MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 16G desktop GPU review: Last-gen high-end GPU in battle against RDNA3 and Ada Lovelace

The MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 16G holds up remarkably well even almost one year after its launch and isn't completely left in the dust by the new high-end GPUs. In a direct comparison, our review unit is neck and neck with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. The Radeon RX 7900 XT is around 11 per cent faster and the XTX model, which is based on the new RDNA3 architecture, runs roughly 25 per cent faster. Overall, the RX 6950 XT is powerful enough to hold its own against last-gen graphics cards. 

A similar picture emerges when it comes to render tests and professional applications. Despite this, the MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 16G delivered excellent performance in some cases. Depending on the application, it is even able to keep up with the RTX 4080. Unfortunately, GPU acceleration in Affinity Photo 2 is not a strong suit of the AMD graphics cards at all.

The results from our gaming test are consistent with those from the synthetic benchmarks. We once again see the MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 16G locked in a close race with the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. In our real-world test featuring numerous games, the MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 16G showed that it is also able to run the latest games smoothly at 2160p and max settings. At the moment, users are still well prepared for future games if they have 16 GB of VRAM at their disposal. 

For another overview of the performance of these graphics cards, please refer to our GPU comparison table.