high-end flagship graphics cards have always been an area where each brand shows its strength. Although their sales volume is not the largest, a top flagship graphics card often represents the strength of the brand. Today we are testing AMD this year’s latest card king, Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card.
RX 6950 XT is positioned as a 3A masterpiece at 4K resolution. It uses the same Navi 21 core as RX 6900 XT, 5120 stream processor , 80 computing units and light accelerator, 16GB GDDR6 256bit video memory. The memory bandwidth of
and is 575.5 GB/s. With the Infinity Cache bandwidth amplification, the actual effective bandwidth officially given is 1728.2 GB/s. This bandwidth of nearly 2000 GB/s has not been achieved by any current graphics card. It is really amazing. Stunning. In addition to the improved memory bandwidth of
, the overall frequency, computing power and power consumption of RX 6950 XT have also increased. AMD's official acceleration frequency is 2310MHz, while the previous RX 6900 XT was 2250, and the power consumption also increased by 35W to 335W.
Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC
However, although this graphics card is AMD’s latest super flagship product, the official recommended price is 8,399 yuan, which is much cheaper than its old rivals.
For the convenience of reading, the author here briefly lists the characteristics of the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card:
1. 3A games can be played smoothly at 4K resolution high frame rate
2. The power consumption of the whole card is 350W, recommended power supply 850W and above
3. V-shaped core cooling module + 14-layer PCB high temperature resistant multiple copper design
4. Tri-X cooling system equipped with ARGB fan
In summary, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card is compared to the RX 6900 XT The improvement is quite large, at least the biggest improvement among the RX 6x50 XT series this time. Basically all 3A games can run smoothly at 60 frames at 4K resolution. In terms of price of
, AMD’s official starting price is 8,399 yuan. This Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC has better materials, workmanship, and higher frequency. It is priced at 8,499 yuan. Such a top flagship is still very cost-effective.
01 Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC Overview
The Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card is considered a "Big Mac" level product of this generation, with a size of 320×135×58mm. Due to the excessive size and weight, Sapphire also comes with a graphics card bracket in the package, which supports a maximum weight of 4-slot graphics cards.
graphics card bracket
Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC
Among the three 6x50 XT series graphics cards, RX 6750 XT and RX 6950 XT have similar appearances, both are three-fan large-size graphics cards. However, the latter is wider, with a size of 134.85mm, which is significantly larger than the 130mm of the RX 6750 XT.
Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC
And in order to increase heat dissipation, Sapphire RX 6950 Light effect.
cooling module rendering
In addition, the newly designed V-shaped core cooling module can effectively avoid the dead air flow under the fan bearing. Through the V-shaped groove, the air flow blowing downward from the fan blades can effectively blow through the entire GPU cooling module. group, so that the areas with the highest temperatures can have more transparent airflow to quickly take away the heat.
zigzag fins can also effectively reduce the resistance of the downward airflow passing through the fins, increase the flow speed and effectively reduce the noise of cutting wind.
multi-layer PCB multi-copper design
Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC is a 14-layer PCB design and uses high-temperature-resistant multi-copper to ensure the stable operation of the graphics card for a long time.
Sapphire RX 6x50 XT Ultra Platinum OC series backplane display
In terms of backplane, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card still uses the design of the Ultra Platinum series, but due to the increased width, the hollows and decorative textures can be clearly seen increase. At the same time, considerable space is left for the power supply position of multiple interfaces.
In addition, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Super Platinum OC graphics card supports manual switching of dual BIOS operating mode. The default mode is TGP 289W, Boost frequency 2324MHz; switching to silent mode is TGP 284W, Boost frequency 2310MHz.
DP1.4a*3 + HDMI 2.1
In terms of video output interface, Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC is the same as the other two graphics cards released together, both using DP1.4a*3 + HDMI 2.1 4 interfaces.
8+8+6pin power supply design
Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card adopts 8+8+6pin power supply design due to the increase in power consumption. The power consumption of the entire card is 350W, and the recommended power supply is 850W.
02 Test platform and parameter introduction
For this test platform, we chose AMD Ryzen9 5950X CPU, the motherboard is MSI MPG X570 Ares board, and Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC graphics card. (all test data this time are obtained after SAM is turned on)
In terms of test results, the benchmark test uses DMARK. The game performance test uses the game’s own Benchmark. At the same time, in order to reduce errors, each test result is tested 3 times and the average is taken. value.
Before testing, let’s take a look at the detailed parameters of the RX 6000 series graphics cards released so far, so that everyone can compare and reference them. The following is a brief summary of the 8 graphics cards that have been released:
Main parameters
The picture above shows the RX 6900 XT and Comparison of the official main parameters of RX 6950 XT, with changes in red letters. It can be seen that although the chip name has changed, the general specifications are the same, and the frequency and power consumption have been significantly improved on this graphics card. It should be noted that the memory bandwidth in parentheses is the final effective bandwidth after including Infinity Cache.
GPU-Z data
RX 6950 XT has 128 raster units, 320 texture units, 5120 stream processors, and can support PCIe 4.0×16 at full speed. These are the same as the previous RX 6900 XT. The biggest improvement of Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC this time is the Boost frequency. The official data is 2310MHz, while Ultra Platinum has been increased to 2324MHz again.
