 XT, but most reviews online seem to peg the difference at 4K between 0 and 10 percent in favour of the Nvidia option.)
Of course, going with Team Red’s card does have a few downsides – namely, their first-gen hardware-accelerated RT implementation isn’t as performant as Nvidia’s second-gen solution. There’s also the question of upscaling algorithms – Nvidia cards get DLSS to boost frame-rates in what is now a long list of supported games, while AMD’s similar FSR 2.0 technology has only officially appeared in a handful of titles (despite being hacked into quite a few games that officially support DLSS). Of course, being an open standard, Nvidia’s cards also support FSR 2.0, so you get a bit more flexibility there at AMD’s expense.
Regardless, I wouldn’t value these extra features so much that I’d pay £338 more for the 3090 Ti over the RX 6950 XT. Maybe if the prices were within £100 or so, Nvidia’s better feature set would clinch it, but for most people AMD’s card is the better value option as it stands right now.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below – and stay tuned for another post on a much more affordable graphics card very soon!