AMD could launch its RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT and 6650 XT refreshed graphics cards on April 20, and the flagship reference card might be a black edition.
This fresh speculation from the GPU grapevine comes courtesy of Wccftech and Greymon55 (the latter being an active hardware leaker on Twitter).
I forgot to mention, it's not a new design, it looks the same as the 6800XT Black Edition.March 10, 2022
As you can see, the theory is that the reference RX 6950 XT will be a black version of the card, but won’t have a new design – it’ll apparently look just like the current 6800 XT Midnight Black model.
Wccftech has spoken to sources who have reasserted the April 20 launch date for the RX 6950 XT plus the other two RDNA 2 refreshes, and it’s now ‘confirmed’ at least according to the rumor mill – though of course we can’t take that as actual confirmation. That date was previously floated earlier this week via the Chiphell forums (and supposedly AMD’s new Ryzen 5800X3D processor will be unleashed on that date, too).
As we’ve heard before, the new ‘6x50’ spins on these Big Navi graphics cards will be differentiated with faster VRAM (18Gbps), with performance also potentially upped by clock speeds being pushed to higher levels as well (maybe to boost speeds of 2.5GHz out of the box, or indeed more).
Analysis: How about the stock situation – and is it better to wait, anyway?
The big question is, given that the 6800 XT Midnight Black graphics card proved popular, what are your odds of being able to get hold of a black edition reference board this time around? Probably not good given the situation around supply issues and component shortages, let’s face it – but there will be other models of this trio of revamped GPUs on sale via third-party card manufacturers.
As Wccftech indicates, the latter is likely to represent the majority of launch stock that’s initially available, but even getting hold of one of those cards is going to be a struggle, no doubt, in the current GPU climate.
Arguably, you might be better off waiting anyway, given that the next-gen RDNA 3 cards from AMD are not all that far off, with the expectation that they’ll arrive before the end of 2022. When you also factor in the prediction from AMD (and Nvidia) that GPU supply issues will ease in the second half of 2022 – and price inflation should be less of a problem as a result – playing the waiting game for a Team Red graphics card certainly seems a sound strategy to employ right now.
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