AMD’s RX 6700 XT Is Here, and There’s Even More Good News for Radeon Owners

AMD’s RX 6700 XT Is Here, and There’s Even More Good News for Radeon Owners

Today, AMD officially revealed the newest member of its Radeon 6000-series family: the RX 6700 XT. Situated just below the RX 6800, AMD said this is an ideal graphics card for anyone with a high refresh rate, 1440p monitor who wants to play games on max settings. And yes, Smart Access Memory is enabled, too, so if you already have a new Ryzen CPU, you can give some of your games a frame rate boost.

Let’s jump right into the specs. The RX 6700 XT has 40 compute units, up to a 2424 MHz game clock (or what AMD says is the lowest frequency users can expect to get while gaming), 96MB Infinity Cache, 12GB of VRAM, and uses 230W of power. While it has fewer compute units, Infinity Cache, and VRAM, it has a higher game clock than the RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800, perhaps to offset the other specs somewhat. But compared to the other Radeon 6000-cards, the RX 6700 XT falls at the higher end of mid-range GPUs.

Compared to older Nvidia cards, AMD said the RX 6700 XT gets better performance than the RTX 2080 Super, outshining it by a decent amount. Although a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is demanding on any card, the RX 6700 XT apparently gets somewhere around 10 frames more per second than the RTX 2080 Super. AMD did not specify in its announcement if those numbers reflect DLSS turned off, which is Nvidia’s method of using machine learning to upscale the resolution from a lower resolution while sharping the image and bumping the frame rate.

But AMD might finally adding Super Resolution to its FidelityFX suite, which basically does the same thing as DLSS, although AMD did not go into detail during its announcement besides a quick reference. Games could start adopting the tech here soon, and enabling that with Smart Access Memory in a game could give it a significant fps boost. It’ll be interesting to see how both Radeon and GeForce cards compare when it comes to frame rates with both of those fps-boosting features enabled. Nvidia recently announced it enabled Resizable BAR, which does the same thing as Smart Access Memory, on its RTX 3060 and will be enabling the same feature on its other RTX 30-series cards soon.

Screenshot: AMD
Screenshot: AMD

For anyone who already has a new RX 6000-series card, there’s some good news for you, too. AMD has enabled its Smart Access Memory feature on Ryzen 3000 processors, so now anyone with a current-gen or last-gen CPU can take advantage of the frame-boosting tech. We tested this previously with the arrival of AMD’s Radeon RX 6800XT and RX 6800 graphics cards, and while we didn’t see an fps boost in all games at all resolutions, games that were affected got about a 10-20 frame rate boost when SAM was enabled in the BIOS. Borderlands 3, Forza Horizon 4, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p ultra (or highest) had the most dramatic effects.

As a side note, AMD is still working on adding ray tracing to Dirt 5 and Cyberpunk 2077. It did not say when ray tracing in those games would be compatible with RX 6000-series cards, only that the feature is “coming soon.”

AMD also said its RX 6000-series laptops are “coming soon.”

The Radeon RX 6700 XT will be available from global etailers/retailers and on AMD.com starting March 18 for $US479 ($614), which puts it in between Nvidia’s RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti price-wise — if GPU prices were anywhere near close to normal at the moment.

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned for local Australian pricing and availability.

AMD said it’s keenly aware of the bot and scalping situation and it has taken steps to address that ahead of the RX 6700 XT launch.

“We hear, and understand, the frustration from gamers right now due to the unexpectedly strong global demand for graphics cards,” Scott Herkelman, who oversees AMD’s GPU business, told Gizmodo. “With the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT launch, we are on track to have significantly more GPUs available for sale at launch. We continue to take additional steps to address the demand we see from the community. We are also refreshing stock of both AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards and AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors on AMD.com on a weekly basis.”

Additionally, AMD told Gizmodo that it has “implemented a number of processes to prevent bots from purchasing products on AMD.com,” and is “manually auditing orders to limit the ability to order multiple products.” AMD is also working with retail and board partners to hopefully make sure scalpers don’t run off with a bunch of cards.

We’ll have to see if those efforts will work in favour of those who just want to upgrade their PCs and keep as many RX 6700 XT cards out of the hands of scalpers as possible.


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