Buying A New 6950 XT OC Formula for a Friend: Experiencing Wonder Once Again! 

Got my 6950 XT yesterday. But I bought the Sapphire Nitro+ Pure. Love this thing.

Got my 6900xt middle of last year and AMD has cleaned up the drivers so much. Currently with a moderate under volt and a little fine tuning it’s getting a GPU score of 21000 in time spy only pulling 275 watts and running quite cool.

Picked up a red devil 6950xt for 672$ brand new on Amazon on sale right after Christmas. It’s been a monster.

"depending on how long he plans to live"....😂

got the 6900XT and absolutely LOVE it! Way to go AMD thankyou for the consistent driver updates!

I’m running the Asrock formula oc 6950xt. I love it. Took it apart and repaste with kryonaut. Amazing card.

Why is the brightness in Quake2 with Ray-tracing turned up to 11?

Picked up my XFX 6900 black for $900 a couple weeks ago and it’s a F’ing beast!

I just upgraded my personal rig to a new cpu/gpu combo, went with the 6800xt which I was able to score for $599 and was BLOWN away by how well it performs. I came from a 1070 being used in an eGPU setup to a full blown Alder Lake CPU with 6800xt. I really do like where AMD is headed with their GPUs.

Got mine on day one release, red devil. Had to upgrade but my power supply but was worth it. Even upgraded my chip from a 1700x to a 5700x a week after. I have been quite happy.

It's 2023 and I just picked up This 6900XT for $699 with 2 games on Newegg. Also got my hands on a 5800X3D for $350. For the price of the 7900XT I got a CPU and GPU upgrade! Not too shabby!

Picked up an open-box but apparently unused ASRock Phantom Gaming 6900xt two days ago from MicroCenter for the stupid low price of $702 + tax. About $750 all told. Absolutely love it! AMD historically has had horrible drivers, but they're so much better now. Hell, I'm even Hackintoshing and my fancy new GPU just screams! +1 to AMD.

Grab an 6950xt recently and it's an beast so far

The only thing these Radeon 6000 series cards are missing is SRV-IO. Unless you know something we don't Wendell... :)

What Wendell said about the cutscenes really resonated with me. Call of Duty MW 2019 is a really good example of the blurry line between pre-rendered cutscenes and gameplay. They look very similar. RDR2 does the real time rendering for its cutscenes too.

ASRock RX 6950 XT OC Formula = $759 on Newegg today 11/17/2022, after $20 mail in rebate.. not bad!

Big Big Card Energy (BBCE) lol Wendell should trademark that.

I feel the same wonderment my man. I am old enough to have played Tomb Raider and Quake when they were new. I have a 5800X CPU and 6800XT GPU with a 27" 1440P 165Hz monitor and games blow my mind now. Insane boost from where we were. Looking forward to your take on a mid range build Radeon 7000 series + Ryzen 7000 series combo when the embargos lift. Might be time to move to 4k for me finally. Might wait on the CPU for the 7800X3D. If 5800X3D was any indicator it will be a CPU for the ages.

Quake is supposed to be dark not lit up with RT. Cool tech tho.

just picked up the 6950 xt for $599 🎉🎉🎉

best things I've bought in semi-retirement is (1) a nice PC and (2) a tractor.

I feel a lot better about impulse buying this exact card on launch day cuz I was so happy it was one of the first cards to be MSRP again and a formula OC version I couldn't resist after waiting soo long thru the GPU winter even though it sucks being 2 years late to rdna 2 glad i didn't pay a scalper!

Speaking of horrorshows, HDMI 2.1 has been a snuff film. I got bit by the faulty Denon boards and NVidia still has not solved the audio drop bug. It's so bad I've considered adding a "cheap" Radeon to handle sound. If AMD continues to up their raytracing and driver game, I'm going flip NVidia the bird the next time around for my main PC.

My 6900XT is from mid last year and AMD drivers are the heaven of any gamer 😘

13:17 And usually those pre-rendered cutscenes break the immersion on older games at the moment 😄 Dropping from 1440p to whatever 3:2 resolution a cutscene was rendered, can be rough 🙂

How come Quake 2 with raytracing turned on looks like the software render version (i.e., bright light with no shadows)? Meh... I'll stick with OpenGL.

I just picked up the 6900 XT for $820 plus it has a $100 rebate and those free games. Such an amazing difference from a year ago!

