Tuesday, November 24th 2020
Possible Radeon RX 6700 XT Specs Surface, 12GB the New Mid-Range Memory Size?
AMD could follow up on its RX 6800 series and RX 6900 XT launches with the RX 6700 series, which logically succeeds the RX 5700 series, and competes with NVIDIA's RTX 3060/Ti. Patrick Schur on Twitter, who has a high hit-rate with specs of upcoming AMD products, put out possible specs of the RX 6700 series. Both are based on the new "Navi 22" silicon, with an interesting set of specifications.
Apparently 12 GB could be AMD's new memory amount for the mid-range. It's unknown whether the 12 GB is running over a 192-bit wide memory interface (6x 16 Gbit chips), or whether AMD is using mixed-density chips over a 256-bit wide memory bus (think 4x 16 Gbit and 4x 8 Gbit), because even the fastest JEDEC-standard GDDR6 chips, running at 16 Gbps, would only yield 384 GB/s memory bandwidth, which is less than the 448 GB/s the RX 5700 series enjoy. Perhaps an Infinity Cache is deployed to make up the difference?
As for power, the RX 6700 XT (described as Navi 22 XT), is expected to have typical graphics power of 186-221 W, while the RX 6700 (Navi 22 XTL), could have 146-156 W TGP), which could mean that at least the RX 6700 could make do with a single 8-pin PCIe power input. VideoCardz predicts that the RX 6700 XT could feature 40 RDNA2 compute units—so 2,560 stream processors; and the RX 6700 featuring 36 (2,304), so the same exact number of shaders as the previous generation. The secret sauce here could be the significantly higher engine clocks, and possibly an Infinity Cache.
Sources:
Patrick Schur (Twitter), VideoCardz
Apparently 12 GB could be AMD's new memory amount for the mid-range. It's unknown whether the 12 GB is running over a 192-bit wide memory interface (6x 16 Gbit chips), or whether AMD is using mixed-density chips over a 256-bit wide memory bus (think 4x 16 Gbit and 4x 8 Gbit), because even the fastest JEDEC-standard GDDR6 chips, running at 16 Gbps, would only yield 384 GB/s memory bandwidth, which is less than the 448 GB/s the RX 5700 series enjoy. Perhaps an Infinity Cache is deployed to make up the difference?
73 Comments on Possible Radeon RX 6700 XT Specs Surface, 12GB the New Mid-Range Memory Size?
RTX 3070 is 52% faster in 4K than RX 5700XT, so there is no reason to believe a 40CU N22 will perform on the same level, unless you believe the clockspeed will be over 2.6GHz.
www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt/36.htmlIf clocks are not taken into consideration.
RX 6800 shows low performance for its specification - I don't know why, though.
AMD is not putting 12GB on cards lower than last year's top end 11GB 2080ti for giggles.
They do it because consoles have a similar amount and games are hardly even ports anymore, its more unified development now than it ever was. It may be hard to believe, but Nvidia might run out of capacity sooner than you can blink. Even the shittiest early console launchgame already wants over 9 GB for 4K (Godfall).
I'm sure they will find a way (driver) around it like they've always done, but it won't benefit performance. There's also still a rabbit in the hat with RTX IO.
Whatever way it develops... its very clear VRAM requirements are going to increase across the board, as they have in the past few generations already. Since Maxwell we have 2,5x the VRAM already (4 > 10GB) and that is only counting the lowest increase on x80 GPUs. With this AMD release, that will expand to 3x. You're living in fantasy land if you think this is just for marketing purposes.
Cyberpunk uses 10GB of VRAM with RT on. Not sure how that will play out on cards with 6-8GB.
N22 is not planned for FullHD but 1440p and there is a 46% difference in performance.
1440p performance summary