03
For this test, we selected a total of 3 graphics cards for comparison testing. The following is the 3DMARK FS set used to measure the theoretical performance of the graphics card DX11: FS, FSE, and FSU correspond to the graphics card at 1080P and 2K respectively. , 4K theoretical performance, actual test results based on graphics card scores are as follows:
3D MARK FS package test
In the 3DMARK FS package test for the graphics card DX11 environment, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC has a comprehensive improvement of approximately 9 compared to the RX 6900 XT. 1%; compared to RTX 3090, the overall improvement is approximately 23.6%.
3D MARK TS suite test
In the Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme tests in the DX12 environment, the overall improvement of Sapphire RX 6950 XT Super Platinum OC is about 15.2% compared to RX 6900 XT; compared to the RTX 3090, the overall improvement Approximately 4.1%. Testing in the
DX12 environment has always been a weakness of AMD graphics cards, but in this upgrade, the RX 6950 XT completely surpassed the RTX 3090.
3D MARK light tracing test
In the test for real-time ray tracing, Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC improved 9.5% compared to RX 6900 XT; compared to RTX 3090, the difference was 18%. In this category, although the 6x50 XT series has significantly improved compared to the prototype card, there is still a gap compared to the NVIDIA that has been worked on for many years. However, this RX 6950 XT is the graphics card with the smallest gap.
04 Game test
In the game test, we chose "Borderlands 3", "Horizon 5", "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla", and "Horizon: Zero Dawn" to test the running scores.
"Horizon: Zero Dawn" game test
"Horizon: Zero Dawn" is a standard 3A masterpiece. This game is famous for its beautiful scenery. Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC can still achieve 2K resolution at the highest image quality. It reaches an ultra-high e-sports level of 162 frames, and can also achieve an excellent result of 90 frames at 4K resolution. Although it is surpassed by 1 frame by RTX 3090 at high resolution, this is almost negligible.
"Horizon 5" game test
Although the frame number of "Horizon 5" is not as high as "Horizon: Zero Dawn" at 1080p and 2K resolutions, it can still reach 95 frames at 4K resolution, which is close to It’s at an e-sports level, and it leaves the RTX 3090 far behind.
"Borderlands 3" game test
"Borderlands 3" is a game with high upper limit and very low performance requirements. In this game, although the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC reaches an ultra-high frame rate of 177 at 1080p, the 4K resolution is only 73 frames, which shows that its upper limit is high.
"Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" game test
"Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" is the latest work of Ubisoft Assassin series, a standard 3A masterpiece. This game has also achieved god-level optimization for A cards. Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC has an overwhelming advantage at any resolution.
05 FSR test
is the flagship card king of this band. Although it can easily handle games at 4K resolution, it often cannot achieve the ideal frame rate of e-sports. Next, we choose "Phantom Line: Tokyo" to test the FSR effect. For the frame rate bonus and picture loss.
FSR Comparison setting
In the graphics options, turn on AMD FSR 1.0 scaling, the sharpness defaults to 8, and other settings are the default highest.
Comparison of the original image (click to view a larger image)
Detail comparison (click to view a larger image)
In "Phantom Line: Tokyo", the extremely detailed environment depiction is the biggest highlight. We chose 4K resolution screenshots and enlarged the details, you can see In the recruitment profile, the age limit is 18 years and above. These small text are clearly discernible in Extreme and Quality modes, while slightly blurry in Balance and Performance modes. In terms of frame rates of
, compared with 4K native image quality, the improvements are 53% (ultra high image quality), 93% (quality), 136% (balance), and 160% (performance).
Overall comparison (click to view larger image)
Next, we are observing the overall details. The larger signature word "girl" in the image, including Chinese and Japanese on the lantern, is very clear even in performance mode. The larger monitoring sticker in the detailed picture just now has become a small text. Similarly, in the balance and performance modes, it will be blurry.
06 Temperature and power consumption
In the temperature and power consumption test, the room temperature was 24°C. The test platform was used to simply test the heat dissipation of the graphics card itself.
Copying test
In the power consumption test, GPU-Z only consumes chip power. Sapphire RX 6950 78℃.
power consumption comparison
In the whole card power consumption comparison, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Ultra Platinum OC has been further strengthened on the official frequency, so the corresponding whole card power consumption has also been improved, reaching 350W. If we compare the public version to the public version, the RX 6950 XT actually consumes less power than the RX 3090, and the difference between the two is 15W.
07 Game test comprehensively surpassed 3090
This time the RX 6950 XT has greatly improved in terms of theoretical performance and game performance, and completely surpassed the RTX 3090 in games, but this also shows the huge contribution of SAM on the other hand. The performance bonus of
SAM is mainly reflected in games. In the traditional PC working principle, the CPU can only access a small part of the video memory at a time, and SAM (Video Memory Outsourcing Technology) can use PCIe bandwidth to eliminate this limitation and give full play to the GPU video memory. Strength. According to AMD’s official statement, game performance can be improved by up to 15%.
Sapphire RX 6950 Under the circumstances, it is quite a radical improvement.
This RX 6950 XT has an overall performance improvement of about 6% compared to the RX 6900 XT. However, with the bonus of SAM, it seems to have achieved cross-level improvement. Previously, we have always ignored the capability bonus of the "3A" platform. , it seems that the "technical barriers" will become more and more serious in the future, and NVIDIA, fighting alone, can only win by relying on overwhelming performance.Regarding the price of
, although this graphics card had some premiums at the beginning of its release, under the influence of the overall market situation of the graphics card market, this Sapphire RX 6950 Yuan is still very affordable.
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