I can't wait to get my hands on RX 6950XT soon I hope wish me good luck :}

You got to love wendell evil genius laugh muwahahah 4:18

Just purchased the Power color Red devil 6950xt for $788 cant beat the price for performance and if tuned right it hangs with the best.

Actually, more people still game at 1080p and 1440p than they do at 4K. Consoles do 4K (ish) but cut a lot out, in order to do so...and neither 1080p or 1440p are leaps and bounds more than what we were doing in the 4:3 LCD days, back in 2001-2005, if you consider the large gap of time between then and now. For those, roughly, 4 years? It was all about 1280x1024p and 1600x1200 (if you were really lucky). Then we regressed and went to 1280x720p monitors, or TVs that were 720p/ 1080i (interlaced), while 1920x1080p was still just large enough of a gap that it was not quite lucrative...kind of like how 4K was 5 years ago and still kind of is in some games, such as Cyberpunk. 1600x1200 was hella impressive 4:3 gaming res, back in the day. And I wasn't much of a Quake fan. Quake I, sure, but once Unreal came out? I never went back to team Quake. However, both Quake and Unreal were the world's first MOBAs, especially once Unreal Championship 2, on console changed the entire formula, by adding melee weapons.

Sold my Radeon VII (bought brand new for $550 before the market went wild) and picked up a 6900XT for a profit months ago. One of the best cards I've ever owned. My 290X still has that crown as the fine wine was really there for that one so we'll see if this 6900XT surpasses it. Handles anything I want at 4k which has been my struggle since I've been using that resolution since 2014.

Yeah when you think about gradation, 0 to 1 is a bigger change than 1 to 3 perceptually.

King of the muscle cards. The breakdown on monitors was very useful still rocking a pair of benq/zowie 1440p 144hz from years ago and ready to upgrade to something better.

I just ordered the Asrock Phantom gaming 6950 xt for $609.99 plus tax, from Newegg. I hope I got lucky.

Yesterday I found out that VSR only supports standard aspect ratio monitors. I'm SOL with my 32:9.

Dude stop making Linus faces in the thumbnails. It's terrifying.

Talking about cutscenes, still have Privateer 2 - The Darkening which had cinematic cutscenes with Clive Owen et al. New games are able to do almost cinematic cutscenes rendered real time without long loading times. Also recently loaded up System Shock 2, running just over 90 fps at 4K native on my Samsung 50" QN90A Neo 120hz TV as my monitor, with my AMD system R9 5900X and MSI RX 6900 XT Gaming Z Trio (XTXH chip) 32GB 3600 ram etc. Not really interested in ray tracing as I find rasterised lighting at 4K in most games is almost realistic on it's own. RT quake for me just looks like someone converted all the wall/ceiling lights to 500w halogen lamps, it's supposed to be dark inside as it's a semi derelict base. Just watch any Alien franchise film and you will get where I am coming from.

Great to see ya again!!!

Is it just me that thinks quake looks better with RTX off ? Its just too bright with it on. Already have my liquid devil 6900xt , that is basically already a 6950 :P Also dont think the generation on generation improvement is as impressive as it used to be 2080ti to 3090 was the smallest bump in performance in history.

How far we've come is pretty insane. The first GPU I played on was an ATI 3D Rage back in the 90s and even the worst on board graphics available today is hundreds of times more powerful. I doubt we'll ever again see an industry advance as fast as computer graphics has in the past 30 years.

We are indeed at the 90%+ mark in visual fidelity. But don't forget some critical factors. 1) The missing 10% can make a big difference in crossing the Uncanny Valley, especially in areas like human models in story-rich games with professional voice/mocap acting. Imagine a game where NPC is like the woman in the Unity "Enemies" demo. 2) Ray tracing is a big part of that missing 10%, and when done right (still needs a couple of GPU gens) it's a huge improvement in most other aspects of realism. Our brains are just too hardwired for the way light works in the real world, we unconsciously notice the smallest lies from rasterization tricks. 3) If we are at 90% in visuals, we're still barely breaking the 10% in physical realism. I want a game where my pants look wet and saggy after crossing a shallow river, without game designers having to specifically program that, just a natural consequence of proper simulation of how cloth works. I want a game where I'll break a chair and it splits down in pieces in a realistic way depending on the position and force of impact and the materials it is made off, and the fragments remain in the game instead of magically disappearing in seconds. Notice that there are game design challenges with this, e.g. you can trivialize or break platforming/traversal problems with weapons that can destroy almost every wall; but then games simply have to be better designed, at least ones that are not over-the-top power fantasies where you can have a shoulder-mounted nuke launcher.

