In the autumn of 2020, AMD made a long-awaited return to the performance segment with the Radeon RX 6000 series and the RDNA 2 architecture. However, the company has been late in bringing the series down to lower price ranges, probably due to the prevailing component shortage, but now it seems that a launch for the middle class is close at hand.
Now the French technology site Cowcotland reports that the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be launched on March 18. This will be the model that can be expected to take up the fight against Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 3060 Ti. AMD is also planning an RX 6700 that can be expected to go up against the Geforce RTX 3060, but for this model no date for launch is stated.
Characteristics | Navi 10 | Navi 21 | Navi 22 |
---|---|---|---|
product | Radeon RX 5700 XT | RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 (XT) | RX 6700 XT |
Circuit surface | 251 mm² | 505 mm² | 340 mm²* |
CU devices | 40 st. | 80 st. | 40 st. |
Streamprocessorer | 2 560 st. | 5 120 st. | 2 560 st. |
Memory | 8 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 | 12 GB GDDR6 |
Memory bus | 256 bits | 256 bits | 192 bits |
Infinity Cache | – | 128 MB | 96 MB |
Architecture | RDNA | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 |
TGP | 225 W | 300/250 W | 186–211 W* |
* Unconfirmed information
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is based on the graphics circuit Navi 22, which according to previous information gets the same number of stream processors as Navi 10 in the previous flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT. These are 2,560 stream processors and these will be flanked by a narrower memory bus of 192 bits, which is a significant step down from 256 bits for Navi 10.
The narrower bus width is likely to be offset by a large Infinity Cache, which AMD introduced with the Navi 21 in the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT. The idea behind this is precisely to be able to provide high performance and practical bandwidth, despite a lower theoretical bandwidth between the bus and the graphics memory itself.
On the memory front, it is about GDDR6 and Radeon RX 6700 XT gets a capacity of 12 GB. Little brother RX 6700 is believed to take a step back to 6 GB, but it can not be ruled out that even that graphics card will get 12 GB. The theoretical bandwidth can be expected to be 336 or 384 GB / s, which depends on whether AMD chooses to use GDDR6 memory with an efficient clock frequency of 14,000 or 16,000 MHz.
While the launch is formally said to take place on March 18, it remains to be seen how many graphics cards will find their way into the store. According to Cowcotland, availability will be “very limited”.
Are you looking forward to new graphics cards in the middle class or have you given up hope of being able to buy a graphics card at all in 2021?