AMD’s next graphics card, the Radeon RX 6700 XT, intends to beat Nvidia’s RTX 3070 product in both performance and price.
AMD is set to launch the new Radeon card on March 18 with a starting price at $479—or $20 less than the initial starting price for the RTX 3070.
During a Wednesday press event, the company also released some of its own benchmarks for the Radeon 6700 XT, which show the card rivaling the performance of the RTX 3070 on several games when played at 1440p on max settings.
According to AMD, the Radeon 6700 XT bested the RTX 3070 on the games Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Call Of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War, and Hitman 3. However, Nvidia's RTX 3070 outperformed the 6700 XT on other games, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs: Legion. To what degree ray-tracing effects were enabled in the tested games was left unsaid.
AMD adds that the Radeon 6700 XT stands out over the competition, thanks to the card’s 12GBs of GDDR6 video memory. In contrast, Nvidia’s RTX 3070 only has 8GBs of GDDR6 memory.
Interestingly, the Radeon 6700 XT has a boost clock speed at 2581MHz, which is higher than the clock speeds on its bigger siblings, the Radeon 6800, 6800 XT, and even the 6900 XT. (All cards in the Radeon 6000 family are built with a 7-nanometer manufacturing process.)
On the downside, the 6700 XT’s infinity cache has been lowered to 96MB, down from 128MB in the other cards. The card can connect to a PC monitor via DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 slots.
AMD is marketing the Radeon 6700 XT as a product for gaming on 1440p monitors. However, the big question is whether the company will have enough stock of the product amid an ongoing shortage for graphics cards. The previous Radeon cards continue to sell out at all the major retailers.
The other problem has been rising component costs and Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports, which has caused vendors to hike up prices for the latest graphics cards. As a result, many of the newest AMD and Nvidia GPUs now cost $100 or more over the original retail price.
During Wednesday’s event, the company didn’t mention how it’ll address the demand or whether the $479 price will apply to all Radeon 6700 XT models. But the company plans to begin selling AMD-created reference design models for the Radeon 6700 XT cards through AMD.com and via major retailers on March 18. Third-party vendors—including Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI—will also sell their own models on the same day.
At the same time, AMD will sell the card through pre-built PC desktop models in the coming months.
