AMD’s Radeon RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT, 6650 XT are official — an end to fake MSRP?
It seemed like AMD and Nvidia were living in a fantasy world. They’d throw out prices like $329 or $479 for a midrange graphics card, knowing you’d actually pay hundreds more by the time pandemic middlemen had their cut. But today, AMD seems to be waking up.
With the recently announced $1,099 AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT, $549 Radeon 6750 XT, and $399 Radeon 6650 XT, the company is finally pricing its graphics cards based on the market instead of creating a fake MSRP. When you combine that with the fact AMD graphics cards have nearly come back down to sane prices in general, it means there’s a chance in hell you might actually be able to buy these new ones for the price that AMD is quoting.
That’s good — because price is by far the most interesting thing about the cards AMD is announcing today.
While we’ve heard murmurs of next-gen AMD RDNA 3 chips on the horizon, the new RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT, and 6650 XT are nothing like that. In fact, they’re not new GPUs at all. As the “50” in their names might suggest, they’re straight-up refinements of the existing RX 6900 XT, 6700 XT, and 6600 XT with literally the exact same silicon, only with new firmware for faster clocks and faster memory.
And while any performance boost is nice, this isn’t going to be a big one: each “50” card offers a 5 to 6 percent bump over the vanilla version. In some games, the difference can be as little as 1 frame per second, according to AMD’s reviewer’s guide. In others that run at particularly high framerates, you might see a 10fps bump or more. Also, those bumps don’t come for free: the cards have a 20 to 35W higher TDP than the originals, theoretically drawing more power and / or producing more heat.
AMD isn’t trying to hide any of this. “These are
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