AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Video Card Review

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AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Video Card

Introduction

Let’s travel not too far back to November of 2020.  It was mid-November 2020 AMD finally let the cloth fly and all the benchmarks on its new AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 video cards were published.  This was the official launch and release of AMD’s next-generation Radeon RX 6000 series based on its new RDNA2 architecture.  A lot of people liked to call this “Big NAVI” so you may recognize it by that name. 

The Radeon RX 6000 series was always meant to be a complete lineup of video cards based on RDNA2.  This followed with the launch of the Radeon RX 6900 XT the next month in December 2020.  Until now, those are the three AMD Radeon RX 6000 series video cards that have existed, and they are all high-end cards. 

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has a suggested price of $999, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT has a suggested price of $649, and the Radeon RX 6800 has a suggested price of $579.  All of these video cards competed at the high-end spectrum of gaming and subsequently the high-end competition equivalents.  Given that the Radeon RX 6000 series was always a series of video cards, it makes sense that AMD would release a new model that is next down on the stack.  That video card is what is being launched today, but the actual availability for cards will be on Thursday, March 18th.  The new Radeon RX 6700 XT will have a suggested price of $479.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Specifications

Let’s jump right to it, the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is based on the RDNA2 architecture but is a new NAVI 22 XT GPU. Therefore all the features supported in the Radeon RX 6800/6900 are supported here.  The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is manufactured on 7nm like the rest of the series.  It will have 40 Compute Units and Ray Accelerators.  This is exactly half that of the Radeon RX 6900 XT.  The Radeon RX 6700 XT has 2560 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and 160 Texture Mapping Units.  The Game GPU Clock will run starting at 2424MHz.  It has a Boost GPU Clock of 2581MHz.  It has 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache, which is less than the 128MB found on the Radeon RX 6800/XT and 6900 XT. 

There is 12GB of GDDR6 memory onboard running at 16GHz.  AMD is using a 192-bit memory bus on the Radeon RX 6700 XT.  This puts it at 384GB/s of memory bandwidth, actually less than the Radeon RX 5700 XT which has 448GB/s of bandwidth due to its 256-bit bus width.  It can use this lower memory bus width and bandwidth because of the use of AMD Infinity Cache to offset the narrower memory bandwidth.  The Board Power is rated at 230W though, only 5W more than the 225W of the Radeon RX 5700 XT.  AMD Smart Access Memory is supported.

Gaming Target

AMD is targeting the Radeon RX 6700 XT at $479 to appeal to 1440p resolution gaming.  AMD states that display shipment growth year over year is showing larger growth in the 1440p monitor area.  In addition, higher refresh rate monitors upwards of 100Hz are becoming more desirable.

Having 12GB of VRAM for 1440p gaming is an important part of AMD’s strategy in providing a good 1440p experience.  AMD also looks at this as future-proofing.  AMD is aiming for 60+ FPS 1440p gaming for 2021.  This means the Radeon RX 6700 XT is an upgrade path from the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX Vega 64. 

Along with this launch, there are also a couple of updates to support.  Radeon Anti-Lag now supports DX12 games along with DX9 and DX11.  This aids in latency reduction.  AMD Radeon Boost also now supports Motion Adaptive VRS in DX12.  These features are enabled via the AMD control panel. 

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Video Card Review Expanding the AMD RDNA Family
Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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