The AMD Radeon RDNA 2 refresh is coming in just a few weeks' time, with the 6950XT, 670XT, and 6650XT providing additional options for gamers, and improving the overall performance of the generation by a few small steps. At the top end faster memory and greater clock speeds should push the 6950XT ahead of the RTX 3090 in a few more games, but it will need a lot of power to do it. Early details from third party cards suggest the top GPUs could pull close to 350W.
The details for these refreshed GPUs comes from Sapphire, which showed off the game and boost clocks of its new cards, along with their TDP demands. The 6650 XT will pull 157W when in silent mode, and will reach to almost 2,700MHz, while the 6750XT will hit 2600MHz and need 200W to do it.
The 6950XT cards, however, are much more exciting. TDPs start at 284W on the silent BIOS for a 2310MHz boost clock, and 2100MHz game clock, but in the toxic, watercooled card, we see a 2435MHz boost clock at 325W TDP, or up to 2565MHz boost, with a 346W TDP.
With over 100MHz difference between the top cards, we might see some notable performance enhancements, particularly when you factor a faster 18Gbps memory being used on these new cards too.
That's a lot of power and heat, though, almost matching the stock RTX 3090 Ti cards from Nvidia.
What do you think of the new Radeon GPUs? Will you consider one, or will you be waiting for RTX 4000 and RDNA 3?