great video, I think about this a lot. In the future we will have RT/lumen/pathtracing to handle perfect lighting, Nanite to handle perfect objects and AI is coming in to help with animations and... better AI for NPCS. We are soon hitting 4k, 150fps with all the bells and whistles. No the 4090 can't do it yet, the 4090 is probably half the speed of the card we need to actually do it, but a 2x faster GPU is likely just the flagship of 2 or at most 3 generations down the line. the 6090 or 7090 will be that GPU, then beyond that do we actually need more GPU power? what is there to be gained? We can only push things so far, scenes can get more and more elaborate and realistic looking, or impressive looking. Just keep adding detail to effects that don't need it. Make worlds ridiculously lush and full. Ok sure, so games get ridiculously dense but that is still not going to be enough to hold back gpu power for more than a couple generations beyond that. So a 8090 or 9090 and then what? Nvidia will try and push some BS feature that barely improves things and costs a ton of power and you don't need it. 8k resolution will get pushed, 360hz will get pushed, but it's all diminishing returns. What will happen, I think, and we are already seeing it, is very CPU intensive games. Yes we make the worlds as beautiful as we can and hit a wall of diminishing returns around 2030, however games can have much much more going on. Big Vram, Big 3d V-cache, Big Ram, Fast Memory, Beefy CPU to simulate whole ecosystems, to simulate entire armies, to simulate entire cities, to simulate AI intellegence NPCs. That is the future beyond making games pretty, and that is the real limit to gaming for hopefully most of my life, making evermore complex things. Because we are absolutetly reaching the point of diminishing returns in visuals alone. I think the good news is that in the next 8 years we will get to see some really nice growth visually and for PC hardware to get much better with 4k RT. The smart move to make is to understand where to draw the line on performance because hardware is getting super expensive on the GPU side and they will be pushing 8K which you don't need at all.

Nice twilight zone reference. Good job. ;)

Just grabbed this card for $700. water blocked on custom loop hit stable in game @ 2855mhz core and 2400mhz stock overclock, after small MPT mod now 2875mhz/2425mhz. Best card I've owned. Almost as fast as 4080/7900XT in some titles without RT. 4090 7900 XTX 7900 XT/4080 6950 XT overclocked 3090 TI 4070 TI

I just picked up a 6950 xt oc formula yesterday and the reason I went with it is because it was 699 with two free games. 6800 xts are going for 730+ right now so I was like no way I’m paying more for just the 6800xt over getting a 6950xt for less with two games.

FYI Samsung are exiting from the LCD business, as far as I'm aware, they are remaining in the market for OLEDS, QLEDS and similar technologies.likely cause they still need it for mobile, and tv's their 2 biggest product lines in Europe (all of samsung's phones are using AMOLED and their tablets have also moved to AMOLED recently. Their tv's are still largely LCD ut OLEDS are starting to become competitive at around £550 (about 700 US with LCD starting at £470-520 [600-680] for the 45-55″ range the smallest consumer OLEDs are 55″ but I buy 47″ due to the cost and comfort of 4k. There maybe 1080p OLEDs but I rarely see them since they're not usually price competitive or are at a size that is too big for a pleasurable viewing experience.)

I hope AMD's ROCm support for RDNA 1and 2 GPUs would last as long as their AM4 support

Love your videos, shoving some love for AMD gpu's!!

Man, am I the only one that got a 6800 xt instead of a 6900 or 6950xt? Personally just using a 1440p ultrawide tho

Samsung exiting the display business? Since when? (a quick google: they're exiting the LCD business with full focus on QD OLED)

Can't wait for that ROCm guide!

Dude, what's that massive apparatus surrounding the CPU? Looks epic af.

I do think we have hit a point of diminishing returns when we distinguish the difference of graphics cards by how the lighting looks.

30 Hurts

This may just be me, but Quake with raytracing doesn't look very good. Yeah, it's a lot brighter than without raytracing, but is that better? Also massive performance loss.

Just got this while it was on sale for $760 (with 2 games, lol). At that price, the value is comparable to the base 7900 XTs. Also, now there is a big issue with the XTX models and I'm not sure if any XTs are also in trouble. Either way, too scary, and I'd rather get the very best of the previous generation, until I can afford Nvidia. I have been having some minor issues with my 6800 (non XT) and hardware acceleration causing crashes ( I think) but I'm willing to deal with it.

