AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - Design and Features
The RX 6700 XT is the fourth Radeon card to release this generation and continues the same styling of its predecessors. That means a GPU that looks almost like a futuristic sports car with its mix of black and chrome-accented silver. The blacked-out heatsink even looks a bit like a grille, though I suspect the red trim and illuminated Radeon logo won’t be to everyone’s liking, especially if they already have custom lighting in their PC. Still, it’s a sleek, svelte card with a two-fan cooler and two-slot width that should fit in most PCs. As expected, the RX 6700 XT is built on the RDNA 2 architecture and is part of AMD’s effort to deliver a full range of GPUs for gamers this generation. At the time of its release, the 6700 XT is the lowest-tier offering and the most accessiblely priced. As such, there are some scale-backs here, but this is definitely a full-featured card designed to compete with the current generation of gaming GPUs. That means gamers can expect most of the same benefits I’ve reported on with previous Radeon RX 6000-series cards: hardware-based ray tracing, Smart Access Memory, and AMD’s Infinity Cache solution to reduce memory latency and boost performance. This also means higher clock speeds and better performance per watt than the RX 5700 XT.
Importantly, RDNA 2 also works with DirectX 12 Ultimate. Of specific note are mesh and variable rate shading. This allows the GPU to intelligently control the level of detail and shading of scenes to prioritize what’s most perceptible to the gamer. It’s a smart way to save performance and prioritize what matters most. Nvidia also supports these features, so while it isn’t exclusive to AMD, it’s an important feature to even approach performance parity. On paper, the RX 6700 XT impresses. It features 17.1 million transistors, a 67% improvement from last-gen’s RX 5700 XT, and runs ridiculously fast. The Game Clock speed is rated for 2.42 GHz with a maximum Boost Clock speed of 2.58 GHz. In contrast, the RTX 3070 often peaked just shy of 2 GHz. In fact, the RX 6700 XT is the fastest card AMD has released this generation by a good margin. The RX 6800 XT was rated for a top speed of 2.25 GHz and pushed to 2.5 GHz with Rage Mode enabled. The 6700 XT, on the other hand, peaked at an incredible 2.64 GHz and tended to hover at 2.5 GHz on stock settings. The Radeon Software also supports automatic, one-button overclocking to push this even further should users desire. All of that speed comes at the cost of heat. In my testing, the card peaked at 85C and hovered only slightly lower at 83C while gaming. I expected this after testing the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, and AMD has been quick to point out that this is nothing to be concerned with. The RX 6700 XT uses a network of sensors to determine its thermal threshold instead of a traditional single-point probe and can actually hit 110C before thermal throttling, so that shouldn’t be an issue for most gamers. Still, after experiencing the impressively low temperatures on Nvidia’s RTX-3000 series, I would have liked to see AMD answer with lower temperatures of its own, even if that means a larger heatsink. 
Compared to the next-step-up RX 6800, the card is expectedly more limited. It features a total of 40 compute units versus that more expensive card’s 60. In addition, it sports only 12 GB of GDDR6 video memory (versus 16 GB) and utilizes a 192-bit bus instead of 256-bit. To close that gap, AMD has equipped the card with 96MB of Infinity Cache, claiming “2.5x effective bandwidth” compared to 12 gigabytes of VRAM on the wider 256-bit bus. In practice, I didn’t find this scaleback to be a major limitation to my gameplay in any way. Likewise, the overall capacity is a smart match for the trajectory of games today. Very few major titles utilize 12 GB of memory, which gives the card a bit of headroom to grow into future games without over-delivering and driving up costs. The card also supports AMD’s suite of software enhancements. The FidelityFX suite is easily accessible and has undergone tremendous improvements over the last two generations, making it easy to navigate and enable image-enhancing features. Radeon Image Sharpening is a particular favorite of mine to add a level of crispness to the picture though it still falls short of an actual upscaling solution like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=c31cca20-f2bb-4876-a65c-1427e1a7bc31"] That omission continues to be an important one. Like the rest of the RX 6000-series, the RX 6700 XT supports hardware-level ray tracing. At 1440p and 1080p, it can deliver playable frame rates on many games that offer ray tracing, but since many of those titles also support Nvidia’s DLSS, the 6700 XT feels handicapped in comparison. DLSS uses machine learning to intelligently upscale games from lower resolutions to near-native quality, dramatically reducing the performance hit of ray tracing. Since there is little reason not to use DLSS when it’s available, this leaves AMD at a significant performance disadvantage in many RT-enabled games, albeit while maintaining a crisper overall image. AMD has a solution in the works it calls FidelityFX Super Resolution, but as of this writing there’s no firm date or hard details on when that will be available or the performance gains it will be capable of. Turning away from ray tracing, another major feature of the RX 6700 XT is Smart Access Memory. This feature debuted with the RX 6000-series and has the potential to offer meaningful performance boosts to owners of select Ryzen 3000 or 5000 CPUs. Smart Access Memory, or SAM for short, allows the CPU to access the 6700 XT’s entire memory pool versus the usual 256 MB, removing a potential rendering bottleneck. That free access allows some games to run more efficiently, leading to increased FPS. 
