AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

[Xuper]

It just seems like RDNA2 is RDNA1 with mediocre DXR support, tweaked for higher clocks. The gamecache seems to have no effect at lower resolutions and only makes a difference at 4K, which is a bit silly because the 6700XT is already at unplayable framerates in several of the tested games at 4K. Who cares if the cache improves performance by 30% when you're still only getting 24.1 fps?

If you look at some of the heavy factory OC 5700XT models with 2150MHz clock speeds they aren't doing a whole lot worse than the ~2450MHz 6700XT reference. I get the impression that a 1900MHz 6700XT would be close enough to a 5700XT that you'd struggle to see the difference in a side-by-side comparison; You'd question whether there was actually an improvement or whether it was just within margin-of-error.

People are arguing that RDNA2 is a huge architectural leap forward, but to me the results sure look like most of the gained performance over the 5700XT is proportional to the clockspeed, meaning that IPC gains are close to zero and power efficiency takes a massive hit from running at those higher clocks.

Well , It's true because RDNA2 architecture provides great opportunity in game performance which you CAN'T get rdna1.

 

[ratirt]

Here is some more comparisons. Hardware Unboxed has managed to do some more testing and here are the results.

 

[Chrispy_]

Not in a million years would amd or nvidia for that matter price a higher performing gpu below a lower one, specially now that amd is back in the flagship competition. $430 would be a more real guess.
That said, nvidia does have more features, the problem with those is that they only apply for 2% of the games?(and that's not taking in to account that amd is working on a dlss alternative). When more rtx games become available, these gpus won't cut it even with dlss, and by that time, the next gen gpus will be out and will be way more capable in that regard.

So there is no need to give that much importance to features that a gpu won't be able to use in all its splendor.

Yeah, if AMD's feature set was at parity I'd be okay with $430 - it's about in line with the 22-game average results:

But between CUDA, DLSS, NVENC, and the vastly better DXR performance, I don't feel that raster-performance alone is the only performance metric to look at.

 

[dragontamer5788]

Yeah, if AMD's feature set was at parity I'd be okay with $430 - it's about in line with the 22-game average results:

View attachment 193091

But between CUDA, DLSS, NVENC, and the vastly better DXR performance, I don't feel that raster-performance alone is the only performance metric to look at.

That 12GB VRAM is amazing... but the lack of CUDA and the poor OpenCL situation right now really hampers it.

You really run out of VRAM really quick when you start doing CUDA / OpenCL stuff. Its not so much needed in video games. I'm not necessarily talking about deep-learning, I'm talking normal SIMD programming environments.

 

[Chrispy_]

That 12GB VRAM is amazing... but the lack of CUDA and the poor OpenCL situation right now really hampers it.

You really run out of VRAM really quick when you start doing CUDA / OpenCL stuff. Its not so much needed in video games. I'm not necessarily talking about deep-learning, I'm talking normal SIMD programming environments.

I've put in a request for a whole pallet of 3060 12GB cards; specifically for workstations. We want CUDA and we want 12GB - actual gaming performance isn't a priority for us.

My account manager said "one per customer at the moment, but as soon as that restriction is lifted I can ship you a pallet direct from distributor".

I'm not holding my breath - I suspect the placeholder 5500XT cards I picked up at £145 each before Christmas will be holding down the fort for several months still.

 

[Deleted member 205776]

I've put in a request for a whole pallet of 3060 12GB cards; specifically for workstations. We want CUDA and we want 12GB - actual gaming performance isn't a priority for us.

My account manager said "one per customer at the moment, but as soon as that restriction is lifted I can ship you a pallet direct from distributor".

I'm not holding my breath - I suspect the placeholder 5500XT cards I picked up at £145 each before Christmas will be holding down the fort for several months still.

A whole pallet of 3060s? Are you trying to buy every 3060 ever produced?

 

[Chrispy_]

A whole pallet of 3060s? Are you trying to buy every 3060 ever produced?

