MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio Review: Power Hungry

Same performance, more power than other 6950 XT cards

Reviews
By Jarred Walton
published
MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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We've updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite since early 2022, with a Core i9-12900K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, and DDR4-3600 memory (with XMP enabled). We also upgraded to Windows 11 to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. We'll probably continue using the same core hardware for at least another year, unless it turns out that Zen 4 or Raptor Lake can deliver a serious improvement in gaming performance (which we doubt will happen).

We are not showing professional application performance with the MSI card, as it was basically the same story as we saw with our initial MSI RX 6950 XT content creation results. Refer to those charts, and add 1% if you want to know how the MSI card compares to the Sapphire card. Newer drivers did not appear to make a difference.

TOM'S HARDWARE 2022 GPU TEST PC

Intel Core i9-12900K
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit 

Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. For this review we'll be testing at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p at "ultra" settings — which generally means maxed out settings, except without SSAA if that's an option. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy also shows 1080p medium performance, if you want to see that.

Each card gets tested multiple times at every resolution, to ensure that the performance we report is consistent. The first run gets discarded, and we use the better result of the two additional runs — after checking that there's no major variance between the two runs. There's one exception to this: Far Cry 6, which at 1080p typically has a very fast first run, a slightly slower second run, and third, fourth, etc. runs often continue to drop in performance. We use the second run at 1080p as a compromise.

We initially tested the RX 6950 XT using AMD's pre-launch drivers, which are basically the same as the 22.5.1 release. AMD then delivered a "DirectX 11 Preview Driver" that was supposed to help with DX11 gaming performance, and rolled that into its 22.5.2 update, so we retested the MSI card with the newer drivers. You'll see both results in the charts, but remember the Sapphire RX 6950 XT was tested with 22.5.1, and in general we saw about a 3% average uplift in performance for our test suite from 22.5.2. (And yes, AMD just released 22.6.1 drivers, but those are only for Windows 7 holdouts.)

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    What a terrible model... The Sapphire is way way better, like always. MSI didn't even try to make this card decent; more like just fulfilling commitments or quotas.

    Also, I wonder if toying around with the VRAM speed would yield better results than the core in terms of extra FPS'es and specially power for the 6950XT. I have the 6900XT and I know for sure it does, but it's capped at ~2000, since it starts artifacting heavily above that speed for me. I run it stock, but I wanted to test the limit of it, heh.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • King_V
    Editing nipick:
    We are not showing professional application performance with the MSI card, as it was basically the same story as we saw with our initial MSI RX 6950 XT content creation results.
    That MSI that's linked should say Sapphire.

    Still, given how little benefit pushing the extreme limits of power consumption gave to MSI, I'm really curious about how much, or rather, little, performance might be lost in backing down the power and clocks... I know nobody buys a top-of-the-line card in order to be power-efficient, but I wonder if we might have a situation here that is similar to the underclocking runs for the Vega 56.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    -Fran- said:
    What a terrible model... The Sapphire is way way better, like always. MSI didn't even try to make this card decent; more like just fulfilling commitments or quotas.

    Also, I wonder if toying around with the VRAM speed would yield better results than the core in terms of extra FPS'es and specially power for the 6950XT. I have the 6900XT and I know for sure it does, but it's capped at ~2000, since it starts artifacting heavily above that speed for me. I run it stock, but I wanted to test the limit of it, heh.

    Regards.
    I poked around a bit at VRAM speeds when I was doing the Sapphire review. Ultimately, I didn't say much about it, but even though you can push clocks higher, I don't think you get the gains that I'd expect. There's something goofy with the VRAM speeds on these 18Gbps modules where you often don't get anywhere near the theoretical boost in performance relative to the existing 16Gbps cards. I suspect memory timings (which you can't directly see on the GDDR6) are somehow at play.

    For example, and I know this is a specific use case, but the cryptocurrency mining speed of the RX 6950 XT was consistently far lower than the RX 6900 XT, regardless of what I tried. You can get ~65 MH/s out of the RX 6900 XT after tuning, but the best I ever managed on the RX 6950 XT was about 54 MH/s. "Stock" (factory) performance with a tweak to the maximum GPU clock did better than any attempted memory overclock.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    I poked around a bit at VRAM speeds when I was doing the Sapphire review. Ultimately, I didn't say much about it, but even though you can push clocks higher, I don't think you get the gains that I'd expect. There's something goofy with the VRAM speeds on these 18Gbps modules where you often don't get anywhere near the theoretical boost in performance relative to the existing 16Gbps cards. I suspect memory timings (which you can't directly see on the GDDR6) are somehow at play.

    For example, and I know this is a specific use case, but the cryptocurrency mining speed of the RX 6950 XT was consistently far lower than the RX 6900 XT, regardless of what I tried. You can get ~65 MH/s out of the RX 6900 XT after tuning, but the best I ever managed on the RX 6950 XT was about 54 MH/s. "Stock" (factory) performance with a tweak to the maximum GPU clock did better than any attempted memory overclock.
    That is so weirdly interesting... I wonder if the higher clocks were at the expense of way way looser timings?

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    Wow, what on earth is this card for? Expensive, inefficient space heater?
    Since even messing with voltages does not seem to make performance better, this is an absolute head scratcher, probably a spec-hunter card only.

    That being said, other versions of this card will get some real usage with AMD's FSR 2.0 and it will make absolute sense even with zero tensor cores. Losing ~7 frames per second to nvidia is neglible at those resolutions and with comparable quality as well.

    Let's see if next gen and DLSS 3.0 might be different, but DLSS 2.x is not.
    Reply