AMD Slots New Radeon RX 6700 XT Into Its RDNA2 Lineup; Priced At $479

As mentioned in a previous post, AMD has had one seriously busy week so far. On Monday, the company launched third-gen EPYC (our performance look here), and yesterday, it unveiled three Zen 3-based chips targeting the Ryzen PRO mobile lineup. Today, the company continues its relentless launch attack with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, the fourth GPU to call RDNA2 on desktop home.

We’re running behind on our full look at the RX 6700 XT in gaming, but will be delivering one soon. Based on what we’re seeing around the web so far, AMD’s new card beats out NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti more often than not (ignoring ray tracing), and in some cases rubs against the RTX 3070.

Given its performance placement, the card’s $479 price tag might throw some off, considering that NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 Ti carries an SRP of $399. While that’s the case, we haven’t seen the 3060 Ti sold near that SRP for quite some time; in recent searches, we found almost all cards to be $60 over SRP. In that regard, it’s easier to understand why AMD might have priced higher out-of-the-gate, although the reality is likely that even this card will still be sold higher than its SRP.

The RX 6700 XT is officially available tomorrow, but in our search, we came across a $1,499 and $1,799 RX 5700 XT. Won’t it be great when the chip market goes back to normal? The longer this goes on, the more frustrating it becomes. But, we digress.

Here’s AMD’s current- and last-gen Radeon gaming lineup:

With a drop to 12GB memory, bandwidth on the new RX 6700 XT also drops a bit, from 512 GB/s to 384 GB/s. As with the rest of the entire lineup (even original RDNA), the latest card uses GDDR6. Interestingly, the last-gen 5700 XT had even higher bandwidth than this new card offers, albeit with less memory density overall. As an RDNA2 card, the RX 6700 XT adds accelerated ray tracing capabilities to the mix, although based on our experience with the other RDNA2 cards, NVIDIA will have to be your choice if you care deeply about high-end RT performance.

As mentioned above, we’re in the process of testing this card, and regret to be late on our article (there’s been so much going on lately!). We’re going to return to the test rig and get something posted as soon as we can (although we are also behind on RTX 3060, so it will likely be first since it doesn’t exactly go head-to-head with the new RX 6700 XT – especially from a pricing stand-point.)