AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU Review: Literally Anything Will Sell

today we're reviewing amd's rx 6700 xt it's supposed to be 480 and out on the market uh march 18th so we're actually able to post the reviews a day in advance this time which is nice because in this market in the very least if the reviews go up the same day no one's going to watch the reviews they're going to buy the card first and then decide if they want it later because otherwise you might not get a card so this is going to up one day in advance you do have time to actually watch this and determine whether you want the card before you buy one and then all the partner models will be launching on the same day so all on march 18th with a starting price of in theory 480 for the manufacturer's suggested price and we'll see how that goes but this is a 40 cu card it is cut down quite a bit the gp die is actually different silicon's uh different size we'll look at that the tear down then in the 6800 and the 6800 xt cards and today we're gonna be benchmarking this for gaming ray tracing rasterization thermals frequency power and more before that this video is brought to you by the thermaltake tower 100. thermaltake's tower 100 is a mini itx case to serve as a showcase system for your components the tower 100 has received many revisions since we first saw it and the case now has an open vent in the bottom for intake a mesh cut out in the side panel for some gpu ventilation and additional mesh along the side skirts and the side panels of the case the tower 100 is mostly focused on building a showpiece pc that's small enough to fit on most tables learn more at the link in the description below so we already have a specs and news announcement video on the 6700xt on the channel if you want to check it out the problem with launching any video card right now is the same thing we said in the rtx 3060 review the rtx 3060 launched into a market where the price didn't matter it's totally irrelevant what nvidia sets as the price how many they make because they're gonna sell them regardless and so that makes it a little bit difficult to review gpus typically we lean heavily on the msrp as a basic guide you're expecting plus or minus 100 at most from msrp not whatever it is right now and so in this market as we said in the rtx 3060 review you don't need to launch a good product your video card doesn't need to be good it doesn't need to be competitive all it needs to do is exist that's how you sell a video card in this market and unfortunately that means there's really not as many competitive practices coming into play as usually the manufacturers aren't pushing each other down in price because why would they even if one manufacturer comes in under the other one for price they're just selling themselves short because they're going to sell the cards anyway so what's the point of being 20 or 40 cheaper it might be better value this card like the 30 60 might be in kind of math territory we'll talk about that today but does it matter if it's in meh territory if it's going to sell out anyway and the answer to that is basically no it doesn't matter because it is going to sell out and so it doesn't matter if things aren't exciting if they stagnate if you end up paying one dollar for one percentage point like you did with the 30 60 and like we'll see today mostly with this card but anyway the basic specs of this thing it's 40 ceus so it's cut down it's a smaller die the advertised game clock and giant air quotes there is 24 24 megahertz we'll look at the actual frequency in reality in a little bit in charts the memory capacity is 12 gigabytes gdr6 that's plenty don't let anyone tell you you need 16 gigabytes you barely need 12. and by the way as a reminder the memory number you see in gpuz and hardware info whatever that's just an allocation for security reasons those applications do not know how much memory is actually being used by the applications on the gpu all they know is what's been allocated so if the application if gpuz or hardware info says 10 gigabytes it's probably because the application requested 10 gigabytes it doesn't mean that it's actually using that so if it requests 10 and it gets 8 but it's only using 6 then it doesn't matter you have enough capacity either way anyway that's just a that's a separate topic but wanted to make sure that's clear for this one so 12 is fine for a card of this class 6 is maybe borderline okay uh future looking though it becomes more of a problem especially with ray tracing in some of these applications board power is advertised at 230 watts we'll do power testing in a bit scp again is 480 scp is amd's word that means msrp it's prepared to cringe suggested retail price but supposed to be 480 we're going to base our evaluation on that number even if it's not as likely to hold because we need to base it on something and so we're going to go with what the companies are setting as msrp because that tells us what they think the card is worth and where it's supposed to be positioned so enough of that let's get into the benchmarks for today go through a lot of them and then talk about conclusions we like to begin our gpu reviews with frequency validation this helps us establish that the gpu is actually working properly and running