Introduction
NVIDIA flagship versus AMD flagship, but overclocked! That is what we are looking at today, we are taking a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti video card and overclocking it to the max, and then comparing performance to an AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT video card also overclocked to the max. This is our Overclocked GeForce RTX 3090 Ti vs. Overclocked Radeon RX 6950 XT performance comparison. Let’s put them head-to-head and see who comes out on top.
Right now, it gets no better than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti from NVIDIA, and the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT from AMD. Both of these video cards are flagship video cards and offer the highest performance a consumer can get for PC gaming today. We’ve recently fully reviewed the general performance of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition and the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE graphics cards. While we did overclock both video cards in their respective reviews, we haven’t yet put them both on a graph to compare overclock versus overclock performance. That is what we are doing today.
Recap of Video Card Specs
Just a quick recap of both GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has an MSRP of $1,999.99. It is based on the full-spec GA102 GPU based on the Ampere architecture. Manufactured on Samsung 8N it has 84 SMs, 10,752 CUDA Cores, 112 ROPs, 336 Texture Units, 84 RT Cores (2nd Gen), and 336 Tensor Cores (3rd Gen). It has a Boost Clock of 1860MHz and 24GB of GDDR6X at 21GHz on a 384-bit bus providing 1008GB/s of bandwidth with a TDP of 450W.
The AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT has an MSRP of $1,099.99. It is based on the NAVI 21 GPU with RDNA2 architecture at TSMC N7. It has 5,120 Stream Processors, 80 Compute Units, 80 Ray Accelerators, 128 ROPs and 320 TMUs, and 128MB of Infinity Cache. It has a Game Clock of 2100MHz and a Boost Clock of 2310MHz. It has 16GB of GDDR6 at 18GHz on a 256-bit bus providing 576GB/s of memory bandwidth with a TDP of 335W.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE Overclock
In our Overclocking NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE review we overclocked the video card, we will be using that same overclock in this review today. The default GPU frequency the video card operated at without overclock was 1995MHz average frequency. When we overclocked it with EVGA Precision X1 we were able to increase the Power Target by 22%, which was quite a bit, plus raise the fan speeds.
With the Voltage at default, we managed to push the video card to +140 GPU Clock and +1000 on the memory slider. This resulted in an overclocked GPU Frequency of 2130-2160MHz, averaging around 2160MHz. This is an 8% GPU Clock Speed improvement. The memory resulted in a frequency of 23GHz versus the default 21GHz. At 23GHz memory, bandwidth increased to 1.1TB/s.
The final overclock shown in this review today is: 2160MHz/23GHz (GPU/Mem).
SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE Overclock
In our SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE review we overclocked the video card, we will be using that same overclock in this review today. The default GPU frequency the video card operated at without overclock was 2460MHz average frequency. When we overclocked it with AMD Radeon Software Tuning, we were able to increase the Power Limit by 20%, which was quite a bit, plus raise the fan speeds.
With the Voltage at default, we managed to push the Maximum Frequency slider to 2850MHz and the memory up to 18.8GHz. This resulted in a frequency of around 2800MHz on average, while gaming. This is a 13-14% GPU Clock increase. With the memory at 18.8GHz, the memory bandwidth increased to 601GB/s.
The final overclock shown in this review today is: 2800MHz/18.8GHz (GPU/Mem).