AMD RX 6950 XT could land in April to combat Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti GPU

AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 refresh could arrive earlier than previously rumored, but will only consist of a new flagship GPU, if the latest from the grapevine turns out to be correct.

We’ve heard a fair few rumors around the supposedly incoming RDNA 2 revamp, and this fresh nugget is from hardware leaker Coreteks on Twitter, who directly replied to a leak we covered yesterday courtesy of Greymon55.

As you can see, the theory here is that the refresh only consists of a new RX 6950 XT to take over from the 6900 XT at the top of the Radeon tree – with no overhauled GPU further down the range, like a 6850 XT – and that it’ll arrive in April, earlier than the June or July potential launch timeframe Greymon floated.

Greymon also told us that this refresh would not come on a new process, and drop to 6nm as some other chatter has theorized, and Coreteks didn’t disagree with that.

Analysis: This timing seems more on the money to us

This makes more sense to us in terms of a release schedule for AMD, if the company is going to push out a refreshed RDNA 2 card (or cards). Mainly because Team Red just confirmed next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs are on track for release later this year, likely in Q4, and Greymon reckons it could be early in that quarter, so possibly October.

That being the case, it seems odd to push out a refresh for current graphics cards in, say, July, with maybe only a few months to go before the next-gen arrives. An April release date would give a bit more breathing room for any revamped cards, for sure.

A limited refresh of just the one card, the flagship, also makes sense in terms of this being just a stopgap thing – and given the pressures of component shortages which still abound. In much the same way that the Ryzen 3D V-cache refresh is only one processor, the 5800X3D.

We’ve also previously discussed the theories out there on the grapevine that Nvidia’s RTX 3090 Ti (which has been announced, back at CES 2022) could be a tentative effort just to get a more powerful GPU out there to tackle what AMD has planned – a card which Nvidia may not deploy in much quantity at all – and again, that’s in line with Team Red coming out with an RX 6950 XT.

Or you could look at it the other way around, and see the 6950 XT as a reply to what Nvidia has planned, but either way, the contention is that both companies will eventually push out a supercharged flagship.

Whether anyone wants to buy either, if this does turn out to be the case, is obviously debatable given what will doubtless be eye-watering pricing, and with the (presumably) RX 7000 and RTX 4000 families due later this year. But there will always be gamers who want the absolute best GPU available at any given time (although availability could bring its own issues, of course, at least until later in 2022).

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Via Wccftech