AMD has made some bold claims about its upcoming Radeon RX 6×50 XT cards. Team Red has stated that its new flagship, the RX 6950 XT offers 80% more performance per dollar compared to NVIDIA’s RTX 3090. At the same time, it churns out 22% more frames per watt. This isn’t really hard to believe as the RTX 3080 costs a whopping $1,500 (~$1,600 market price) while drawing more than 400W under load. From what we’ve seen, the RDNA 2 graphics cards are almost always a bit more power-efficient than their GeForce counterparts. So that isn’t a surprise either.
The Radeon RX 6650 XT is another noteworthy mention. It is presently going for $400, roughly $100 more than the RTX 3060’s market price. As per AMD’s figures (1080p), it offers 54% more performance than the 3060 per $ while also delivering 35% higher frame rates per watt.
What AMD has failed to mention is that the ray-tracing performance of its Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2) parts is utter rubbish. The lack of a proper upscaling filter (comparable to DLSS) doesn’t help either, and it’ll be a while before FSR 2.0 gains proper traction. All in all, the newly launched Radeon RX 6×50 XT GPUs offer solid raster performance at or close to MSRPs, and the limited number of ray-traced titles on the market does well to mask their shortcomings.
