While I wait on 3rd party reviews I’m mulling over whether or not to swap out my 6950xt for the 9070xt.
My current card is fine for me in 1440p ultrawide, though it does get hot and is (for me) noisy.
The main consideration is (tethered) VR gaming. The 6950xt is ok but it feels like it’s just short of where I want it, but I’m not sure how much of a difference there’d be between the 2 cards.
I’m planning to upgrade my 7800 XT to a 9070 XT assuming availability allows that and actual AIB pricing is close to MSRP. The uplift should be around 45-50%, or more in RT. And you get FSR4, whatever that’s worth.
My main reason is that I used to play at 2560x1440 and the 7800 XT is great for that, but now I’m playing at 3440x1440 which means almost 35% more pixels and I want to get back to the same performance level as before albeit the higher resolution. The 9070 XT should allow that with some headroom.
Your 6950 XT is slightly faster than my 7800 XT already, so expect the uplift to the 9070 XT to be more around 35-40%. And you get FSR4 in select games, and AV1 encode fwiw, as RDNA 2 didn’t have that yet.
All assuming AMDs marketed numbers aren’t complete bs of course. Wait for independent benchmarks to be sure.
Noise obviously largely depends on the cooler, I had a great experience with my PowerColor Hellhound 7800 XT, it’s quieter than any MSI, ASUS (Strix) or Zotac card I ever owned. So I’ll try and get a PowerColor card (Hellhound or Red Devil) again or if they’re out of stock maybe a Sapphire Nitro (even though I’d prefer 8-pin power instead of the 12VHPWR connector).
At the very least i’d say just wait until it comes out and look at reviews to see how much performance you’ll gain. I’m currently also using a 6950xt with 1440p ultrawide but i think i’m gonna stick with it for a bit longer, purely cause i haven’t played as much games as i would have liked and still have a huge backlog, but if you think the performance uplift would be usefull to you i don’t see why not.