I don’t know why you’d want to give up frames just to play at 4k

I bought the same just Powercolor branding. To be honest still the driver thing is the issue most of the time. (I know because I have a weird setup, 2x1080p monitor; 1x 4k monitor; and a 49" G9 for sim racing 9 :D Trust me the driver thing crashes at least once in 2 days :D

6950xt for 849$ CAD and even less than 800$ CAD is my suggestion for what to buy right now if they're going for a gpu.

I PAID 1250 FOR A 3070TI AFTER MENTAL BREAKDOWN AFTER MOTHS OF TRYING TO GET A CARD. NOW I JUST GOT A 6950XT ASROCK OC FORMULA FOR 700!!!!!!!! lol the 6950 used to be 1250, now I got it for 700, which the 3070ti should have been.

LOOOOVE that intro beat!

Quake 2 with RT looks like a remake built from the ground up.

Horizon Zero Dawn actually came out before Shadow of the Tomb Raider funnily enough

which monitor is in the background at 6:00 minutes? that is not the 4k monitor he was talking about

love to see AMD trading blows with NVIDIA in the GPU department, but if its isn't asking too much what about 3d art, i do work a lot In blender and a machine that can render stuff faster would really benefit me, specially if i end up working with Houdini too blender 3.0 basically rewrote the cycles render engine, and it took until 3.2 to get radeon support for GPU rendering I'm looking forward to an RTX 3070, because it can game well and i can use it to render since CUDA and optix are made specifically for NVIDIA cards, but now i wonder what's AMD offering note that I'm in Brazil, so availability may be different here

Hey did you guys do kvm testing on that m32u in that unlisted video? :)

Do you think Intel Arc GPU will suck?

Would you go with a 6950XT today? Or wait till November?

Isn't Samsung only exiting the LCD business rather than the display business as a whole? 6:11

Running Navi 21 too, that thing rips

I replaced my 5ish year old samsung 48" 4k tv with Hisense 55U8G. Blows the samsung out of the water. I paid $800 and it is also my monitor now. HDMI 2.1 120hz (in game mode) ALL VRR Freesync and yes the speakers are typical tv speakers, but sound is via my BOSE sound bar. High end 2022 models supposedly will come with mini-led and ATSC 3.0. So if any of you are in the market for a TV/monitor this year, like always, wait for reviews. I also upgraded from an EVGA 1080Ti to 6900 from AMD. I would have bought their 6800XT, but like Nvidia, not even on their web site. I sure hope them maximizing profits bites them in their collective behinds.

This hits home! I am in a Situation where the update is needed for my personal gaming excess. A quick glance at PC Info shows an i5-6600K with a GTX 1080. I own Elden Ring and Total War Warhammer 3, not played them at all because I am aware that my PC is not going to give me the quality and performance I want for these games. I would love that same level of advice for a Motherboard and CPU. Yes I am willing to throw money at my gaming rig because that is my main hobby and has been for many years. But right now I do not feel tech CPU and GPU is at a stage where paying overpriced "crazy" is worth it. "New" scaling methods and technique's are worked on that will result in more mature and quality development in the coming two generations for CPU's for example.

Hey wendell. I've often thought that we need a modern display that mimics the characteristics of an old CRT to see the kind of "wow" benefits we want to see. I have my 1080p 144hz monitor overclocked to 177hz and I use backlight strobing to get about 1200 pixels per second in fast motion, with a pretty dim picture. I would prefer something like a MEMS based Laser Phosphor display that wouldn't be a fixed pixel display, and would be inherently low persistence. I would be more impressed with a display that could give full motion resolution, and better color at 60-80hz with more fidelity, but the same smooth motion because the display is better with motion resolution.

Am I the only one the only one that finds the 4k labeling exasperating, like the old naming convention was just fine, 2160p

The Gigabyte m32u review is unlisted?

some games look pretty photorealistic but still almost no game has super realistic movement physics. everything always ends up feeling a little janky

I'd love to see how far photorealism has come by say 2035. You might be shocked at the leap Wendell

I really can't bring myself to buy another Asrock product. Their warranty policies are horrible, especially around GPUs. Appreciate the rest of the video though!

