AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Review, A Worthy 5700 XT Successor?

[Music] welcome back to harvard unboxed today we're taking a look at the new radeon rx 6700 xt from amd as well as a few different models from partners now this cut down rdna 2 gpu is said to be targeting the 480 us price point so we'll have to see how that goes and of course amd has been claiming significantly improved supply so again we'll have to see how that goes when compared to the 520 millimeter squared navi 21 die navi 22 which the 6700 xt is based upon is considerably smaller at just 336 millimeters squared that's a 35 reduction in die size and of course both are manufactured using tsmc's seven nanometer process when compared to the 580 us rx 6800 and yes i'm going to compare the msrp the 6700xt is suggested to be just 17 more affordable which honestly really isn't that much particularly given that it packs 33 percent fewer cores tmus and rops moreover the memory subsystem has also been downgraded as the 192-bit wide bus offers a peak bandwidth of 384 gigabytes per second a 25 reduction when compared to the 6800 the smaller bus has also reduced the memory capacity from 16 gigabytes to 12 gigabytes which really is a non-issue as this product is targeting the 1440p resolution and here an 8 gigabyte buffer is still sufficient so that being the case 12 gigabytes is more than enough but so far we're looking at a rather substantial 33 downgrade for the core configuration and 25 percent less bandwidth all for just a 17 cost saving thankfully though the 6700 xt does have one advantage and that comes through clock speed as the cores are clocked 23 percent higher so while there are 33 percent less of them they should be around 20 faster i should also note just quickly that the infinity cache size has been reduced by 33 as well from 128 megabytes with the 6800 to 96 megabytes for the 6700 xt amd claims that this optimized on die cash delivers up to two and a half times the bandwidth of a 256 bit wide bus running at 12 gigabits per second gddr6 memory and just lastly when compared to the 6800 we're looking at just an 8 reduction in total board power which makes sense given the cores are clocked so much higher so that's really a quick and rough look at the 6700 xt specs and how they compare to the next product and the stack obviously with a 480 usmsrp the 6700xt is targeting the rtx 3070 from nvidia and amd has claimed via their own benchmarks that this new gpu is typically faster than the rtx 3070 of course using their own cherry-picked range of games and test conditions they did throw in watch dogs legion to make their claim appear a bit more legitimate but most of the tiles were sponsored by amd and are known to perform very well on their hardware also worth noting is the fact that amd tested with smart access memory enabled their branding for the pcie feature called resizable bar when testing across 35 games at 1440p we here at harbour unboxed found that sam boosted performance by three percent on average though we did see gains of 10 or more and half a dozen of the titles tested that said sam did also negatively impact performance by a three percent or greater margin in five of the games now by default we don't yet test with sam or resizable bar enabled for two reasons firstly it's not supported on all platforms so depending on your motherboard the option may not be supported and at this point amd is still only offering support on 500 series boards when using a 5000 series processor or a select 3000 series processor and the second reason being that even if you have the required hardware the feature is not actually enabled by default meaning the user needs to enter the bios find the resizable bar option and manually enable it this isn't that different to what we do with say xmp but it's another step we'd be making only to enhance the performance of radio and gpus so for now at least we're not going to do that though please note we will provide some sam enabled results showing where it works well and where it doesn't now for testing i'm still using my ryzen 9 3950x test system and i am still in the process of updating to the 5950x and you can expect all that data once we get through the latest round of product releases the system is configured with 32 gigabytes of dual rank dual channel ddr4 3200 cl 14 memory and finally i will be focusing on the 1440p data for almost a dozen of the 14 games tested and then we'll jump into the usual performance breakdown graphs which will include a look at the 1080p results as well and please note that all graphs and data will be made available to float plane and patra members okay let's get into the results first up we have the watchdogs lesion data and here the 6700 xt was 11 slower than the rtx 3070 and just two percent faster than the rtx 3060 ti so in other words we're looking at 360 ti performance in this title which really doesn't bode that well for amd given the 6700 xt costs 18 more that said it is only 14 slower than the rx 6800 and that is a great result for the 6700 xt and it means we could be looking at very impressive performance in amd optimized titles such as assassin's creed valhalla and speaking of which as expected in assassin's creed valhalla performance is very impressive hitting 73 fps on average at 1440p using the highest quality preset and that made it just 10 slower than the rx 6800 and 14 faster than the rtx 3070 so that really is a great result for amd though i couldn't help but notice the 6700 xt was just 24 faster than the 5700 xt and while that's certainly a decent performance uplift remember it's almost coming in at a 20 premium at least when comparing the msrp so that's hardly progress worth getting excited about the 6700 xt also performed well in death stranding edging out the rtx 3070 by a slim 4 margin so basically identical performance between the two competing gpus here quite surprisingly the 6700 xt was just 7 slot in 6800 we are likely running into a slight cpu bottleneck here with the 3950x which will be resolved with the updated 5950x test system but i don't expect this margin to grow beyond a few