AMD unveils the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card is the successor to the firm's most important release of recent years, the RX 5700 XT. AMD heralds this release of not just a new faster performance hope aiming squarely at 1440p gaming, but one that champions new technologies many of which come under the heading of AMD FidelityFX. 

"Modern games are more demanding than ever, requiring increasing levels of computing horsepower to deliver the breathtaking, immersive experiences gamers expect," said Scott Herkelman, CVP&GM, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. Appealing to the older GPU stalwarts, he added that "For most gamers still playing on three-to-four-year-old graphics cards, it is the perfect upgrade solution designed to deliver incredible visuals and no-compromises, high-refresh 1440p gaming performance at maximum settings."

So what about performance? The Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card is now launched but AMD and partners won't be releasing reference and custom designs until Thursday, 18th March. Review embargoes might be lifted a little earlier than that but for now we have AMD's singular official gaming performance slide to ponder over. It pits the RX 6700 XT 12GB GDDR6 (MSRP $479) against both the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB ($399) and RTX 3070 8GB ($499). The suggested RRPs make this an apt comparison, but I won't go down the pricing and availability rabbit hole today. A good selection of modern AAA titles is tested at 1440p but of course features such as RTX and DLSS aren't used.

The tech specs of the reference Radeon RX 6700 XT Made by AMD (MBA) design can be seen in the slide below. Some extra info is shared on the AMD news blog, which reports the boost clock as "up to 2,581MHz". In brief, its drop in CU count compared to the RX 6800, from 60CUs to 40CUs is quite significant, and it has 4GB less GDDR6 and a more restrictive memory bus too – for a $100 discount on RRP. Meanwhile, the smaller card's TDP of 230W is eerily close to the 250W RX 6800.

AMD partners will be putting out some products with faster game and boost clocks but at the time of writing none have revealed this level of detail. (eg Gigabyte, MSI). System builders like HP will be refreshing desktop pre-builds with these new Radeons which might be another way to acquire them.

AMD is promising significantly more GPUs available at launch with this line of graphics cards. We will have to wait and see if any difference is felt by buyers.

You can watch AMD's Where Gaming Begins: Ep.3 above. As well as the new graphics cards there is quite a bit of the presentation dedicated to AMD gaming technologies like FidelityFX, as well as some footage of new games being played with RDNA2 GPUs.