AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2021 drivers. Version 21.3.1 beta comes with support for the new Radeon RX 6700 series. It's interesting that they didn't specify the RX 6700 XT, which means other SKUs such as the RX 6700, could be right around the corner. Next up, the drivers come with optimization for "DOOM Eternal: The Ancient Gods, Part Two." The drivers also introduce many new feature updates. Radeon Anti-Lag technology now supports DirectX 12 games. The Radeon Boost performance enhancement has been updated with support for DirectX 12 and Variable Rate Shading on select titles. The Performance Tuning section of Radeon Software now comes with an internal stress-test. The drivers also introduce support for new Vulkan API extensions, including VK_KHR_synchronization, VK_EXT_4444_formats, VK_EXT_conditional_rendering, and VK_KHR_sampler_ycbcr_conversion.

Among the issues fixed with Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.3.1 include high CPU utilization for Radeon Software, even when idling; Oculus VR headset causing system crashes when connected to GCN (pre-Polaris) GPUs; corrupted or missing textures for "Minecraft DXR," a crash with "Call of Duty : Modern Warfare" with raytracing enabled on RX 6000 series GPUs, improper lighting with "Star Citizen" on RX 6800 series; Enhanced Sync + V-sync causing black screens on Vulkan games; and a black screen on Hybrid Graphics systems; a crash with Bethesda Launcher, color corruption with Epic Games Social Overlay; display flicker or corruption on high refresh-rate multi-monitor configs using RX Vega series GPUs, and audio loss on TV displays connected to the video card's audio output.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.3.1 beta

Sapphire today launched its two custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards, the premium RX 6700 XT NITRO+ (which we reviewed here), and the cost-effective RX 6700 XT Pulse. The NITRO+ comes with a high-end looking triple-slot cooling solution with three fans, a compound aluminium fin-stack heatsink, an independent heatsink for the memory area, and a trio of fans. It also comes with all the RGB illumination you want, and also puts out a 3-pin ARGB header. The card comes with Sapphire's highest factory overclock, running the RX 6700 XT at up to 2.65 GHz max boost (compared to 2.57 GHz reference).

The Sapphire RX 6700 XT Pulse appears to be using a slightly cut-down version of the NITRO+ PCB, with a smaller cooler dubbed Dual-X. The card is strictly 2 slots thick, and 26 cm in length. It features a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink in which the main heatsink handles the GPU, as well as the memory and VRM, and is ventilated by a pair of 100 mm fans with webbed-edge impellers. The Pulse has a mild factory overclocked speed of 2.58 GHz. You still get the handy dual-BIOS feature that's also available in the NITRO+. The RX 6700 XT Pulse is expected to be priced around $529, and the RX 6700 XT NITRO+ goes for $579, both rather steep premiums over the $479 baseline price for the RX 6700 XT.

XFX is gearing up to offer three different versions of AMD's upcoming RX 6700 XT graphics card. Joining the QICK and MERC models that XFX has already presented in some form or another with other SKUs, the Speedster SWFT309 builds upon those bullish, robust, yet aesthetically clean designs by adding a number of details and protrusions to the cooling shroud. XFX's industrial design philosophy is kept with the black color scheme, but there's some added complexity nonetheless.

Apart from those aesthetic considerations, the Speedster SWFT309 seems to carry the same cooling design philosophy as other XFX offerings, with a triple-fan setup, a backplate with aesthetic cutouts and XFX's SWFT branding, and the same 2x 8-pin as other offerings for this particular AMD chip. Pricing remains to be seen (both MSRP and actual street pricing), especially considering how reports have placed available supply at launch in the order of thousands for a region such as the European union.

"Hellhound is born, sharp of fang and razor-like claws, covered with fur that is tough like armour", was the start of PowerColor's last press release for the Hellhound video card series, a new entry into their lineup sitting alongside the Red Dragon and Red Devil graphics cards. The teaser image for the Hellhound aesthetics promised a black, silver and teal design language - and that's exactly what we got, strange PR texts aside.

The PowerColor RX 6700 XT Hellhound features a triple-fan cooler with translucent, blue-LED-illuminated fans (and with the middle fan being slightly smaller than the others, so as to generate some turbulence). The card features a dual 8-pin power delivery subsystem, a backplate with a small cutout featuring the Hellhound logo (absent of any RGB lighting, it seems), and an I/O set at 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI 2.1. The card is definitely a looker.

The global supply chain of graphics cards is currently not very well equipped to handle the massive demand that exists for the latest generation of GPUs. Just like we have seen with the launch of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere, and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series Big Navi SKUs, the latest generation graphics cards are experiencing massive demand. And manufacturers of these GPUs are not very well equipped to handle it all, so there is a huge scarce for GPUs in the global market. With AMD's recent announcement of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, things are not looking any better, and the availability of this GPU could be very tight at launch.

