AMD doesn’t yet have a rival for the RTX 4070 in its new Radeon RX 7900 lineup, but it does have an RX 6950 XT model that’s now priced at almost half what it was at launch. And at the same time, we are talking about just about the same price as the RTX 4070. The authors of the Hardware Unboxed channel decided to compare these two adapters to understand which is more profitable for $ 600.

The cards have been tested in a large number of games. What is important, separately with ray tracing and separately without it, since not everyone needs this technology, and when mixing tests, this greatly affects the result and information content.

So, if we are talking about the results without tracing, then the RX 6950 XT is noticeably faster at all resolutions. In Full HD, the AMD card is ahead by 12%, at 1440p the advantage reaches 15%, and in 4K it is already 17%. And there is only one game in the list tested (The Callisto Protocol), which works better on the Nvidia adapter.

With ray tracing, the situation is expectedly different, but it’s not as bad as those who think that this technology always works many times better on Nvidia cards might think.

In Full HD, the RTX 4070 is 12% ahead, at 1440p the advantage is reduced to 11%, and in 4K the Nvidia adapter even in this mode is already losing to the competitor, although only by 2%. It is worth noting here that tracing games differ greatly in their preferences. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 always runs much better on the RTX 4070, but Hogwarts Legacy, RE4 and F1 2022 run better on the RX 6950 XT regardless of resolution. At the same time, in the super-popular Fortnite in Full HD, the RTX 4070 is ahead of the RX 6950 XT by a huge 30%, and in 4K the AMD adapter is already faster, and by 35%. That is, everything here depends very much on the resolution.

Thus, the choice between these two adapters, if approached without any preferences, is not so simple. It is necessary to proceed both from the target resolution, and from the importance of ray tracing. If tracing isn’t important, then the AMD card is much faster.

At least one model of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card has another overheating issue. In this case, we are not talking about reference cards, but about the PowerColor RX 7900XTX Red Devil, which is considered one of the top versions of the AMD flagship.

The author of the portal Igor’sLAB decided to look into the reasons for the numerous complaints of the owners of these cards and indeed discovered the problem. And the most banal one: it turned out that the cards had poorly applied thermal paste on the GPU.

Because of this, the heat from the core is transferred to the cooling system unevenly, which leads to a situation where the temperature of the hottest point of the GPU is 30 degrees higher than the average temperature! This is even more than in the case of problematic reference versions.

A simple replacement of thermal paste with the correct application has proven to solve the problem easily. Firstly, the average GPU temperature dropped by 5 degrees, and secondly, the temperature of the hottest spot decreased by 15 degrees.

The important thing is that PowerColor has already contacted the author and thanked him for his help.

We’ve discovered an issue on our production line that causes some cards to have warmer hotspot temperatures than usual. We have seen this happen with a small percentage of total production and we are already in the process of replacing thermal paste. Thanks to a new contribution from IgorLabs, we are also testing whether changing the way the cooler is attached to the card improves thermal performance. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible so that our customers receive only the highest quality products.

In general, the problem with overheating of the RX 7900 XTX made a lot of noise at one time, and then they quickly forgot about it. As was the case with the RTX 4090 fire.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti video card should go on sale on May 24, and today the adapter was first lit up in the benchmark.

True, so far only in Geekbench, where the results of the card are only 9% higher than the RTX 3060 Ti, but in this case the results are not so important. It is important that the software confirms all the leaks and rumors about the graphics card having 4352 CUDA cores and 8 GB of memory. Yes, there will supposedly be a 16 GB version, but it will not be released until July.

The software also talks about a GPU frequency of 2.54 GHz and a memory frequency of 18 GHz.

Recall that we are also waiting for the RTX 4060 model with 3072 CUDA cores and the same memory subsystem. By the way, against the backdrop of the upcoming release of new adapters, Nvidia partners began to lower prices for the RTX 3060 Ti.