Ow. Hey. Ow. Quit it. What are you?
Stop. Hey, I'm launching paper at
you. I get it. AMD, you on the other hand, I just
don't get sometimes. We're in the middle of one of the biggest chip shortages in
a long time, maybe ever. And here you are proudly announcing your newest
graphics card to the world. Is it that you know something I don't? Because this
move feels like a confusing one given how people have reacted to all the other
graphics cards that have launched this year with functionally zero stock
available to actual gamers. Maybe
there's a method to the madness, though. Maybe there's a 4D chess game here that
we just can't see. Maybe
Our first glimpse at the RX6700 XT came
just one day before NVIDIA launched their RTX 3060, which seemed kind of
like a rotten move, but you know what they say, all is fair and love in
gaming. The first party card has a design similar to the larger RX6800 and
6T900 series, except that Team Rocket stole the third fan. And as soon as that
teaser went up, speculation and leaks began to fly. Leaks that turned out to
be rather accurate. What they got exactly right was the price. At
$479, it's much higher than the RTX 3060
MSRP, but this card isn't targeting the
3060. It's landing somewhere between the 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070. Now, you might
be scratching your head thinking, "Didn't AMD target the RTX 3070 with the
RX6800?" Yes, but as AMD points out, the
lower VRAM available to the RTX 3070 can
be a potential bottleneck for more demanding titles at higher resolutions.
And AMD wants 1440p max quality out of this card. All
at a price point that will still be appealing, just like this insulated 40oz
stealth water bottle from
ltstore.com. Ah, tastes like winning. Of
course, the price AMD targets matters very little right now, thanks to the
one-two punch of a crypto mining boom and a worldwide silicon shortage. It's
gotten so bad that retailers are now raffling off the opportunity to buy a
card instead of selling them directly. NVIDIA's attempt to tackle this involved
nerfing Ethereum mining efficiency on their 3060. Never mind that there are
tons of other GPU mined cryptos and launching a separate series of mining
GPUs. While AMD is taking a different approach, they're going to be selling
the cards directly to gamers. And AMD tells us they'll be releasing the RX6700
XT in weekly drops on AMD.com, giving
consumers multiple chances to buy. This is at suggested pricing in spite of the
retail landscape. This could be a viable
method of getting the cards into the hands of actual gamers. But one of the
problems with announcing when the cards will drop is that you're still relying
on strong protections against bots and scalping groups, which is not going to
be easy. And it also doesn't tell us anything about how many units will be
available for each region or even in each drop. Fortunately, if you're not
into that strat, it's not just AMD who's going to be selling these. So, on March
18th, both AMD's cards and their partner boards will go on sale simultaneously,
which also gives better odds that they won't all be sold out as soon as they go
live. And they've also got a host of system integrators that are geared up
and ready to go. But hold on a minute. Are these things going to be worth
buying? Well, we will have a full review. Make sure you're subscribed so
you don't miss it. But here's what we know so far. Compared to the RX6800, the
6700 XT has a third fewer compute units,
25% less Infinity cache, and four fewer gigs of GDDR6 memory. To offset that
though, the game clock is substantially higher at 2424 MHz, a 25% increase. As a
result, we can probably expect ray tracing performance to be lacking even
compared to AMD's own higherend cards. But as we've seen when we overclocked
the RX6800 XT to near 6T900 XT levels,
higher core clocks can have a huge impact on the RDNA2 architectures raster
performance. With that said, though, there's a bigger gap in compute units
with the 6700 XT. So, we'll have to see how this all plays out. Now, AMD didn't
mention this in the presentation, but there's another potential pitfall for
the 6700 XT, and that is memory bandwidth. Unless AMD is using lower
capacity chips for memory, which we doubt, it's likely the memory interface
has dropped from 256-bit to 192bit. Now,
AMD may be clocking the memory higher in order to compensate. And we were
surprised at how much of a difference the Infinity cache makes in memory
intensive games on the bigger radons. So, maybe it won't be such a big deal
here, especially at sub4K resolutions.
But remember, the Infinity Cache is smaller, too. So, this gives me reason
to temper my expectations. As for what
resolution people will be gaming at, 1440p display adoption, at least
according to AMD, has increased by 44% over last year. And while that still
puts it below high refresh rate 1080p, high refresh rate 1440p displays have
made a 98% jump in sales thanks to declining prices and improved
capabilities. What this means is that a growing percentage of gamers are looking
to drive fast 1440p panels. And that's
exactly what AMD is banking on for the RX6700 XT. On paper though, high refresh
rate 1440p looks like a bit of a
stretch, especially in AAA titles. But AMD hopes their Radeon boost hardware
accelerated adaptive resolution function in DirectX11 mode and variable rate
shading in DirectX12 mode will make up some of this ground. That is as long as
you're willing to give up some image quality in your peripheral areas and in
high motion scenes. Curiously missing from the presentation is any further
explanation as to how and when Fidelity FX Super Resolution, that's AMD's answer
to NVIDIA's DLSS, is going to make an appearance. What they did do is give us
a few insights though into what's taking them so long. Apparently, rather than
rushing it out the door on only one new top-end card, they want it to be
crossplatform in every sense of the word. So, they actually want it running
on all of their GPUs, including the ones inside consoles, before they pull the
trigger. It would have been nice to have it ready by the time the cards launched.
But, as we saw with NVIDIA's DLSS 1.0
versus DLSS 2.0, it could be for the
best. I mean, lots of people still think that DLSS sucks thanks to the poor image
quality of V1 and NVIDIA's confusing marketing where they actually referred
to it as an anti-aliasing technique. still more proof if you needed it that
lots of people and NVIDIA for that matter can in fact be wrong about
things. Anyway, in the meantime, AMD is pointing to Radeon Boost and Fidelity FX
contrast adaptive sharpening for their upscaling. Whether that's an acceptable
compromise or whether it's worth it to wait for Fidelity FX super resolution or
whether this question is utterly meaningless until such time as these
cards can be purchased for a reasonable price. All of that is up to you, the
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freshbooks.com/inus. We're going to have that linked down below. If you guys are
looking for another video to watch, you can check out our review of the 6800 and
6800 XT, which might give you an idea of what to expect from Team Red's latest
offering.