According to information obtained by Igor's Lab, AMD could supply only a few thousand Radeon RX 6700 XT GPUs for Europe as a whole. To be precise, Igor's Lab notes that "If you condense the information of various board partners and distributors to a trend, then there are, depending on the manufacturer and model, only a few pieces (for Germany) to a few thousand for the EU as a whole." This could be a very bad indication of AMD's supply of these new GPUs globally, not just for Europe. The company is currently relying on the overbooked TSMC, which can only produce a limited amount of chips at the time, and we don't know how much capacity AMD allocated for the new chip.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and monitoring utility. With the latest version 2.38.0, we are introducing the ability to detect Resizable BAR support. GPU-Z can now tell whether Resizable BAR is supported, and if so, whether it is enabled. AMD refers to Resizable BAR as AMD Smart Access Memory, but it is a feature developed by the PCI-SIG, which lets your CPU see the entire video memory of your discrete graphics card as a single addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. This feature has been found to improve performance in games that can take advantage of it. Resizable BAR status can now be viewed from the main tab, right next to the multi-GPU status.

The latest TechPowerUp GPU-Z also adds support for new and upcoming GPUs, including AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, RX 6700, RX 6600 XT, RX 6600, and Ryzen "Lucienne" mobile processor iGPUs. Support is also added for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile. Other new features include the ability to monitor negative temperatures on NVIDIA GPUs. We fixed video BIOS extraction on AMD RDNA2 GPUs (Radeon RX 6000 series). Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.38.0The change-log follows.

ASRock, the leading global motherboard manufacturer, today announced its AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT series graphics cards. The new products include the high-end, triple-fan AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D 12GB OC, the mid-range, triple-fan AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger Pro 12GB OC, and the mainstream dual-fan AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger D 12GB graphics cards.

ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT series graphics cards leverage 7 nm process technology and the breakthrough AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture, and support the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, hardware-accelerated raytracing and HDMI 2.1. The product line features 12GB of GDDR6 memory, and supports the latest PCI Express 4.0 bus standard. With these advanced features, the ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards level up your 1440p gaming experience.

AMD has just announced its Navi 22 RDNA 2 devices, spanning the middle-end gaming sector. The Radeon RX 6700 XT, which is the latest addition to the 6000 series of Radeon graphics cards, is carrying the Navi 22 chip inside it. However, AMD GPUs need to satisfy another sector in addition to the desktop market and that is the laptop/mobile market. With the past 5000 series of laptop GPUs, AMD has made a bit of a disappointing launch. Given the availability of the first-generation RDNA GPUs in mobile devices, many gamers were unable to find 5000 series Radeon GPUs in laptops, as it was rarely a choice. MSI and Dell have carried a few models with the Radeon RX 5500M and RX 5600M, and the highest-end Radeon RX 5700M availability was limited to Dell Alienware Area-51m R2 laptop.

During the announcement of Radeon RX 6700 XT, Scott Herkleman (CVP & GM AMD Radeon) has announced that AMD is preparing the launch of the next-generation RDNA 2 based RX 6000 series of graphics cards for mobile/laptop devices. While there should be a range of models based on Navi 22, Navi 23, and Navi 24, the availability is unknown for now. The only information we have so far is that it is "coming soon". The exact configurations of these chips remain a mystery until the launch happens, so we have to wait to find out more.

TUL Corporation, a leading and innovative manufacturer of AMD graphics cards since 1997, today announced the new PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. Powered by the groundbreaking AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture and featuring AMD Infinity Cache, AMD Smart Access Memory and other advanced technologies, the new graphics card delivers the ultimate in 1440p gaming performance.

The PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card is built upon 7 nm process technology and AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture, designed to deliver the optimal combination of performance and power efficiency. AMD RDNA 2 based graphics cards are optimized to deliver real-time lighting, shadow and reflection realism with DirectX Raytracing (DXR). When paired with AMD FidelityFX, developers can combine rasterized and ray-traced effects to provide the ideal balance of image quality and gaming performance.

ASUS today launched a trio of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. These include the RX 6700 XT DUAL, the TUF Gaming RX 6700 XT OC, and the top-of-the-line ROG Strix RX 6700 XT O12G. All three a factory-overclocked cards, and while the company didn't disclose the clock-speeds, one can make out how the three stack up—the ROG Strix at the top, the TUF Gaming OC next, followed by the DUAL. The company will also sell reference-design RX 6700 XT cards. The ROG Strix RX 6700 XT O12G leads the pack with its latest-gen DirectCU III cooling solution that's featured across its custom RX 6000 and RTX 30-series lineup; which features a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink, a trio of the latest-gen Axial-Tech fans, a blinding amount of RGB bling, and the strongest VRM setup among the three, which pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and other goodies such as dual-BIOS, RGB and case fan headers.