as it should before we waste any time with testing if it's not this chart has a truncated chart range on the left axis from 2250 to 2600 megahertz it's helpful for visualizing differences that otherwise would be difficult to see but keep in mind that it distorts the scale that's intentional here the rx 6800 xt stock card ran in the range of 2300 to 2360 megahertz the rx 6800 non xt held a fairly flat frequency near 22 80 megahertz and the rx 6700 xt was closer to 2560 megahertz this is normal typically amd's lower end radeon cards run a higher frequency but the reduction in cores and physical hardware is what pulls down the performance ranking the line isn't flat which is due to power limits and the frequency bouncing off of a wall but this can be flattened if desired by boosting the power limit in the gpu's options radeon settings but of course then the power consumption would go up this next chart shows the thermals and fan speed on the amd rx 6700 xt as a reminder the 6800xc reference card ran nearly at 100 degrees for its junction temperature in this test with its average edge temperature in the range of 75 degrees this also is a measure of v-bios not just the cooler since we're showing automatic settings with auto-v bios a temperature target will dictate the fan speed more than anything else amd has temperature ranges in there that it's targeting and the end result is a hot gpu core with andy's default configuration this is something that partners have complete control over so you'll see this change from card to card let's get the 6700 xt on the chart now the 6700xt fan rpm at about 1700 is where we'd expect it based on previous amd reference launches the average edge temperature is again around 75 to 77 degrees celsius the junction temperature stays in the 90s and as we'll show an overclock step in it's not shy to hit 100 degrees under the right conditions the core can technically handle 110c here but it'll start throttling at that point and 100 is still warmer than it really needs to be the delta of 25 to 30 degrees edge to junction is also a wider gulf than what we'd like to see but this aligns with amd's mounting pressure shortcomings and some of the shortcomings in the vapor chamber and the cold plate that we've shown previously here's our overclock stepping chart this is basically a chart of our raw notes while we work through stabilizing and overclock amd is still somewhat challenging to work with and it behaves more erratically than nvidia does during the oc process but we did establish a slight gain at full stock our baseline score was 58 64 points in port royal which increased by 1.3 percent just from setting the power limit to 1 15 percent and doing nothing else undervolting helped a little bit but you'll see that our lower attempt at 1140 millivolts ended up resulting in worse performance or in performance regression in other words we got uplift at 1160 millivolts and it does run below that but it silently ends up lower in performance so it'll work and won't throw a blue screen or anything but it's not better so just remember to always validate your overclocks or your voltage changes with actual benchmarks for performance to make sure you're not making it worse accidentally the end result was a 5.6 uplift in port royal there may be some more room in there but we had memory errors with higher memory overclocks and stability issues with higher core clocks so we'd really have to invest a lot of time to tune it much better than this we'll start with something different in rainbow six siege at 1080p we measured the amd rx 6700xc stock card at 371 fps average with lowest spaced proportionally and well at 255 fps and 238 fps one percent and 0.1 percent the 371 result places the 6700 xt between the rtx 3070 and rtx 3060 ti that's below where it needs to be really the nvidia rtx 3070s msrp is 500 so there's not enough of a price gap between the 6700 xt and the 3070 msrp to establish a strength in this benchmark we're still using msrps as a guideline or a judge because that's where the companies are intending to sell these things that's how they value them everything else is just chaos and we can't predict it for a review but obviously you'll need to tweak your understanding of the data based on what's available and how much it costs when you check inventory the 6700xt does fine we just think it needs to be cheaper to compete in the fantasy gpu league where everything goes for actual msrp the 6800 outperforms the 6700xt by about 12 here that goes up later with the 6800 xt about 18 percent ahead of the 6700xt overclocking the 6700xt got us at 4.6 uplift moving to 388fps average at 1440p the 6700xd pushes 228 fps average enough to satisfy most high refresh displays even at 1440p and so it landed between the 3060 ti and the 2080 super sam or rebar would help a bit here but we've already covered that in our 6800xt review and it's something that's available to both parties now the percentages scale like this the 6800xt leads by 42 the 6800 non-xt leads by 21 and the 3070 leads by 21 without either platform using rebar overclocking resulted in a gain of 7.6 percent for the 6700 xt at 4k the 6700xt ends up still doing well at 100 fps that's good enough to play even for a competitive game like this one the end result is just below