AMD RX 6700 XT Review

1. Introduction2. AMD RX 6700 XT3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Control8. Cyberpunk 20779. Dirt 510. The Division 211. F1 202012. Gears 513. Hitman 314. Metro Exodus15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Total War Saga: Troy17. Watch Dogs: Legion18. Performance Summary (12 Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing - Control21. Ray Tracing - Metro Exodus22. Ray Tracing - Watch Dogs: Legion23. Smart Access Memory (SAM) Tested24. Blender25. Clock Speed26. Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Noise-Normalised Temperatures29. Power Consumption30. Performance Per Watt31. Overclocking32. Closing Thoughts33. View All Pages

Heralded as the ultimate GPU for 1440p gaming, today we are putting AMD's RX 6700 XT through its paces. As the fourth RDNA 2-based GPU to hit the market, the RX 6700 XT is also the cheapest with an MSRP of £419.99/$479, putting it head to head with Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards. Let's see how AMD's Navi 22 silicon can compare to its Ampere-based rivals.

As we alluded to, AMD's RX 6700 XT is built on a completely new GPU. So far, all the RDNA 2 GPUs we have seen – the RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 – use the same Navi 21 GPU, but with slightly differing configurations of that GPU. With the RX 6700 XT, AMD has debuted its smaller Navi 22 GPU, which offers 40 Compute Units when fully populated.

Compared to the RX 6800, the RX 6700 XT sports 33% fewer cores, which would suggest a fairly large gap in performance between the two. AMD has also significantly increased clock speeds with the 6700 XT, however, with its rated game clock over 600MHz faster than its bigger brother. We test this new GPU in 12 games to see exactly how it stacks up against the RX 6800, and also Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti.

	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT	RX 5700 XT
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	17.2 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	519 mm²	336 mm²	251 mm²
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60	40	n/a
Compute Units	80	72	60	40	40
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840	2560	2560
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 2424MHz	Up to 1755MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 2581MHz	Up to 1905MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 23.04 TFLOPS	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 13.21 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 46.08 TFLOPS	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 26.43 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 720 GT/s	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 413.0 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 165.2 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	128MB	96MB	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	384 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	300W	250W	230W	225W

As a spec recap, RX 6700 XT is built using the Navi 22 GPU, a physically smaller die than Navi 21, measuring 336 mm². It houses 40 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 stream processors per CU, giving a total of 2560. RX 6700 XT features a fully populated Navi 22 GPU, but we can expect cut-down versions to appear with the RX 6700, and potentially RX 6600 XT if that comes to market.

RDNA 2 houses one ray accelerator per CU, so there's a total of 40 with the RX 6700 XT. Four texture units per CU gives a total of 160, while there's also 64 ROPs. Clock speed sees a significant bump, even when compared to the RX 6800 series, with a rated game clock of 2424MHz, compared to 1815MHz for the RX 6800.

As for the memory configuration, AMD has opted to use a 192-bit memory interface paired with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Using 16Gbps modules, total memory bandwidth hits 384 GB/s, which is lower than its predecessor, the RX 5700 XT. RDNA 2 GPUs, however, have the benefit of AMD's Infinity Cache, with a 96MB cache used here.

Lastly, total board power (TBP) is rated at 230W, which is an 8% reduction compared to the 250W RX 6800. We test this later in the review, while also looking at overall efficiency of the graphics card.

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