AMD announces the Radeon RX 6700 XT for 20% more than the RX 5700 XT but with 40 CUs, 192-bit VRAM and a lower memory bandwidth
AMD has lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 6700 XT, and it is as expected. Based on the company's RDNA 2 architecture, the Radeon RX 6700 XT has 40 Compute Units (CUs) or 2,560 stream processors, 64 ROPs, 160 Texture Units and 40 Ray Accelerators. There is also 96 MB of Infinity Cache and a Typical Board Power (TBP) of 230 W.
AMD recommends using a 650 W PSU with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, from which it claims will be a 'powerhouse 1440p' graphics card. AMD has offered some in-house benchmark results that compare the Radeon RX 6700 XT favourably against the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, but we would include the RTX 3060 in AMD and NVIDIA comparisons, too.
Memory bandwidth is not everything, but the Radeon RX 6700 XT is closer to the RTX 3060 in this respect than NVIDIA's other RTX 30 series cards. Specifically, AMD has restricted the Radeon RX 6700 XT's 12 GB of VRAM to a 192-bit interface, which yields up to a 384 GB/s bandwidth. This puts the Radeon RX 6700 XT 24 GB/s ahead of the RTX 3060 and 64 GB/s behind the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 on account of their 256-bit interface. In percentage terms, this means that NVIDIA's GA104 cards have a 16.6% memory bandwidth advantage over the Radeon RX 6700 XT. Incidentally, the RX 6700 XT has a lower bandwidth than the RX 5700 XT, too.
AMD and its partners will begin selling the Radeon RX 6700 XT on March 18. The card has a suggested estimate price (SEP) of US$479, but it remains to be seen how many board partners or retailers will list the Radeon RX 6700 XT at that price. AMD claims that it will have ample stock of the Radeon RX 6700 XT too, but we shall reserve judgement until after launch day.
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