Product manager Nish Neelalojanan told press that the “hit rate” for the RX 6700 XT’s Infinity Cache at 1440p is similar to what the faster GPUs see at 4K resolution. That’s smaller than the 128MB found in pricier AMD GPUs, but the Radeon RX 6800-series and 6900 XT target 4K gaming. The Radeon RX 6700 XT ships with 96MB of Infinity Cache. AMD claims the Radeon RX 6700 XT’s memory setup delivers up to 2.5X the performance of a standard VRAM configuration with a wider 256-bit bus. This avoids the need to send signals all the way across the chip package to the onboard memory in many cases, especially because the cache holds a lot of temporal and spatial data that can be reused in subsequent frames. The Infinity Cache provides a large amount of on-die 元 cache that’s been heavily optimized for gaming workloads, which lets the Radeon RX 6700 XT keep most of the working data for any given frame on-die. AMD gets by with such a constrained bus because of RDNA 2’s radical Infinity Cache.
That should be plenty of overhead for the foreseeable future, and AMD’s VRAM generosity forced Nvidia follow its lead with the (also overpriced) RTX 3060. Speaking of 1440p gaming, AMD outfitted the Radeon RX 6700 XT with an ample 12GB of GDDR6 memory over a tiny 192-bit bus.
The lack of a DLSS alternative mostly limits Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs to 1080p resolution with ray tracing enabled-a bummer when the Radeon RX 6700 XT costs nearly $500 and targets 1440p gaming. AMD is working on a more open alternative dubbed “Fidelity FX Super Resolution” but it isn’t available yet, nor has it even been explained in detail. Crucially, however, AMD doesn’t currently offer a rival feature to Nvidia’s DLSS, which uses dedicated hardware and machine learning to improve performance and claw back many of the frames lost to ray tracing’s significant performance hit. For now, here’s how the Radeon RX 6700 XT’s tech specs hold up against the Radeon RX 5700 XT’s:Įach RDNA 2 compute unit includes a single ray accelerator that helps process real-time ray tracing workloads, which allows the cutting-edge lighting effects to run on AMD GPUs for the first time. Seeing how it holds up in our performance benchmarks will be insightful. Meanwhile, with 40 compute units, this new GPU is a direct replacement for the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which served as the flagship for AMD’s first-gen RDNA architecture. The Radeon RX 6700 XT’s “Navi 22” chip is much smaller, featuring half as many compute units and stream processors as its bigger sibling. The previously launched Radeon RX 6800-series and Radeon RX 6900 XT were built using “Big Navi,” the largest GPU built on AMD’s fantastic new RDNA 2 architecture.
Radeon RX 6700 XT specs, features, and price If you want a high-level look at our impressions before wading through pages of explanatory text and benchmark graphs, be sure to check out our companion synopsis, 5 key things you need to know about the Radeon RX 6700 XT.
We’ll have reviews of custom RX 6700 XTs coming soon. Custom cards from AMD partners like Sapphire, XFX, Asus, and MSI also hit the streets today but cost much more. Now that the stage has been set, let’s dive into AMD’s $479 Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card, which will periodically be available at no markup on AMD.com.
(It’s worth noting that its Radeon RX 5700 XT predecessor debuted at $400.) If you can find the Radeon RX 6700 XT for MSRP it might be worth considering in today’s ludicrous market, however, especially if you need to upgrade now and don’t want to simply stream your games via Nvidia’s PC-friendly GeForce Now service until everything calms down. When the dust settles around the current graphics card shortage the price would need to drop at least $100 to be truly compelling. The bad news? The $479 Radeon RX 6700 XT performs closer to the $400 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti than the $5 (though AMD’s Smart Access Memory can provide a massive boost in some games) and it isn’t anywhere near as strong as Nvidia’s cards when it comes to ray tracing.
Because AMD is suffering through a manufacturing logjam at chip foundry TSMC-the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Ryzen 5000 desktop and mobile processors, and Radeon RX 6000-series are all built on TSMC’s 7nm process-being able to sell its GPUs for more gives the company additional incentive to churn out graphics cards during a time when there’s nowhere near enough graphics cards available to satisfy gamers. Pricing the Radeon RX 6700 XT at $479 allows the company to get in on the action, and the card will no doubt sell for more than this on the streets anyway. All those extra profits go to retailers, scalpers, and AMD board partners like MSI and Sapphire though, rather than AMD itself.