GeForce RTX 3090 Ti vs Radeon RX 6950 XT Compute Performance

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition next to SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE video card on a black background with Compute Text

Introduction

We’ve thoroughly examined the performance of NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, and Overclocked it, and we’ve also looked at AMD’s Radeon RX 6950 XT full performance and overclocked it.  Then we put both video cards head-to-head Overclocked, to see how they compare when pushed to the max.  This covers all the gameplay performance, Ray Tracing, DLSS, and FSR.  However, what it doesn’t cover is the Compute and Workstation performance out of the video cards. 

While we know that NVIDIA’s and AMD’s flagships can provide the best gameplay experience to date, and which one is best at what, what we don’t know is which one is best for Compute workloads.  GPUs today can do much more than gaming, and the Compute and Workstation and GPGPU workloads they are capable of matters, especially on these flagship video cards.  You see, NVIDIA packs 24GB of VRAM on the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, which is great for professional use, and AMD has 16GB on the Radeon RX 6950 XT.  With VRAM capacities this large, these video cards are viable compute accelerators for professional workstations at a reasonable price. 

Therefore, in today’s comparison, we are pitting the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition vs the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT and testing compute performance using synthetic benchmarks, as well as industry-recognized standards like SPECviewperf.  Let’s see which one is best for compute, GPGPU, and workstation-class performance outside of gaming. 

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.

We will be using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition video card and a SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE video card for comparison.  The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ PURE runs at a factory overclock of Game Clock at 2162MHz and Boost Clock at 2368MHz.

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Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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