AMD just announced the new Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. Like the RX 6800 series, the RX 6700 XT is based on AMD’s new RDNA 2 architecture. It’s a 1440p gaming graphics card that will compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. Starting at $479(MSRP), this card will be available starting March 18th, together with the custom cards from the AIB partners. Check out the rest of its specs and some game benchmarks below.
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Specs and Features
The Radeon RX 6700 XT is based on a 7nm Navi 22 GPU. It’s smaller than the Navi 21 found on the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT cards. It features 40 compute units, 2560 stream processors, 96MB infinity cache, 12GB GDDR6 memory, and up to 2424MHz of game clock speed.
The 12GB GDDR6 memory clocks at 16Gbps, with 384GB/s memory bandwidth running on a 192-bit memory interface. It has 230W of board power and features AMD’s smart access memory as well. The reference design has an 8-pin+6-pin PCI power connector, but expect that cards from AIB partners will probably have dual 8-pin power connectors.
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Benchmarks (Preview)
AMD is targetting the RX 6700 XT as a 1440p gaming graphics card and plans to combat NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. During the presentation, AMD showed some slides where they compared the 6700XT against previous-generation NVIDIA cards like the RTX 2080 Super and GTX 1070 Ti.
The test system used was powered by an AMD Ryzen 5900X paired with 16GB DDR4-3200MHz memory, both installed on an ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard.
AMD also compared the Radeon RX 6700 XT with NVIDIA’s latest RTX 30 series cards. And based on these results, the RX 6700 XT is a bit faster than the RTX 3070 in some of the (cherry-picked) game titles. Some of these games are AMD-sponsored, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the 6700XT performed well compared to the competition.
Again, AMD used the same test system – AMD Ryzen 5900X paired with 16GB DDR4-3200MHz memory, on an ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard.
AMD only showed results for traditional rasterization, despite the card being capable of ray tracing. Well, it is understandable since it is the first time AMD has implemented ray tracing features. It’s expected that ray tracing is (currently) not the forte of these RX 6000 cards.
Pricing and Avaiability
AMD plans to release the Radeon RX 6700 XT starting March 18 with an MSRP of $479. Both the reference cards and custom cards from AIB partners are expected to be available starting that day.
The problem is, I’m certain that these cards will sell out instantly, just like the other graphics cards released recently. And expect exorbitant prices from third-party retailers after that. Hopefully, the silicone shortage will be resolved very soon.