I have to keep almost a thousand machines up to date, a pallet is anywhere from 50-100 cards depending on how bulky the boxes are. I normally buy 8 a month and I haven't been buying any for the last four months because of supply/scalping.

I don't normally order by the pallet but have done a few times now. I have friends working at Google who've told me "standard order is in multiples of twenty pallets" just to make me feel small and insignificant.

 

[Deleted member 205776]

50-100 cards

Yup that's about how many 3060s currently exist

 

[Chrispy_]

Yup that's about how many 3060s currently exist

definitely explains why I can't have my pallet yet.

 

[nguyen]

6700XT is a design failure, the 96MB Infinity Cache is a waste of silicon space. AMD could just used their expertise in 7nm fabrication process and improve the 5700XT clocks then these 2 GPU would be very close anyways.
I'm guessing AMD is reserving the RDNA1 for their mining specific lineup, those chips are making a killing out there.

 

[efikkan]

The extra 4 GB VRAM over the 3060 Ti and the 3070 is enough for the 6700XT to run games with very high VRAM needs smoother than those cards even in 1440P. So if you are interested in raw rasterization performance, that -4% difference means less than having 4 GB extra VRAM.

Where is the evidence of this? If anything RTX 3070 pulls further ahead in 4K, which contradicts your claim. Unfortunately this review doesn't contain measurements of frame rate consistency.

You clearly don't quite understand how VRAM affects performance. If two cards have "comparable" computational performance memory bandwidth, but one of them have significantly more VRAM, that's not going to yield more performance. The only time it will have an advantage is in games with higher details and lower frame rates. Increasing frame rates would require more memory bandwidth and computational performance, which is why more VRAM as "future proofing" is a fool's errand.

There are also those that swear by Linux' open source drivers. I'm not convinced it's a worthy trade off, but it's a reason nonetheless.

There are those who strongly advocate the Gallium3D based AMD drivers, interestingly enough very few of them are heavy users of graphics on Linux, or even uses Linux at all. Whenever you see people argue about this is they use ideological arguments like the Mesa/Gallium3D driver being more open, and therefore at least 23% less evil.
Those of us who have long experience in graphics programming knows the AMD drivers (both the proprietary ones and the partially open ones) have terrible OpenGL support, along with frequent glitching in simple things like video, and crashes or corruption which requires restarts. There is a world of difference in general stability between their Linux and Windows drivers (at least as long as you stick to DirectX). There is also lack of support for the OpenGL compatibility profile, which makes things more cumbersome and require a lot of more fiddling. On top of that, Mesa/Gallium3D drivers are bundled with the kernel, so getting one that's less than 2-3 years old is too much hassle for "normal" people, and even for "experts", having to fiddle with untested kernel combinations is not fun.

I'm used to workstations having "continuous" uptime, they run for years, until the next power outage or office reorganization. Nvidia's and largely Intel's drivers (if you don't do heavy OpenGL >3.x) are this stable. AMD Linux drivers are not.

 

[Chrispy_]

6700XT is a design failure, the 96MB Infinity Cache is a waste of silicon space.

It does seem to have negligible impact at 1080p, and even if it scales up in usefulness with resolution, the 6700XT can't really handle 4K with sub-60fps in several games:

This is without DXR and when you enable that another three games fall by the wayside and now half of the games tested run poorly at 4K. That's not good at $480-550. For that sort of money 1440p144Hz or 4K60 displays are the expectation. You don't buy silly-expensive graphics cards to play at 1080p, right?

The games that do run well are what I'll call "lightweight" games that run absolutely fine on old, midrange hardware from 5 years ago. You're not spending $480-550 for no reason when the games you play run smoothly at high details.

I mean, the vanilla 3060 is a worse card for sure, but at least it's supposed to be $150 cheaper and DLSS provides a meaningful performance boost to 8 of those games that the 6700XT performs poorly in, even if you ignore the vastly superior DXR performance....

