AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Review: Nvidia Wins This Round

AMD and Nvidia pretend to live in a fantasy world, one where you can buy a modern graphics card for less than $ 700. Heck, a fantasy world where you can buy a new AMD GPU at all – although AMD has repeatedly promised to sell additional RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards on their website for $ 579 and $ 649 respectively, I did not see any evidence that the company has ever has replenished supplies since the cards first launched four months ago.

Today, the company launches a GPU that can change that: the $ 479 Radeon RX 6700 XT. AMD tells The edge it will have ‘significantly more GPUs available’. If this is true – if this is the moment when the clouds separate, the GPU shortage decreases and you can even buy an RX 6700 XT for $ 479 for even a limited time – then you absolutely must do. This is a good performance at 1440p.

But amusing, in the fantasy world where we pretend that a $ 400 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and $ 500 RTX 3070 still exist, the RX 6700 XT actually feels excessive. This is not the obvious Nvidia competitor you might have been hoping for.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has a simple pitch: a way to maximize your 2560 x 1440 monitor with the latest games at maximum settings, all for $ 100 less than the RX 6800 I reviewed late last year. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same playbook that Nvidia used last fall, where its $ 400 RTX 3060 Ti is worth the same amount as $ 500 RTX 3070.

So in our fantasy world where the prizes were held, it would lay the groundwork:

Given the prices, I would expect a $ 480 AMD card to penetrate a $ 400 Nvidia card well. (This is what the Radeon RX 6800 from $ 580 per account did to the $ 500 RTX 3070.) I would also expect it to be within spitting distance of the $ 500 Nvidia card if there was only one $ 20 would be between the two.

But the AMD card runs through my 15-game glove on my own 1440p monitor, but AMD’s new card sometimes loses to Nvidia’s 3060 Ti – sometimes through a very – and it could even lose $ 329 RTX 3060 for Nvidia’s vanilla in tests where I turned on jet tracking.

As you will see in the table above, AMD makes some gains and in many cases meets the promise of maximum settings at 1440p. Shadow of the Tomb Raider seems to average 105 frames per second on my G-Sync / FreeSync monitor with all the eye cookies turned up, and the difference between 120 frames and 114 frames in Call of Duty: Warzone at maximum settings (probably) it is not worth arguing about.

With a more expensive processor you can get more than 60 frames per second in a maximum maximum Cyberpunk 2077 also experience – I’m still testing with my old Core i7-7700K, which is more than good enough for most games on this list (SotR show I’m 100 percent GPU bound), but some titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk is still notorious for the processor, and more key points may help. As another example, my colleague Tom Warren saw identical frameworks for me in Watchdogs: Legion and Metro exit the pairing of the 6700 XT with a much newer Intel chip, but slightly higher in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

But look at Valheim. Look at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Look at Control. How does AMD perform or does it only load these lower level cards? Things aren’t rosier with 4K resolution, if you’re wondering: although I still recommend Nvidia’s 3070 for entry-level 4K, the 6700 XT just does not have the same rumblings. In games like Control and Metro exit, I had to drop the settings to a relatively dull ‘low’, where the 3070 was able to play those games on 4K and medium-spec without any problems. And of course, AMD does not yet have a DLSS competitor if you are a proponent of AI-upgraded resolution.

Nor is it as if AMD is winning in any other way. Although I really love the company’s new two-slot design (clearly inspired by a certain muscle car in the late 1960s) and it’s not really going for me to go from three to two axle fans, the RX 6700 XT is just as thick and almost as powerful as the RX 6800 (230W at 250W) without so much to show for it. AMD still recommends a 650W power supply, an expensive offering for those with long computer cases, and you need both 6 and 8-pin PCIe connectors, while Nvidia’s comparable cards get a single 8-pin.

I also saw the 6700 XT reach 89 degrees Celsius on one occasion. Although I do not have enough evidence to say that this is a problem, I have not yet seen Nvidia’s 3070 cross 82 degrees C, even if my fans are not turned on.

But as I mentioned in my introduction, very little of this will matter if you can get this card for $ 479.

In December, I reported that the true street price of an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti of $ 399 was actually $ 675 and that the street price of a $ 499 RTX 3070 was actually $ 819. These were the average prices people paid on eBay that month.

If you think it sounds incredible, hear this: the street price of the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 is now approaching $ 1,200 everyone. People pay three times what Nvidia’s scare-for-the-money graphics card should be, and the launch of a “$ 329” RTX 3060 doesn’t slow it down at all.

To me, this suggests two things: first, AMD probably will not be able to make nearly enough RX 6700 XTs to reach the $ 479 price tag for the vast majority of buyers, even if it produces “significantly” more cards. . I would not expect today to play differently than any previous GPU launch since the pandemic started. This is now an established pattern. Second, none of these fantasy land prices will necessarily deter the RX 6700 XT if it is an offer. As you can see from the similar street prices for the 3060 Ti and 3070, the market can balance the prices.

If you miraculously see this card for its list price, buy it because you will not get anything better for that price in the near future. But it feels inferior to any Nvidia GPU that can compare – and I would not trade my 3060 Ti for one.