AMD's Radeon RX 6750 XT was touted as the GPU most likely to offer a visible performance boost over its predecessor. However, like the Radeon RX 6950 XT (opens in new tab), all I see is a factory-overclocked version of the previous card with a high MSRP and a hearty appetite. Don't get me wrong, Asus once again makes an excellent package for AMD GPUs and offers an unparalleled cooling solution, even by the standards of the Chonky Chiller attached to the MSI RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio (opens in new tab), which we also checked out ...

However, there is really nothing that the refreshed RDNA 2 graphics card offers over its RX 6700 XT (opens in new tab) ancestor. That's because what the RDNA 2 does have over its Radeon siblings is in its energy consumption.

With the cost of power output from plug sockets rising at a frightening rate, it seems a bit tone deaf for AMD to release a card set that can only perform when it is consuming much more power than a traditional card.

But that's been the trend with GPUs for a while now, and it's hard to blame the Red Team across the board, especially since these chips should have been spec'd out long before energy prices spiked. [The specs themselves are nearly identical to the RX 6700 XT, with the Navi 22 GPU still built on the same TSMC N7 node, with the same 2,560 shader design and 12GB of GDDR6 memory. However, the memory has been accelerated from 16 Gbps to 18 Gbps. This, combined with the higher boost clock speeds, given the chip's ability to require higher power consumption, results in higher gaming performance.

And it also comfortably offers higher clock speeds. Like the MSI cards we reviewed, the Asus Radeon RX 6750 XT Strix OC (opens in new tab) easily exceeds its rated boost clock of 2,600MHz, with an average frequency just shy of 2,700MHz. Compare this to the reference RX 6700 XT that I run on my office machine every day of the week, which adds another 300 MHz on average.

This is much higher than is reasonable to expect from a factory overclocked graphics card. However, I am of two minds as to what this clock speed actually means in terms of game frame rates. [It's hard to find a reason to recommend spending more money on the RX 6750 XT than the RX 6700 XT. Or even a cheaper RTX 3060 Ti (open in new tab) if you can find one closer to MSRP.

To be fair, that probably won't happen. [However, there are Radeon cards with MSRPs that include both the RX 6750 XT and RX 6700 XT. So the higher-priced Strix edition cards are doubly tough to recommend: we could only find the Asus RX 6750 XT Strix OC for $650+, the similarly performing RX 6700 XT for $499, and the faster RTX 3070 ( Open in new tab) can be had for $630: ...... In other words, why do it? [19] [20] 1080p gaming performance [21] [22] 1440p gaming performance [23] [24] 4K gaming performance [25] [26] There are some outliers where the RX 6750 XT offers a more visible performance jump compared to the RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT, but overall As a whole, the three GPUs offer roughly the same kind of frame rate. Nevertheless, these frame rate levels are quite strong and can handle 1080p games with no problems, and 1440p games can be comfortably run on any GPU with confidence that there is no need to do the heavy lifting on the settings screen.

Notably, all of our gaming benchmarks use the GPU's native performance without any upscaling techniques. This is not because we particularly disregard them, but because they help us understand the performance of the silicon itself. But now that Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR are such established entities and frankly amazing, enabling either on these $500-$600 cards will yield outstanding 1440p performance results

GPU Performance

Now that FSR 2.0 is fully open-sourced (open in new tab), it is expected that any game with DLSS processing will be able to quickly and relatively easily switch to AMD's equivalent. Also, developers should have little excuse to implement FSR technology in new titles from the start. In short, AMD will no longer be behind in the upscaling wars.

However, this Asus Strix version is definitely technically impressive, i.e., it averages almost 2.7 GHz GPU clock and peaks at only 56°C at full load. The average power consumption of the older RX 6700 XT is 213W, while this version runs at 274W, with a peak of 310W. For reference, this is higher than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, the latter of which is also a comfortably faster GPU.

Ultimately, this is not a piece of graphics silicon that I would recommend, nor is it part of a graphics card package that I would recommend to anyone considering spending big bucks today. the GPU market is changing now, and is certainly more fluid than at any point in the last few years. The market is in a state of flux, and it's more fluid than at any point in recent years. The latest cryptocurrency crash has re-started the used market, and regular sales prices are dropping.

And a whole new generation could be on the horizon in the near future.

It may be time to consider buying a cheap/mainstream GPU, as replacements won't drop until next spring.