 

[HD64G]

Another source that shows the same that HU video showed about nVidia's GPUs being bottlenecked with all but the most powerful CPUs. Don't you think that it could be a pro in the conclusion page for the latest AMD GPUs @W1zzard (or a con for the nVidia ones to be fair)? And why not remove any of the cons or pros related to the present market condition and not related to the specific product reviewed?

On the top left side of the link's page below there is a button to change language from Russian

Сравнение процессорозависимости GeForce и Radeon в DX12 | Блоги | TEST GPU

Всем доброго времени суток! Без долгих предисловий, скажем прямо, что побудило нас к этому сравнению видео п

gamegpu.com

 

[nguyen]

Another source that shows the same that HU video showed about nVidia's GPUs being bottlenecked with all but the most powerful CPUs. Don't you think that it could be a pro in the conclusion page for the latest AMD GPUs @W1zzard (or a con for the nVidia ones to be fair)? And why not remove any of the cons or pros related to the present market condition and not related to the specific product reviewed?

On the top left side of the link's page below there is a button to change language from Russian

Сравнение процессорозависимости GeForce и Radeon в DX12 | Блоги | TEST GPU

Всем доброго времени суток! Без долгих предисловий, скажем прямо, что побудило нас к этому сравнению видео п

gamegpu.com

Remind me why do people need sky high FPS in single player games again? and 720p minimum settings?
Do you usually require high FPS with online games? which 99% of them are DX11?
Sure let benchmark 10 most popular online games on Steam like GTA V, CS:GO, DOTA 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, RB6 Siege, Valheim, TF2, Rust, Warframe and see whether AMD or Nvidia has driver overhead problem with low end CPU, that would be a more realistic testing.

 

[jhimijoeb]

My few notes for 6700xt:

1. There is lot of hate of msrp, but msrp in 1Q2021 can't be realy compared to 4Q2020 or even before. There is lot of restrictions and high shiping cost due to current situation. Keep in mind that AMD ship these around the world and you have at least small chance fight bots in store for MSRP.
2. Cache didn't improve only bandwidth, but also is much more power efficient. It don't mean much on 230W desktop cards, but it could make huge impact on sub 100W laptops. Also it probably have better response times than memory so when games take it in to the acount it could make diferernce.
3. I wouldn't use average results as hard numbers as there are some oblivius outliers, like AMD limited around 120 fps. What suprised me, when in some cases 6700 xt was behind in 1440p, but win in 4k.

In general very nice review. IMHO 6700xt is where it suposed to be, with performance below the 6800, maybe pricing could be better, but it will take some time.

 

[Jism]

that whopping 1.0% performance uplift from overclocking - mouthwatering!

This comment is a bit stupid. The card overclocks itself. It pretty much seeks the best available boost clock.

 

[Chrispy_]

That 12GB VRAM is amazing... but the lack of CUDA and the poor OpenCL situation right now really hampers it.

You really run out of VRAM really quick when you start doing CUDA / OpenCL stuff. Its not so much needed in video games. I'm not necessarily talking about deep-learning, I'm talking normal SIMD programming environments.

Definitely. Nvidia gave me an RTX 8000 and RTX 6000 to try at launch and with that extra VRAM our vis department could render things that were previously the domain of CPU rendering only.

We bought a couple of RTX 8000 cards and dumped them into an Epyc server so that we can rush-render things easily, but the average workstation is on an 8GB card at this point and the upgrade to 12GB or 16GB will be a welcome change for the 3D modellers and compute/simulation guys. We tend to simulate wind and solar on a "multiple-city-block" scale so you can imagine that the 3D dataset is quite large. Those with a 2080Ti are quite often doing those with a 2060S a favour on their machines as the extra 3GB is the difference between success and error message.

Sure, they could probably justify a Quadro on their salary but this isn't an all-day, every day thing - it's just an occasional part of what they do and if it means saving €3000 on every workstation then damn straight I'm buying Geforce cards!

