Radeon Series RX 6700 XT preview & analysis

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AMD Radeon Series 6000

Radeon Series RX 6700 XT

In this preview, we'll be discussing the pending Radeon Series 6700 XT that AMD announced today. This article is preliminary, based on what AMD has been sharing as well the stories that made the news to get a grasp of what AMD is releasing. Who can remember it? It was January 12th that AMD's CEO Lisa Su made a bit of an appearance in a keynote speech, in the background you could see two graphics cards, one of them is announced today, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. And albeit most of you probably have seen all rumors and chatter, today we can finally share some final specifications of the product series. 

In this announcement preview overview a bit of analysis, we'll be discussing that pending Radeon Series 6700 XT from AMD as that stems from the RDNA2  architecture. It certainly took a while, back in July 2019 AMD announced the NAVI-based Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT. a product series that ever since has been well respected. The 5700 series does offer some good performance. However from there onwards, things were pushed back for various reasons like all COVID-19 related, in the world of graphics technology, also a new dynamic was added, Raytracing. Or, I should say DirectX Raytracing (DX-R). NVIDIA was pioneering two years ago with their RTX 2000 series already, and AMD made the call to delay that for the original Navi GPU. As the graphics landscape changed somewhere done the line, so this the roadmap for AMD change. Microsoft and Sony consoles embedded with AMD technology revealed that Ray tracing was going to be supported. And that did set the trend for the desktop graphics card we see announced today as well. 


Rx-6700xt

RadeonRX 6900 XTRX 6800 XTRX 6800RX 6700 XTRX 5700 XT
Architecture RDNA2 RDNA2 RDNA
GPU Navi 21 Navi 22 XL Navi 10
Die size 505 mm² - 251 mm²
Transistors 26.8 billion - 10.3 billion
Manufacturing process TSMC 7nm
Compute units 80 72 60 40 40
Raytracing cores 80 72 60 40 -
Shader processors 5120 4608 3840 2560 2560
Game / boost freq. 2015/2250 MHz 2015/2250 MHz 1815/2105 MHz 2424/2581 MHz 1750/1905 MHz
Performance (FP32) 20.6 TFLOPS 18.6 TFLOPS 13.9 TFLOPS 13.21 TFLOPS 9 TFLOPS
Memory 16 GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps 12 GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps 8 GB GDDR6 @ 14Gbps
Memory bus 256-bit 192-bit 256-bit
Memory bandwidth 512 GB/s 384 GB/s 448 GB/s
Infinity Cache 128 MB 128 MB? -
TBP 300W 250W 230W 225W
Release date 8/12/2020 18/11/2020 18/11/2020 18/3/2021 Available
MSRP $ 999 $ 649 $ 579 $  479 $ 399

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What to expect?

You may expect several graphics cards within the new 6700 lineups. Initially, one Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards will be released. Previously there has been mention of reference clocked products, and the OC model (which are allowed to utilize more power at a TGP of 230W. AMD just mention one 230W model now, we like that as it avoids confusion. Inevitably, of course, there will be a Radeon RX 6700 (non-XT) series released as well. AMD claims a 50% perf per watt improvement in performance, double that of last-gen performance. 

Blistering clock speeds, 12GB GDDR6 for 'mainstream'

RDNA2 architecture on that same 7nm node seems susceptible to increase clock frequencies. RX 5700 XT sits around 1950MHz, the boost speed of the Radeon RX 6700 XT should/could reach close to 2600 MHz though the game clock is listed at 2424 MHz (=very high).  To appropriately serve the GPU with instructions and data, AMD increased the memory speed to 16Gbps on its Radeon RX 6000 GPUs. To increase memory bandwidth AMD introduced 'Infinity Cache'. 

96MB Infinity Cache

One of the biggest changes from previous GPU architecture in RDNA2 is Infinity Cache, a cache memory that will take the load off the memory bus and improve performance per watt. This memory is on the chip itself (on-die), and would be one of the reasons that the Navi 21 and 22 GPUs are considerably larger than Navi 10. Normally a GPU has a few megabytes of cache memory (L1 and L2). Then there's a huge gap in between the many gigabytes of VRAM that the frame buffer has. This gap is bridged with Infinity Cache, basically, you could look at it as an L3 cache that is more capable to provide the GPU with sufficient and faster data in a faster manner, and reduces frame buffer utilization.  The 6700 series also has the same 96 MB Infinity Cache which was 128MB on the 6800/6900 series offering more bandwidth closer to a 256-bit or 384-bit memory bus. This L3 cache sits on the GPU die, ergo it's big size. That's a lot of transistors used for this feature. There's more to it all as the GPU  now takes advantage of lower energy consumption because there is less utilization on the memory controllers. 