percent then moving on to microsoft flight simulator 2020 we find that the 6700 xt isn't all that impressive here trailing the 6800 by a 21 margin as it dropped down from 48 fps to just 38 fps that meant it was also 14 slow on the rtx 3070 and even 5 slower than the 360 ti perhaps even more disappointing was the fact that it was just 19 faster than the 5700 xt performance in shadow of the tomb raider was also very disappointing here the 6700 xt was only able to match the cheaper rtx 3060 ti making it nine percent slow on the rtx 3070 and 19 slower than the 6800 that said it did offer an almost 30 performance uplift from the old 50 700 xt the 6700 xt also struggles to keep pace with the rtx 3070 and tom clancy's rainbow six siege this time it was 10 slower and again was more comparable with the 3060 ti beating it by a mere two and a half percent margin then when compared to the rx 6800 we're looking at a 19 performance loss and when compared to the 5700 xt a 28 performance gain like assassin's creed valhalla godfall is an amd sponsored title and it's well optimized for radeon gpus as a result the 6700 xt blew away the rtx 3070 offering 17 greater performance at least when comparing the average frame rate the one percent low performance was actually very similar quite interestingly the 6700 xt mimicked the performance of the rx 6800 in this title and after multiple re-tests i received pretty much the same results please note that i did go back and retest the 5700 series of gpus here and found that performance had improved since my previous testing quite a few months ago now the 5700 xt is now on par with the rtx 3060 ti and that meant that the 6700 xt was 35 faster which is still a much larger performance uplift than what we've seen in other titles now here's a look at performance in an nvidia sponsored title wolfenstein youngblood as you'd probably expect the 6700 xt doesn't have its best showing here losing to the rtx 3070 by a 16 margin and even the 360 ti by a six percent margin it was also 23 slower than the 6800 though it was 34 faster than the 5700 xt so pretty good result there relative to the older radeon part the f1 2020 results are quite disappointing really especially given how the other radeon gpus perform relative to their competing parts for example the 6900 xt can be seen beating the rtx 3090 the 6800 xt beat the rtx 3080 and the 5700 xt easily beat the rtx 2060 super the 6700 xt on the other hand that was percent slow in the rtx 3070 and while that is a fairly insignificant margin again when compared to how the other radeon gpus performed i did find this quite disappointing it also meant while it was just 16 slower than the 6800 it was also just 13 faster than the 5700 xt last up here's a look at the horizon zero dawn results and as you can see the 6700 xt finds itself positioned squarely between the rtx 3070 and 3060 ti but they're all so close here that it really doesn't matter so let's call this one a tie the 6700xt was just 11 slower than the 6800 and 33 faster than the 5700 xt so when compared to the other radeon products that is a decent result okay so here's a look at the 1080p data averaged across our 14 game sample at this entry level resolution the 6700 xt averaged an average of 150 fps and that meant it was three percent slower than the rtx 3070 had we enabled sam for what would probably be a three percent boost performance would be identical though you could get a similar overall boost from enabling dlss 2.0 in the games that support it when compared to the cheaper rtx 3060 ti we're looking at just a six percent performance boost and then just a 23 increase over the 5700 xt while it was just 12 percent slower the rx 6800 though again it notes some cpu limitations will be present in this low resolution data then jumping to 1440p we find the 6700 xt was just four percent slow on the rtx 3070 and just six percent faster than the rtx 3060 ti this time it was 16 percent slow on the rx 6800 and a much more impressive 30 faster than the 5700 xt though again it also costs 20 more so a pretty uninspiring improvement there really as we just saw when compared to the rtx 3070 the 6700 xt was on average four percent slower at 1440p and here's a look at how they compared across the games tested godfall and assassin's creed valhalla were the only two big wins for amd and if we remove those titles the 6700 xt becomes 7 slower then if we remove the two most favorable games for nvidia the 6700 xt is still six percent slower overall so i can't see the new radio and gpu coming out on top when testing a dozen games or more when compared to the rx 6800 the 6700 xt was 15 at 1440p and if we remove the godfall result it only drops a percent making it 16 slower so when compared to the 6800 it does reasonably well though it's only about 17 cheaper so they're going to come in very similar in terms of cost per frame again when compared to the 5700 xt the 6700 xt is rather uninspiring sure it is 28 faster but it also costs 20 more so a very small generational improvement in terms of value now for a look at the cost per frame and obviously this time i can't include the ebay pricing data as we did in the rtx 3060 review as this content isn't being published two weeks after release no doubt tim and myself will revisit this discussion later in the month in our q a series but for now here's the msrp comparison as that really is the only meaningful comparison that we can make in terms of value the 6700 xt is a very very small improvement over the rx 6800 we're talking about a two percent discount per frame that's not great and it means the rtx 3070 and in particular the rtx 3060 ti are better value you're looking at a 14 discount per frame with the rtx 3060 ti for example and that's not good given they do essentially occupy the same performance tier perhaps though the most disappointing comparison that can be made is with the 5700 xt here we're looking at just a seven percent improvement in cost per frame and yeah times have changed but after two years i still find that very disappointing if it were priced at 400 the 6700 xt would be a 23 improvement in cost per frame and