the 2080 super and allows the 3060 ti a lead of about 20 this is expected as nvidia tends to scale better as the resolution increases as compared to amd or again said inversely amd does better at 1080p than nvidia does proportionally next up is shadow of the tomb raider at 1080p the rx 6700 xt lands at 165 fps average which has it above the rtx 3060 ti and functionally equivalent to the nvidia rtx 3070. this is a more favorable position than in rainbow six siege and the amd card looks a little more competitive here the rx 6800 non-xt out does the new xt by 5.5 with the rx 6800 xc out ranking it by 11 we're at a cpu bind at this level with the rtx 3080 and the rx 6800 xt so we'll need higher resolutions to see scaling as for overclocking the improvement here is three percent there's probably a little bit more in there but we had trouble with stability across all the games when running higher at 1440p fps falls to 119 fps average with lows still well spaced and indicative of strong frame time consistency the 119 fps average result has the 6700 xt between the rtx 3070 stock and the amd rx 6800 the rx 6800 leads the 6700 xt by 18 with the 6800 xt leading by 38 the overclock gave us a couple percent once again but not much at 4k the 6700 xt can still play the game well with its 66 fps average and 60 fps one percent lows the rtx 3070 is again functionally tied the 3060 ti is a bit behind and the 6800 offers a meaningful uplift that's actually worth establishing this separate sku for the game looks much better for the 6700 xt than rainbow six did which made it look poorly positioned we'll still need more game data though to make an aggregate decision redded redemption 2 is next this one has the 6700 xd at 134 fps average for 1080p which has it ahead of the rtx 3070 by nine percent that's good positioning for the gpu as compared to rainbow six compared to the 5700 xt there's a generational step here of 34 but that is paired with a pricing increase of 80 on the 6700 xt so it doesn't really feel like an actual improvement when we're looking at 30 percent for 80 dollars more than the previous generation with the same basic naming scheme it starts to sort of feel like nvidia's rtx 3060 launch stagnation as long as the gpu exists in this market it'll sell so no one needs to care about pushing the needle for value at 1440p the rx 6700xt holds 101 fps average or still about 29 hiked generationally over the 5700 xt the 6700 xt result has it functionally equivalent to the rtx 3070 and a couple percent ahead of the rtx 3060 ti the rx 6800 outperforms the rx 6700 xt by around 10 here with the 6800 xe offering about a 24 to 25 uplift the most direct nvidia competition would be the rtx 3060 ti below the 6700 xt or the rtx 3070. those aren't meaningfully different between these cards and average isn't meaningfully different between the 30 70 and the 6700 xt but the 3060 ti does get left behind here at 4k red dead redemption has the rx 6700xt still in playable territory but with 0.1 percent dips that start to sometimes hurt a little bit the rtx 3070 holds a 10.5 percent lead at 4k pulling away when it was otherwise equal at the lower resolutions generationally amd pushes the needle by 21 against its rx 5700 xt architecture uh and previous card and the 5700 xt ends up holding on to its scaling better as the resolution is pumped upwards or worded inversely the 6700xt scales better at lower resolutions than the 5700 xt did either way one of those is true and that's why we see this difference in scaling as the resolution changes in either case the value proposition gets worse as the resolution goes up especially compared to previous price positioning as now you're at a hard one dollar per one percent improvement metric just like we talked about with the rtx 3060 that's not innovation that's stagnation because yes it's better but you're paying a proportionate amount more so nothing's changed that means the bar hasn't really moved and the lower resolutions in the very least as some semblance of value offers slightly better than one-to-one scaling here's a quick frame time plot overall they're really not too terrible for the performance level we're getting but there are a few small hitches lower is better as always but more consistent is best we see a few hitches and corrections toward the beginning where we see a plus or minus change maximally of seven to eight milliseconds so it's occasionally noticeable but it's really not too bad we're testing using the previous patch for cyberpunk 2077 for gpus right now due to stability issues of the new one but our cpu testing uses the newest patch so they definitely can't be compared these were all tested using the same game version which is the important part so they're all directly comparable in the gpu charts at 1080p the rx 6700xt ran at 97 fps average which has it above the 5700 xt by about 19 but it allowed the 360 ti a lead of about six percent that's better positioning for the 3060 ti than elsewhere when compared to the 6700 xt at 1440p the 6700xt remained in about the same place it's above the 5700 xt now by 21 while the 3060 ti maintains a slight lead over the new amd card the 6800 xt offers a larger jump than elsewhere at 41 improved over the 6700 xt there's not much point to testing 4k with this card in this