Raytracing

AMD announced that it would introduce its Radeon RX 6000 series lineup back in October 28, as we write this before the announcement, which is today.  Before the announcements, a thing or two have leaked, but overall everybody is still guessing the new lineup's precise specifications. The rumor was that the flagship product would compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 and support DX-R, aka Raytracing, and DirectX ultimate in its entirety.  We cannot say much about DXR performance but have calculated the number of RT cores inside the RDNA2 architecture as it is easy to math, 1 RT core per CU.


Radeon RX 6000 vs GeForce RTX 30
Graphics cardRay Tracing CoresTensor Cores
Radeon RX 6900 XT 80 NA
Radeon RX 6800 XT 72 NA
Radeon RX 6700 XT 40 NA
GeForce RTX 3090 82 328
GeForce RTX 3080 68 272
GeForce RTX 3070 46 184

Radeon RX 6700 XT

AMD just hosted their 'Where Gaming Begins epi3' presentation (March 3, 2021). As earlier indicated, only one NAVI22 SKU is released at this time. The Radeon RX 6700 XT. A Non-XT version may follow at a later date. The RX 6700 XT will be commercially available on likely the 18th of March. Reference MBA cards and Customs cards will arrive on the same date. Navi22 XL, the GPU that resides on the 6700 XT graphics card series has been paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory Armed with RDNA2 architecture and 40 CUs this offers 2560 shading processors, the same amount as the Radeon RX 5700 XT, the architecture, however, is much faster. The memory makes use of a 192-bit wide memory bus. The reference boards use 11 phases of power. It will have a base clock of 2321 MHz, a game clock of 2424 MHz, and a boost clock of 2581 MHz. The graphics card features 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 40 Raytracing cores for raytracing hardware acceleration. The graphics card is equipped with a high-quality PCB with an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector. The official TDP is listed at 230W.



We a 2581 MHz boost clock and a more realistic 2424 MHz Game clock or something in that range, the card definitely is clocked high. The card is to battle the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 in at the very least shading performance. This graphics card will cost you a sweet sum of 479,- USD.


GPU Specifications

AMD announced three BiG Navi based graphics cards. Interesting was to learn the GPUs are fabricated on an optimized 7nm node derived from TSMC.  The cards will be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a. Specs then, below an overview. The number of hardware-accelerated RT cores are TBA, but shader count, memory volume, and clock frequencies we can report.      

   

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Desktop              
GPU Stream Processors RT Cores Max Boost GPU clock (MHz) RAM type RAM volume (GB) RAM bandwidth (GB/s) RAM width TDP (watts)
Radeon RX 6900 XT 5120 80 2250 GDDR6 16 512 256-bit 300
Radeon RX 6800 XT 4608 72 2250 GDDR6 16 512 256-bit 300
Radeon RX 6800  3840 60 2105 GDDR6 16 512 256-bit 250
Radeon RX 6700 XT 2560 40 2581 GDDR6 12 384 192-bit 230
Radeon RX 5700 XT 2560 1605 GDDR6 8 448 256-bit 225
Radeon RX 5700 2304 1465 GDDR6 8 448 256-bit 180
Radeon VII 3840 1400 HBM2 16 1024 4096-bit 300
Radeon RX Vega 64 4096 1247 HBM2 8 484 2048-bit 295
Radeon RX Vega 56 3584 1156 HBM2 8 410 2048-bit 210
Radeon RX 590 2304 1469 GDDR5 8GB 256 256-bit 185

 

Pricing

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is to cost a rather hefty 479 USD. You can thus expect board partner cards with custom designs and cooling to sit well above the 500 USD marker.

Availability

They are announced today on the 3rd, but launch on March 18th for both the reference and board partner designs. 

The Presentation

Below the announcements made by AMD.


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