i think that would have been a pretty amazing result though it's also extremely wishful of me given the current climate and i suspect most of you would be over the moon by the prospect of landing a 6700 xt for even 500 u.s now before wrapping up the benchmark graphs we still have to take a quick look at ray tracing performance along with power consumption and overclocking and of course i will have a look at these aib models see how they compare in terms of clock speeds thermals all that stuff we normally look at for testing ray tracing performance we still have to rely on nvidia sponsored titles so it's hard to say exactly how well our dna 2 performs with ray tracing enabled given these games aren't optimized for amd's implementation but it does prove the point that if you want to enjoy ray tracing today you're best off with an nvidia gpu especially as performance can be boosted by using technology such as dlss and here we're seeing that using the medium quality rtfx the 6700 xt averaged just 36 fps down from 84 fps without rt enabled this is the same level of rt performance you'll receive from an rtx 3060 in this title at least without the aid of dlss enabling dlss boosted the 3060s performance by 50 and therefore made it 50 faster than the 6700 xt and of course we're only talking about the rtx 3060 here the real competitor is the rtx 3070 in this title it's 47 faster without the help of dlss and then 114 faster with dlss so that's not good and as i've said countless times before if you care about ray tracing performance right now you'll want a geforce 30 series gpu ray tracing performance in shadow of the tomb raider is much better though we're only using rt to enhance shadows here so it is rather pointless in our opinion though that's our take on road tracing in most games i suppose anyway using the ultra quality settings the 6700xt managed 64fps on average and that meant it was 23 slower than the rtx 3070 and 30 slower with dlss enabled wrapping up the ray tracing testing we have control which is of course another nvidia sponsored title and here the rtx 3070 destroys the 6700xt with rt enabled for rasterization performance the 3070 is already well out in front beating the 6700 xt by a 22 margin and that figure ballooned out to a 58 margin with rt set to high and then 178 percent with dlss enabled moving on i'm not going to show too much sam related testing we've already provided an in-depth benchmark covering this feature with the rx 6800 and scaling won't be that different with the 6700 xt one of the best examples with the 6800 was seen in assassin's creed valhalla and here with the 6700 xt we're looking at a healthy 12 performance boost which allowed it to match the rx 6800 without sam enabled but also as we found previously sam doesn't work in all games and again assassin's creed valor hala should be considered as a best-case scenario what we're seeing here in microsoft flight simulator 2020 isn't that unusual as most games will see little to no performance improvement using pcat to measure the power draw of just the graphics card we find the 6700 xt is comparable to the rtx 3070 sucking down 221 watts basically the same kind of power consumption you'd see with an rtx 2070 super it was also 12 less power than the 5700 xd which is impressive given performance in this total was boosted by 30 percent using the amd reference model i was able to overclock the cause to 2.75 gigahertz and this resulted in a very mild 6 performance increase remember this model is already clocked much higher than the 6800 so that does reduce the available oc headroom it also means the rtx 3070 will typically extract a little more performance when manually overclocked so for some of you that can help boost its value rating and the same would also be true when comparing it to something like the rx 6800 since i've ended up with half a dozen aib models for this release we're just going to look at the peak gpu hotspot temperature after half an hour of gameplay in an enclosed atx case the corsair obsidian 500d this is stock out of the box performance as i didn't have time before the noise normalized testing dialing in each card does take quite a bit of time the highest clocking models were the gigabyte gaming oc and xfx speeds to merc 319 and of the two the xfx model was far more impressive operating its fans at just 1000 rpm for a hot spot temperature of just 85 degrees the gigabyte model was 2 degrees cooler but you're looking at almost twice the fan speed which does increase the operating volume quite drastically the gaming oc should be a fair bit cheaper though so it could still represent pretty great value the power color red devil and hellhound models were extremely impressive both ran the fans at just 1000 rpm for sub 80 degree temperatures the red devil did clock around 100 megahertz higher and that made it one of the best models we tested sapphire's nitro plus almost forgot it had fans spinning them at just 800 rpm after 30 minutes of load this model also appears to sip power despite running the cores at 2.5 gigahertz the hotspot temp did creep up to 91 degrees though that's not bad given the whisper quiet fan speed then we have the msi gaming x and this is one of the least impressive models i have to say and i suspect it would be comparable to the gigabyte gaming oc under noise normalized test conditions it was quite a bit better than the amd reference design though so there is that so what to make of the radio rx 6700 xt then it is really a bit too hard to make a concrete conclusion because i don't know what pricing and availability will look like i would guess not particularly good but again amd has been claiming significantly better availability than navi 21 but of course that could just mean they've got a few dozen cards ready to sell in all seriousness though i have reached out to a few retailers and it does sound like they've got a decent amount of these things certainly not enough to supply everybody upon release but you know that was never going to be the case so we still expect them to sell out very quickly but they're at least starting with a much more healthy number