game but it at least proves that there's not much point to doing it because it's a stretch for cyberpunk 2077 to play at 4k the card ran at 31 fps average anything shy of an rtx 3080 here is a rough experience in this chart in gta 5 we're mostly bound by the cpu at the high end so we can't see the true difference between the 6700xt of the 6800xt although there's still a clear gap against the rtx 3070. let's move on to 1440p for more scaling insight 1440p has the rx 6700xt at 133 fps average scaling over the 5700 xt by 21 again back down to about a one dollar per one percent gain metric the new trend here is that the improvements people think they're seeing generationally are being obfuscated by marketing sorcery it's getting tough to tell when there's actually a movement forward or progression over the years versus when it just looks better on a chart if you ignore the price scaling overall for the 6700 xt is less impressive against its predecessor when tested in this older title but it's also less impressive when tested at higher resolutions so that's leaving a limited window to where we're seeing the larger gains it's still gta that is among the top played games on steam and many other top games are built similarly the 3060 ti and the rtx 3070 alike are getting outdone by the 6700 xt here so it gets credit for defeating nvidia's latest offerings in that sense the 6700 xt offers a gain of about 4.3 over the rtx 3070 in gta at this resolution but it does move around a little bit depending on the game at 4k the rx 6700xt plunges to 61 fps average this is now only 12 percent better than the 5700 xt the rtx 3070 also passes the 6700xt now with a 17 advantage so a complete flip and these more expensive rx 6800 non xt hold 78 fps average so there's a void like 28 lead over the 6700xt fortunately this void can be overcome with a bridge the the bridge is made out of money but you can overcome it nonetheless strange brigade will be our last rasterized benchmark we'll look at some power and ray tracing numbers after this at 1440p this one ranked the 6700 xt at 185 fps average or 191 fps hours when overclocked the placement is as before it's between the rtx 3070 and the amd rx 6800 but in a manner which is better value than both in this instance the price still feels too high for the rx 6700 xt just like it did for the rtx 3060 but neither company feels particularly compelled to apply a competitive pressure right now they'd just be selling themselves short in this market at 4k the rx 6700 xt stock car did 96 fps average so including the lows it's functionally equivalent to the rtx 3070. the rx 6700xt out does the 3060 ti marginally and the 3070 now technically surpasses it but it's basically the same this is the same trend we saw earlier so lower resolutions benefit the 6700xt more quake 2 is the first of our ray tracing games this is the first amd gpu we've done since the game was updated to allow launching with amd cards so the 6700xd is alone on this chart amongst nvidia's cart the update also added support for vulkan extensions but the game appears to work just as well using the rtx extensions that we've used for testing all the nvidia cards so far we validated this and saw no performance difference from our test configuration so either one seems okay here the 6700xt lands between the rtx 2060 ko and the 2070 xc in performance at 52 fps average but it had a marginally more stable 0.1 percent low nvidia's 360 ti averaged 78 fps in this test which is a significant 52 percent lead over the amd card amd's 6700xc would have been competitive and ray chasing performance for this title in 2018 but it's not competitive right now and that's especially true because it's fully path traced so there's no rasterization to leverage with amd's advantages at 1440p the 3060 ti retains a large lead up to 57 at 46 fps average versus 29 for the 6700 xt the 6700 xt may be technically capable of ray tracing but it's not the ideal card for it at 4k we recorded a validation pass just to make sure our observations remain correct and that running the benchmark with rtx extensions and khr extensions resulted in roughly the same performance and it did the results were identical the 6700 xt was limited to 13 fps average in both instances here meanwhile the 360 ti's advantage grew to 61 percent with an fps average of 21. this advantage is largely theoretical though nobody wants to play quake 2 at 21 fps in 2021 but it's still technically a defeat for the 6700 xt tomb raider is fairly lightweight in terms of ray traced efforts so this one should do better for the 6700 xt rtx shadows are the only feature enabled for this test and that means that this is largely still rasterization the average for the xt in this test was 84 fps with a 360 ti 15 percent ahead at 97 fps the 6700 xt makes some ground back versus quake because of the less demanding rt effect and specifically because it's more rasterization heavy and already advantaged at the 1080p lower resolution at 1440p the 6700 xt averaged 60 fps with the 3060 ti 10 percent ahead in performance and the 37d 21 a hat as before if you're interested primarily in ray tracing you should probably buy nvidia higher render resolutions are unrealistic for this tier of card so we'll just skip 4k and move on control is a game that we