Wendell rocks 🤘😎👍

Well ... , i bought an 6800XT for 679 Euro last week thats with VAT = for the US = 570 USD and in my Eyes its a way better Value than a 6950 XT for 1100 Dollar . Nearly half the price for only 10 % less Performance ( on Paper ) . Some undervolt and OC and you are faster than a 6950 @ stock . Its 72 vs 80 CUs which is not such a big Difference and some higher clocks which i can reach with OC , even higher , i can reach in Time Spy a 2480-2500Mhz constant Boost clock under Air , i am considering to Watercool the 6800XT , but on the other side i currently use an extrem undervolt Setting @892 mv until it crashes , suprisingly it seems to work , it limits the boost to 2188 Mhz , but it Boosts constantly over 2100 Mhz because of no Power and Temp Limits , this is for 1440p more than enough . Only RT Games may need a Performance Setting . If i use Chill and use the refresh rates of 165Hz as limit then its under 100 Watt Power usage @ 1440p in less demanding Games like World of Warships , otherwise it stays under 200 Watts . For 1440p you not really need a 6800XT but the 6800 was only 90 Euro cheaper and it is cut down 20 % vs the 6800XT . The 12 more RT Accelerators of a 6800XT maybe usefull in RT Games too , thats why i bought a 6800 XT . Even if i would buy an 4 K Monitor the 6800XT will be enough , at least if i use FSR 2.1 which can be easily implemented in Games which already use DLSS . The next GPU Gen may deliver more FPS , but 80-100 FPS are enough for me and currently i already limit the 6800XT in favor for less Power usage . EDIT : I had a major undervolt Breakthrough , i used the more Power Tool from Igor , i call it less Power Tool ... , to modify Voltages and min sliders of the Adrenalin Software . I now use only 808 mv with Boost of 2409 which translates to 2330-2350 Mhz Clock in Timespy , no addional Power , but its already an OC Bios with 272 Watts . Its Time Spy stable , the rest has to be seen

Basically open source as in basically beer or basically freedom?

Do you know what the max clock speed was and temps? I'm looking to get this card form newegg

Comfy af

1440p gaming is suddenly affordable. A RX 6700 or 3060ti and 5600x or Intel 10 400 with 32gb ram goes along way and you might be able to do it all for only a $1000.

4k 30hz? Welcome to the wonderful world of dual-link dvi!

I missed an opportunity to get a 3090 for the same price as 6950's currently are at, so I'm trying to decide if this would be a worthwhile investment over a 3080ti. I do care about VR, and less sure of the importance of ray tracing/dlss. Running a triple monitor setup with the main being an ultrawide 3440x1440. I'm less enthused with waiting for the next generation of cards simply due to uncertainties surrounding them and opportunities to pickup this generation cards for pretty cheap. Is VR performance something that would be improved with driver updates as that's the main difference I'm a bit torn over. Any suggestions?

And here I am thinking spending around 1200 usd for a decently powerful pc when GTX 780 was hot and only Titan was stronger was quite a lot....

Thumbnail is great 😅

choosing Radeon and first test is path tracing... interesting choice

on sale now for 699 oh boy

Got a 6900XT at a great price but gonna be running it on ye old faithful 1080p 144hz monitor until I find a good 4k monitor that's not as much as the video card :-o

hey I bought one of them... but mine is Gigabyte..... for it on DAY ONE because I'm expect there to be another shortage because of Chyna shutting down so much because of their "zero covid" policy... I think I may ave been wrong..... but I think it was worth the $399 I paid for and the $399 I paid for a 165hz 1440p 32" monitor..... Plus I already have a 4k TV hooked up..... so I think I'm good to go for a lil while :)

“depending on how long he plans on living”

I like to pronounce ROCm as Rockum, like Rockum Sockum Robots lol. Much more fun.

Gigabyte M32U or MSI Optix Optix MPG321UR-QD (with “Quantum Dots)?

If asrock would make the oc formula mobos more available I'd probably buy one.....

Call me crazy but I would have preferred Quake 1 or Quake 3 with ray tracing. RT Quake 3 with how many games were made on the Quake 3 engine.... a boy can only dream of the Jedi Outcast games getting serious fan made mods to turn the visuals up to eleventy billion vs the original maximum.

Hey there. So I’m looking at this video card and a 3080 ti. I’m running a 3440x1440p 120 hz Alienware monitor. Now i only play very high or ultra and I want to get my 120 fps in most games. Can this video card handle that or am I gone see drops to 80-90.

6:11 source??? That's crazy wtfff?