Official Radeon RX 6700 XT: arrives on March 18 to challenge Nvidia on gaming at 1440p

AMD presented the Radeon RX 6700 XT, a new video card that challenges the RTX 3070 ($ 499 tax free) with an introductory price of $ 479 tax free. The card will arrive on the market, both with the reference design and customized by the partners, starting from March 18. The new proposal, which replaces the Radeon RX 5700 XT and therefore aims to guarantee high gaming performance at 1440p, is based on a 7-nanometer Navi 22 GPU.

Architecture is always the same RDNA 2 we’ve seen on the previously announced Radeon RX 6000 models (RX 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT), albeit with obvious differences in terms of specifications. Size-wise, the reference board is 26.7mm long like previous reference models, albeit slightly shallower. As for thickness, it should still occupy two slots like the RX 6800. The other difference is obvious, that is, it has only two axial fans compared to the three of the more powerful models.

As for the power supply, the card needs one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe connector, compared to the two 8-pin of the higher-end GPUs. It is possible, indeed probable, that the custom models have two 8-pin connectors due to the higher factory frequencies and to guarantee additional overclocking margin for enthusiasts.

AMD talked about 11 power phases on the PCB (formed by 10 layers with 2 ounces of copper), phase-change material on the GPU to promote heat transfer to the radiator and confirmed the presence of three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1 in the back, at least as far as the reference model is concerned.

Radeon RX 6700, technical specifications

As for the specifications, the Radeon RX 6700 XT has a GPU with 40 active Compute Units for a total of 2560 stream processors. AMD indicated a base clock of 2321 MHz, a Game Clock of up to 2424 MHz and a Boost Clock of 2581 MHz. These are very high values ​​when compared with those of the RDNA 2 GPUs already released.

Each RDNA 2 Compute Unit offers a Ray Accelerator to speed up the calculations behind ray tracing, so in this case we have 40 RA. The graphics chip also counts on 96 MB of Infinity Cache, the integrated memory that acts as a bandwidth amplifier. As for VRAM, the card has 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on 192-bit bus. AMD explained that games will increasingly require more memory, so 12GB is needed. The TDP is 230W, 20W less than the RX 6800.

Radeon RX 6700 XT, performance according to AMD

During the presentation event, Scott Herkelman (Corporate Vice President & General Manager of the Graphics Business Unit of AMD) unveiled some performance data of the new Radeon RX 6700 XT.

First of all, he compared it with older generation solutions at 1440p, illustrating the marked improvement over Nvidia’s GTX 1070 Ti and RTX 2080 Super. In another slide, instead, here is the comparison with the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, with variable performance: many times it is ahead of the RTX 3070 ($ 499), others behave similarly, and in Watch Dogs Legion it is even behind the RTX 3060 Ti ($ 399). We can however say that in general it should be equal to or slightly better than the RTX 3070.

The choice between the two cards will depend on the actual price of AMD’s proposal and Nvidia’s solution, although AMD could capture more fans thanks to the greater amount of memory. Of course, at the moment each evaluation leaves the time it finds, both because we have not yet tried the card, and because with the shortage in the middle, the list price is only useful for completely theoretical discussions.