AMD’s 6700 XT comes in overpriced and (likely) understocked
AMD announced the newest member of its RDNA2 lineup of graphics cards today, finally bring the “mid-range” to Team Red aficionados.
The 6700 XT will feature 40 compute units, or 2560 stream processors, running at 2424 MHz, boosting to 2581 MHz should thermals allow. This will give it a maximum theoretical performance of 12.4 TFLOPS. Additionally, the card will feature 12GB of GDDR6 memory running at 16 Gbps on a 192-bit bus. Total board power consumption is expected to be 230w.
So far this looks to be a fairly solid offering, at least on paper, for the 1440p crowd. AMD’s own marketing benchmarks show performance roughly equal to rival Nvidia’s RTX 3070. At least when it comes to raster performance. RDNA2 cards have notoriously lagged behind the Green Team in ray tracing. AMD did not provide any numbers in that regard. We’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks to verify these claims. Though thankfully AMD will be lifting the review embargo a couple days before it hits retail. A concession prize for an increasingly insane PC market.
One particularly sour note though is the pricing. The 6700 XT has a suggested price of $479 USD. Hence why we put “mid-range” in quotation marks at the beginning. While this is about $20 cheaper than the 3070, it still represents a substantial $180 price hike when compared to similarly tiered cards in recent generations. Notably the Vega 56 and RDNA1 based 5700 XT.
PC components have always had higher up front costs than consoles. Yet with the Xbox Series X offering similar performance (on paper), at only $20 more for an entire system, this card is already a tough value proposition. This pricing issue is further being compounded by stock shortages and the current crypto-mining boom. A perfect storm that has seen PC component costs skyrocket to unprecedented levels. Well, at least when compared to the last 20 years. Basically, you can expect to pay double, at minimum, for these cards when they come out on March 18th. That is if you’re lucky enough to even find one. While consoles also remain hard to find, at least they can still be snagged at the list price, if you’re persistent.
Source: Anandtech