than they have with previous uh releases so at least that's based on what i'm hearing so availability should indeed be better assuming that the healthy numbers that we're meant to be seeing upon release keep getting updated refreshed we see a we see cards flowing in on a regular basis over the coming weeks and months then it should make it a bit easier to buy a 6700 xt but again all of that remains to be seen as for pricing well again that also remains to be seen difficult to comment on that before they go on sale but here in australia i am hearing that it sounds like these aib cards at least the more entry-level aib cards should be around 20 cheaper than what aussies are faced with having to pay for an rtx 3070 so that's pretty good availability inflated prices aside for a moment let's just assume we're living in more normal times so the 6700 xt will hit shelves today quickly sell at the msrp and then supply should catch up a few weeks down the track at which point you could easily buy one for the 480 us msrp or whatever the equivalent price is in your region plus any taxes in block costs and so on in that reality the 6700 xt is a pretty lukewarm product it's a very very small improvement from its predecessor in terms of value yeah you do get a bit more vrm and efficiency has been greatly improved but overall a 30 performance increase at a 20 price premium is hardly cause for celebration it's roughly equal to the rtx 3070 in terms of value though so it's hardly poor value relative to the competition but as we've discussed in the past it's really not good enough for amd to just price match nvidia in terms of cost per frame as there's more to the value equation for example the radeon gpus lack the same level of ray tracing maturity we're still waiting on a dlss competitor which is becoming more and more of a big deal as the game support list for dlss continues to grow albeit slowly but it is growing also for streamers the nvidia encoder is still much better so even if we accept that gpus released in 2021 won't necessarily stack up as well as we'd like them to in terms of value compared to models released in previous years due to factors such as the trade war resulting in stuff like tariffs increased shipping costs and of course increased manufacturing costs all of which result in the products being more expensive than they were just a few years ago it's still hard to accept the 6700 xt at 480 us given the missing features mentioned a moment ago i feel the 6700 xt needs to be at the very least 50 u.s less than the rtx 3070 of course as i discussed in our rtx 3060 review the reality of the situation is that it makes a little sense for either amd or nvidia to release a good value gpu right now both are selling absolutely everything they can produce and therefore the incentive for amd to heavily undercut nvidia by a meaningful margin it's just not there they're not going to gain any extra sales by doing so so they'd really just be robbing themselves of profit and that means they've basically just price matched the rtx 3070 sure it is 20 cheaper according to the msrp and you do get four gigabytes more vram but you're still missing out on cutting edge features like dlss so if i had my choice of an rtx 3070 for 500 us that'd be nice or a 6700 xt for 480 us i really do think i would go with the geforce gpu a four percent discount just really isn't enough for me to part with features like dlss especially given that i play games like fortnite that support dlss please don't judge me as for the six aib models that i have on hand they all worked very well my personal favorites were the power color red devil and xfx speeds to merc 319 though i suspect they will both be rather pricey especially the xfx model the power color hellhound was also excellent and if they can deliver that near the msrp once things return to normal then that will be one to look out for the sapphire nitro plus is too quiet for its own quit in my opinion and i suspect it will perform very well relative to the power color and xfx models once noise normalized though again i don't expect it to be cheap the gigabyte gaming oc should be good value and while the cooling performance wasn't amazing given the high fan speed it certainly was acceptable the msi gaming x is expected to be a premium model there will no doubt be a ventus or something cheaper so i assume this is going up against the likes of sapphire's nitro plus xfx's merc and power colors red devil and i hate to say it but the gaming x just doesn't seem to be in quite the same league that said the performance was perfectly acceptable so if the price is right this will be another model to look out for and that is going to do it for this review of amd's new radeon rx 6700 xt let me know what you think about the 6700xts in the comments section below what do you make of this new offering uh we'll be sure to read all of your comments because yeah i'm very interested to see what you guys make of this thing and i guess your comments and opinions will probably be shaped by what availability looks like but again it's probably going to take a few weeks before we know exactly well we're going to know if this is any any better than what we we've seen so far and yeah i don't have high hopes on that but amd say significantly more supply and they seem very optimistic but we know what happened last time amd was very optimistic about their supply for gpus anyway it won't say any more we'll leave it at that if you'd like to get more involved with the hardware box channel you can support us over at floatplane or patreon that will get you access to stuff like behind the scenes content q and a's live streams with two of myself which we do at least one of those per month uh what else have we got we've got an exclusive discord chat so you can jump over there really awesome community that loves talking about pc hardware and all that kind of stuff so yeah if you're interested check it out if not perfectly fine i would like to thank you for watching this video i'm your host steve and i'll see you again next time [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 219,354

