AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Leak Alleges 12GB GDDR6 Memory To Battle RTX 3070
Give it some time and both AMD and NVIDIA will inevitably flesh out their latest generation graphics card lineups with more SKUs. NVIDIA so far has been a bit more aggressive than AMD, having followed up its initial launch of three cards with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3060. However, there is more evidence to suggest that AMD will soon announce a Radeon RX 6700 XT.
AMD also debuted its second generation Radeon DNA (RDNA 2) graphics architecture with three initial SKUs, those being the Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6800. All three came out of the gate with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Rumor has it the Radeon RX 6700 XT will sport 12GB of GDDR6 memory, to duke it out with the GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB GDDR6) for mid-range supremacy.
The latest clue to the card's existence comes from hardwareLUXX's Andreas Schilling, who posted what looks to be an official logo for the upcoming SKU. Have a look...
According to Schilling, this card will indeed have 12GB of GDDR6 memory and take aim at 1440p gaming. Schilling also notes that it will be arriving soon, as in "sometime in H1 2021 or is it Q1?," but does not mention a specific date or pricing. Between tariffs and supply challenges, pricing and availability might not even be determined yet, but that's a different discussion.
The rumors regarding this unannounced SKU are starting to stack up. If they end up being correct, the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be based on AMD's Navi 22 GPU, with 40 compute units and 2,560 stream processors running at 2.35GHz to 2.5GHz. Past Radeon RX 6700 XT rumors have also pegged this card as having 12GB of GDDR6 memory (16Gbps), along with a 192-bit memory bus and 96MB of Infinity Cache.
While we do not know where pricing will land, we can at least surmise that it will probably be roughly in line with the MSRP of a GeForce RTX 3070. Here is a look at the pricing structure for currently released cards...
- GeForce RTX 3090: $1,499
- Radeon RX 6900 XT: $999
- GeForce RTX 3080: $699
- Radeon RX 6800 XT: $649
- Radeon RX 6800: $579
- GeForce RTX 3070: $499
- GeForce RTX 3060 Ti: $399
- GeForce RTX 3060: $329
A prior rumor indicated the Radeon RX 6700 XT will trade blows with a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, though looking at the current pricing structure and where the upcoming card is likely to land, it seems AMD will be taking aim at competing against the GeForce RTX 3070.
For reference, the Radeon RX 6800 sports 60 CUs and 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, and offers up to a 2,105MHz boost clock. As we saw in our Radeon RX 6800 review, it is generally faster than a GeForce RTX 3070 in rasterized rendering, and not far behind in ray-traced testing. It will be interesting to see how the Radeon RX 6700 XT with fewer CUs fares in comparison to both cards.
