AMD is going to bet on a mid-range with better performance than the previous RX 5700 XT, which they will replace, both in terms of the VRAM capacity that will come in the RX 6700 XT and in specs. Everything to face the mid-range of NVIDIA with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.
12GB GDDR6 confirmed for RX 6700 XT
This graphics card is expected to have the top configuration of the Navi 22 GPU, which like its older sister will also be based on the RDNA architecture but on a smaller scale, since this GPU is intended for the mid-range, but not for that reason, it cuts in terms of technology since it has everything that defines the RDNA 2 architecture for PC. The specifications of the AMD Navi 22 GPU are as follows:
- 40 RDNA 2 computing unitsThis means that the intersection calculation units for ray tracing are built in.
- 2560 ALU and FP32 in total, half that of the RX 6900 XT.
- However, despite half of the units, it’s not in the bandwidth, where we have a 192-bit GDDR6 bus.
- 12 GB of GDDR6 as video RAM.
- The same Infinite Cache of the best models of the RX 6000 still holds, this time with a configuration of 96 MB.
AMD will apparently be promoting it as a graphics card designed for gaming at 1440p, which coincides with how they are promoting the RX 5700 XT, which has the same number of compute units as the RX 6700 XT, but only 8GB GDDR6. , without Support for ray tracing and variable rate shading.
How does it compare to your direct competitors?
Everything indicates that AMD will launch the RX 6700 XT in a price range close to that of the RTX 3060, which in its final configuration will have a configuration of 3,840 CUDA “cores”, which translates to 30 SM. We have to take into account that since NVIDIA RTX 3000 includes 128 ALU in FP32 per SM, while AMD continues with 64 ALU configuration, so at floating point power level, NVIDIA card is more powerful.
The reason is that NVIDIA decided to focus more on Ray Tracing. Where the floating point power in combination is much more important than the speed of fixed function units for rasterization. Thus, the AMD RX 6700 XT is designed more for current games than for future games more focused on Ray Tracing.
Additionally, in terms of rasterization performance, it’s possible the RX 6700 XT could match and even outperform the RTX 3060 Ti, an NVIDIA card that stuck at 8GB GDDR6 versus 12GB of AMD’s RX 6700 XT. Additionally, it is said that the reason the recently introduced RTX 3060 has 12GB of VRAM is because of the configuration of this RX 6700 XT.
When is the AMD RX 6700 XT expected?
The latest information is for the first quarter of 2021. Since we have already passed the first month, we should hear from AMD in the coming weeks.
AMD mentioned in passing about its new GPUs during its presentation at CES this year, but it seems they deleted that part of the presentation at the last minute. Will AMD surprise us with a little presentation of the RX 6700 XT and the rest of the company’s mid-range cards? No event is planned in this regard, but we could see it on AMD’s own YouTube channel.
In any case, things are exciting for the mid-range at the start of 2021.