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: PJboWJJFk9I

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/PhoBoChai]

Should be $399, period. Direct 5700XT replacement, +28% perf. Would have been received so much better, and help with gamer mindshare.

IDGAF that its sold out, lots of ppl with more money than sense buy 3090 for $3K doesn't mean ppl with actual sense should be paying for such rip off hardware.

[u/Dchella]

28% faster than the 5700xt at a 20% markup. What’s the point of generational improvement if you must pay more?

This product confuses me. Who wouldn’t just go for the 3070 or 3060ti. I understand they’ll sell regardless, but it’s just really weird positioning - even more so than the 6800.

[u/Darkomax]

Wow pretty disappointing results. I would not pay more than 400 for it. (in a world where MSRP actually exists). What is the incentive over a 3070 seriously?

[u/SolidQ1]

I think they would have put 400$, if not for the mining situation, but reality MSRP for RDNA2/Ampere is vacuum.
P.S Just checked in my country 6700XT, cost 200/300$ less than 3060ti/3070

[u/Darksider123]

Hardware "It is what it is" Unboxed

[u/UnderwhelmingPossum]

Oh if it isn't our old friend 'zero price/performance improvement from gen to gen"

[u/LiebesNektar]

Wow, it is in a bad position. Shouldve been 400 dollars as the 5700XT.

[u/spacev3gan]

I am actually quite impressed with the product. 2080Ti-ish level performance, minus the RTX feature-set, for "$480".

Sure, it doesn't shatter the competition. The 3070 is indeed a more compelling product, and so is the 3060Ti, but I don't think you could go wrong with a 6700XT. I would like it to be priced at $450 instead, and maybe have a game or two bundled (a practice we saw AMD adhering to for all RX5000 cards), but still, I think the price is decent enough and the product itself is very appealing for 1440p gaming.

As we know though, it won't be available, it won't be priced at MSRP plus AIB partners will charge outrageous premiums for their fancier custom cards.

Nevertheless, the 6700XT is, at least in theory, a good product.

[u/Doctor-Hue]

Ahh yes. Hardware Unavailable.