test using dlss when possible but that's not an option for any amd cards we have several nvidia entries in this chart with dlss explicitly enabled but we also have some results in the control benchmarks with dls has disabled that gives you a fair like for like comparison without dlss as an advantage to look at nvidia versus amd rt performance without the lss the 6700xt averaged 49 fps and struggled at any higher resolution we do have some data gathered from video cards with dlss disabled at 4k though the 6700 xt only manages to 15 fps average here but this clearly isn't resolution that this card is meant for with rt at least we're only looking at these results for the sake of comparison for relative scaling the 6700xt is just slightly behind the 3069 ti here while the ti is 48 percent ahead and we've got the dlss and non-dlss results for many of these cards to help with a like for like or a realistic comparison minecraft rtx is another game that we test with dlss on when given the option but we are forced to run at full render resolution with amd gpus nothing above 1080p was playable and even the 1080p test result averaged an unpleasantly low fps the 3060 ti ran this same test with dlss disable that 67 fps average or 114 percent ahead of amd's gpu again the 6700 xt is capable of ray racing but it isn't the card's strong suit it did better in tomb raider where we really only have one rt feature to worry about finally for power consumption we'll keep it short in a power virus workload the rx 6700 xt maxed out at 219 watts right below the rtx 3070 stock result the rtx 3060 stock card pulled 200 watts in the same workload so everything makes sense given the positioning in the hierarchy there's nothing out of line with these results we also checked the pcie slot draw and that looks fine too so about 219 watts for total card power is what you end up with with the 6700 xt closing out then frankly this card like the rtx 3060 is whatever it's hard to get excited about them right now and this isn't just trying to play to the cheap seats this isn't pandering to the audience because that is what a lot of people want to hear they don't want to see someone talk about how great a video card is how great value it is because everybody's gonna be disappointed when they can't buy one but this isn't trying to play to that emotion in all actuality it is uh just sort of disappointing to look at the rtx 3060 and then to look at this as reviewers because you're looking at this thing and the 3060 going okay cool so in fps numbers it's 20 30 percent better than the previous model with the same name minus a thousand on the sku so 5700 xd that's cool that's uplift it sounds good then you look at the price and realize oh okay so it's one dollar for one percent great that means we're in the same spot we were when the 5700x launched or when the 2060 launched or the other cards before them so price creep it's gonna happen anyway but this is far outpacing inflation first of all and ultimately the name is just a name so the manufacturers decide that well 57 the 700 xt line we're going to bump that up to a higher class of performance and slot something in under it where the previous one was the thing is though when they slot something in under this like let's say a 6700 non xd 6600 6500 whatever when it is an inevitably the same price that the 5700 xt was at launch ignoring the later years pricing of the card which was lower when it comes in at the same price point and it's the same performance or very slightly different plus rt hardware the real response to that is who cares that's complete stagnation uh and it's just not interesting and it's it's this isn't good enough from nvidia or amd so not mad at nvidia or amd just exceptionally disappointed however not surprised because in this market as we said in the intro to this piece amd and nvidia would be selling themselves short if they actually brought the pricing down in a way that was either one in this case more competitive with a 30-70 or two more competitive with their own first party previous offerings there's no incentive to do it because they're going to sell it and they'd be selling their shareholders short and that's what matters uh for this type of operation so it's just it's fine just like the rtx 3060 it's fine and it's hard to lean one way or the other more than that because unless you're watching this in months from now and supply is stabilized it doesn't matter today the answer to what you buy today is what's in stock and short of buying something exceptionally bad like say some of the zotac ones or the thermal pads uh literally don't touch the components there's not a lot of things you should just hard avoid because hard avoiding typically means you have other options in this case hard avoiding means the card is so garbage that it's going to cause you problems later down the line and this isn't that so the conclusion is it's fine that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.camerasnexus.net to pick up one of our tool kits or mouse mats they're in stock we have them we have more stock than billion dollar companies now or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus thanks for watching we'll see you all next time the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 460,808