 

[Anymal]

One of the reason I read tpu reviews are images, closer look of the cards. I also wonder why manufactures do not add them when sending review samples to all of reviewers?

 

[bug]

One of the reason I read tpu reviews are images, closer look of the cards. I also wonder why manufactures do not add them when sending review samples to all of reviewers?

You probably wouldn't trust them as much if the manufacturer produced them. You know, with some manufacturers silently swapping parts and such...
And manufacturers don't want to put the hardware layout under the spotlight. That's only useful to modders and manufacturers don't encourage modding. At least officially they don't.

 

[spnidel]

This comment is a bit stupid. The card overclocks itself. It pretty much seeks the best available boost clock.

nooo you're not allowed to make jokes

 

[medi01]

Welp, it is quite available it seems:

mindfactory.de
Total Gaming GPU Sales Week 12
Nvidia Units 2255 = 67.61%
Radeon Units 1080 = 32.39%


Radeon Top 5 Selling Brand Line

1. RX 6700XT = +285 Units.
2. RX 6800XT = 285 Units.
3. RX 6800 = 270 Units
4. RX 6900XT = 170 Units.
5. RX 550 = 50 Units.

Nvidia Top 5 Selling Brand Lines!

1. RTX 3070 10GB = 690 Units.
2. RTX 3060 12GB = 470 Units
3. GTX 1660 Super = 350 Units.
4. RTX 2060 6GB = 165 Units.
5. RTX 3090 24GB = 130 Units.

So, total RDNA2: 285+285+270+170 = 1010
total Ampere: 690+470+130 = 1290

So, new gen vs new gen is 56% NVidia, 44% AMD.


In terms of number of cards sold, by the way, it is somewhat lower than normal, but not "times" lower.

 

[N3M3515]

Welp, it is quite available it seems:

mindfactory.de
Total Gaming GPU Sales Week 12
Nvidia Units 2255 = 67.61%
Radeon Units 1080 = 32.39%


Radeon Top 5 Selling Brand Line

1. RX 6700XT = +285 Units.
2. RX 6800XT = 285 Units.
3. RX 6800 = 270 Units
4. RX 6900XT = 170 Units.
5. RX 550 = 50 Units.

Nvidia Top 5 Selling Brand Lines!

1. RTX 3070 10GB = 690 Units.
2. RTX 3060 12GB = 470 Units
3. GTX 1660 Super = 350 Units.
4. RTX 2060 6GB = 165 Units.
5. RTX 3090 24GB = 130 Units.

So, total RDNA2: 285+285+270+170 = 1010
total Ampere: 690+470+130 = 1290

So, new gen vs new gen is 56% NVidia, 44% AMD.


In terms of number of cards sold, by the way, it is somewhat lower than normal, but not "times" lower.

Damn......deep pockets

 

[Anymal]

High wages in DE!

 

[Footman]

Prices are stupid still!
Managed to buy new, sealed in box AMD 6700XT from a guy on Ebay for $610. Stuck my older 5700XT on Ebay for shits and giggles and watched a shark frenzy, with the Powercolor 5700XT finally selling for $885! WTF.....

Suffice to say the 6700XT is running extremely well and I have enough money from the sale of the 5700XT to buy a new waterblock and PCI-E 4.0 riser cable.....

 

[N3M3515]

Prices are stupid still!
Managed to buy new, sealed in box AMD 6700XT from a guy on Ebay for $610. Stuck my older 5700XT on Ebay for shits and giggles and watched a shark frenzy, with the Powercolor 5700XT finally selling for $885! WTF.....

Suffice to say the 6700XT is running extremely well and I have enough money from the sale of the 5700XT to buy a new waterblock and PCI-E 4.0 riser cable.....

First, that 6700 XT guy must be EXTREMELY desperate for cash. The cheapest on amazon is at $900
Second, don't know about ebay but the cheapest 5700 XT on amazon i saw was at $1200

I don't know what has changed recently because ebay has always higher prices than amazon.