Unfortunately, I was not able to test this for myself since it requires a Ryzen CPU and IGN’s test system is built around an Intel Core i9-9900K. In time, I hope AMD opens up support for Intel processors since Nvidia’s solution, Resizable Bar, is compatible with either. That said, independent testing and AMD’s own marketing materials demonstrate that the benefits are highly dependent on the game in question. Using its figures across nearly a dozen games, the uplift ranged from 4-17% on a Ryzen 9 5900X at 1440p. These results are fairly close to independent testing conducted by TechSpot, so it’s fair to say that the performance enhancements are real but varied. Finally, when it comes to inputs and outputs, the card sports three DisplayPort 1.4 connections and a single HDMI 2.1 capable of 4K120 or 8K60 frame rates. It delivers decoding support for AV1 and VP9 and encoding/decoding support for H.264 and H.265 for every major streaming need. 
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - Performance
With background out of the way, it’s time to get into testing. I run each card through a series of synthetic tests, including several specific to ray tracing, as well as a series of real-world gaming benchmarks. All tests are conducted at ultra settings unless otherwise noted. This allows me to run all cards through the same series of assessments and gauge relative performance and value at different resolutions. One important thing to note is that ray tracing tests are conducted with DLSS enabled on Nvidia cards. It is true that this lends Nvidia cards an advantage over AMD; however, it also represents the exact situation gamers buying these cards today will be faced with. Since so many ray traced games also support DLSS, the question prospective customers will be faced with is whether to opt for Nvidia with RTX and DLSS or AMD at native resolution without. These tests reflect that. When AMD releases its FidelityFX Super Resolution, that feature will also be factored into testing.AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - Synthetic Benchmarks
| Graphics Card | 3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra | Uniengine Heaven 4.0 (1440p) |
| AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode) | 12,317 | 3725 |
| AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT | 12,105 | 3671 |
| AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT | 8,426 | 2488 |
| Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition | 8,547 | 2785 |
| Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition | 7,306 | 2258 |
| Graphics Card | 3D Mark Port Royal | 3DMark Ray Tracing Test |
| AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode) | 9107 | 27.2 |
| AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT | 9054 | 26.7 |
| AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT | 5919 | 13.6 |
| Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition | 8,131 | 31.9 |
| Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition | 6,941 | 25.6 |
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - Gaming Benchmarks
After running the card through our initial series of five tests, a few things become clear. First, this is absolutely not a 4K card. It was never promised to be but if you were holding out hope, it’s time to exhale. Second, 1440p and 1080p performance are quite good! Even with ray tracing set to high and without the benefit of DLSS upscaling, it was able to run Metro Exodus at 46 FPS. Lowering settings, it would certainly be possible to push this to 60 FPS. For rasterization, however, this card has no trouble playing games at max settings at this resolution at high refresh rates. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=amd-radeon-rx-6700-xt-benchmarks&captions=true"]The biggest point of comparison is against the RTX 3070 which retails for only $20 more (theoretically). With Metro included in the overall average, the RX 6700 XT lagged behind by 8% at 1080p, 13% at 1440p, and 21% at 4K. With that game excluded to create a better apples to apples comparison, the results are much closer with the RX 6700 XT only lagging behind by 4% at 1080p, 7% at 1440p and 14% at 4K. Remember, also, that my system does not have the advantage of Smart Access Memory, so these results could potentially be even closer.
Compared against AMD’s RX 6800 in all games, the RX 6700 XT was 14% slower at 1080p, 15% slower at 1440p, and 21% slower at 4K. Against the RX 5700 XT, the tables turn in rasterization performance. There, we see the RX 6700 XT offer a massive lead of 32% at 1080p, 35% at 1440p, and 34% at 4K.
With general testing out of the way, I put the RX 6700 XT through a round of expanded testing against a selection of competitive cards: the RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and the RX 6800.
At 1440p, the RTX 3070 maintains its lead. When ray tracing and DLSS are factored in, the results lean heavily in favor of Nvidia’s $499 GPU. The RX 6700 XT lags behind by 19 FPS in these results. In sheer rasterization things are much closer with the gap coming in at only 9%. Thanks to DLSS, the RTX 3060 Ti also tops the RX 6700 XT by 10% average across the whole game set. With that removed from the equation, the RX 6700 XT surpasses it by 7%. When compared against the RX 6800, it comes in 15% slower.
At 1080p, things tighten up considerably. Against the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti, the difference across all titles is only 13% and 3% respectively, even without the benefit of upscaling. In rasterization, the RX 6700 XT beats both cards by 3% and 14%. Against the RX 6800, the gaps remain consistent with 1440p at 12% slower.
Like the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, the RX 6700 XT is a fast gaming GPU and an excellent value for rasterization. With Smart Acif thacess Memory factored in, Ryzen users could find themselves with an extremely competitive card compared to Nvidia. That said, without an answer to DLSS, it underperforms in ray tracing scenarios. That’s a shame because this is a genuinely good card that feels artificially handicapped without an upscaling solution to square off on even footing.
As in the last two Radeon RX 6000 reviews, I found myself wishing AMD had held this launch until FidelityFX Super Resolution was ready. Its release could dramatically change the value proposition. As it stands, if you care about ray tracing and can find a card at MSRP, the RTX 3070 is the better buy. And that’s really the rub: being able to find a GPU at MSRP. While AMD is promising additional stock, only time will tell how that will pan out. If the current GPU marketplace is any indication, these cards will sell out fast and then be resold at exorbitant prices. At their suggested price, most gamers will be better served spending the extra $20 on an RTX 3070, but if you can find the RX 6700 XT at MSRP and the RTX 3070 is still $600-700, then it’s reasonable to accept the modest performance gap and wait on FidelityFX Super Resolution.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3tz2VSD
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