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amd rx 6700 xt review, amd rx 6700 xt benchmarks, amd rx 6700 xt testing, amd rx 6700 xt, amd rx 6700 xt ray tracing, amd rx 6700 xt vs rx 6800 xt, amd rx 6700 xt vs rtx 3060, amd rx 6700 xt vs rtx 3060 ti, amd rx 6700 xt power consumption, amd rx 6700 xt 4k, best gpus 2021, best gpus for 1440p, high refresh gpus

Id: oj8SuJ2Mb6A

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ShowBoobsPls]

So let's pretend the 3070 and 6700 XT are sold at MSRP.

Why would anyone buy this only for 20 dollars less? I would only consider this if it was like 60 dollars cheaper.

[u/Arbabender]

The market is so out of whack at the moment. Products like this and the RTX 3060 can come out and move the performance needle so little compared to last gen hardware that it's hard to see where lower end cards fit in that aren't literally "the same performance as last gen for the same price". And this is in the wonderful, whimsical world of "MSRPland" - a place that doesn't exist.

Oh, right. Silly me. There won't be any lower end cards than this until market conditions "improve", because there's no justification for AMD or NVIDIA to release anything lower than this.

[u/ShimReturns]

I was out of the PC game for a few years. Dusted off my 3770k and 980Ti for Cyberpunk which ran pretty well. Thought about upgrading but then I got up to speed on the current market for graphics cards and well, sat back down.

[u/cherryteastain]

At the moment, to me it seems like the only good thing about this card is that more Navi 22 dies can be made per wafer vs Navi 21. Navi 22/GA104 level of performance is enough for most people so there'll be more GPUs available from the same wafer allocation at TSMC compared to if AMD made Navi 21 only instead.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/[deleted]]

Imagine pricing this card like a 3070 when it’s barely better than the 3060 TI.

[u/hackenclaw]

if they stick a MSRP of $549, it will still sold off.

[u/Hellascrupman]

Why make customers in the 5700xt price bracket wait 2 years to pay 25% more for 25% more performance?

AMD: why not?

[u/oldprecision]

Is there not a tariff on these cards that didn't exist on the previous generation? It's not entirely AMD/Nvidia's fault that MSRP is higher than last generation.