AMD Announces the RX 6700 XT Card

Radeon RX 6700 XT. © AMD.

Even as AMD is struggling to deliver its excellent 6800/6900 series graphics cards, the company announced the arrival of a new RDNA2 card, the Radeon RX 6700 XT, priced at US $480, promising that it will be widely available on the March 18 launch. AMD chose YouTube to make its announcement but inadvertently left the chat feature on. Irate fans flooded the chat, shouting “sold out” or “out of stock” for a good fifteen minutes, referring to the shortage of the graphics cards. Getting back to the RX 6700 XT, this is a more affordable and less muscular version of the 6800: the compute and texture units are down 44.5% and 33% respectively; L3 cache drops from 128 to 96MB, and VRAM drops 25% to a reasonable 12GB. This card builds on the RX 5700 XT and is positioned as AMD’s flagship card for 1440p gaming. It is meant to compete head-on with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070, which is priced at US $500 and only has 8GB of VRAM. Despite AMD’s best efforts, the RX 6700 XT cards are certain to sell out in a matter of hours or less, with robot buyers and scalpers speculating on GPUs amid the global semiconductor shortage.

⇨ YouTube, “Where Gaming Begins: Ep. 3 | AMD Radeon™ RX 6700 XT.”

⇨ The Verge, Sean Hollister, “AMD announces $479 Radeon RX 6700 XT, says it will have ‘significantly more GPUs available’.”

2021-03-03