The TUF Gaming RX 6700 XT OC is next up, along with its acclaimed TUF Gaming cooling solution that exposes much of its heatsink's bare-metal, through an airy metal shroud; and uses a trio of Axial-Tech fans. This card pulls power from two 8-pin PCIe connectors, much like the ROG Strix, but is expected to have a slightly downsized VRM, and lower factory-overclocked speeds. You still get dual-BIOS. Lastly, there's the RX 6700 XT DUAL, slotted in the company's sober-looking PRIME family of motherboards and graphics cards. It features a more compact board design, with a lighter aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses only a pair of Axial-Tech fans. This card pulls power from 6-pin + 8-pin connectors. All three are expected to launch on March 18, 2021.

GIGABYTE today rolled out a pair of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. These include the RX 6700 XT Gaming OC, and the RX 6700 XT EAGLE. The company will also sell reference-design "made by AMD" RX 6700 XT cards. The RX 6700 XT Gaming OC features a WindForce 3X cooling solution that looks practically identical to the Radeon RX 6800 Gaming OC card, with possible modifications to its heatsink's base-plate. Three aluminium fin-stacks are skewered by five 6 mm-thick copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. Additional base-plates pull heat from the memory and VRM areas. The card draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include two each of HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT EAGLE is the more slender of the two custom-design RX 6700 XT cards by GIGABYTE. It is strictly 2 slots thick, and uses a slimmer heatsink. Three aluminium fin-stacks are joined by three 8 mm-thick copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. The power input configuration is the same as the Gaming OC card, as is the display output configuration. GIGABYTE didn't disclose the factory overclock speeds or either cards, but the Gaming OC card is expected to be the faster of the two. Both cards are expected to launch on March 18, 2021.

AMD has pulled what could be another sucker punch on NVIDIA with the announcement of its upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card set at the $479 price point. Considering, of course, that there's availability; in case there's not, our very own btarunr defined AMD's claims quite well on the news post covering AMD's announcement. If there is actual availability, however, AMD has showcased eight different designs coming from its more high-profile partners: AsRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX, and Yeston.

All the showcased graphics cards will feature the Navi 22 GPU and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, but all of them should differ from AMD's reference design in the power delivery: dual 8-pin configurations are the expected changes to the design, so as to allow for higher performance, higher power limit ceilings, and better potential overclocks. Expect all of them - all of them - to be priced higher than AMD's suggested (and we know how that suggestion goes nowadays) MSRP of $479. All of these cards should be available in some quantity come March 18th.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI is proud to announce a new graphics card line-up based on the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU, uniting the latest in graphics technology, high-performance circuit board design and advanced cooling.

GAMING series
MSI brings the GAMING series with the iconic TWIN FROZR 8 thermal design to the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. Compared to the previous generation, the dual fan design has been improved with TORX FAN 4.0, binding fan blade pairs together with an outer link to focus airflow into the TWIN FROZR 8 cooling system. The heatsink features advanced aerodynamic and thermodynamic technologies for efficient heat dissipation, reducing temperatures while maintaining high performance. A new design emphasizes the dazzling Mystic Light RGB infused into the card. Gamers can easily control and synchronize LED-lit components with the upgraded MSI Dragon Center software.

AMD today announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT, its fourth RX 6000 series graphics card based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The card debuts the new 7 nm "Navi 22" silicon, which is physically smaller than the "Navi 21" powering the RX 6800/RX 6900 series. The RX 6700 XT maxes out "Navi 22," featuring 40 RDNA2 compute units, amounting to 2,560 stream processors. These are run at a maximum Game Clock frequency of 2424 MHz, a significant clock speed uplift over the previous-gen. The card comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. The card uses 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips, so the memory bandwidth works out to 384 GB/s. The chip packs 96 MB of Infinity Cache on-die memory, which works to accelerate the memory sub-system. AMD is targeting a typical board power metric of 230 W. The power input configuration for the reference-design RX 6700 XT board is 8-pin + 6-pin.

AMD is marketing the RX 6700 XT as a predominantly 1440p gaming card, positioned a notch below the RX 6800. The company makes some staggering performance claims. Compared to the previous-generation the RX 6700 XT is shown beating the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. NVIDIA marketed the current-gen RTX 3060 Ti as having the same performance outlook. Things get interesting, where AMD shows that in select games, the RX 6700 XT can even beat the RTX 3070, a card NVIDIA marketed as matching its previous-gen flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. AMD is pricing the Radeon RX 6700 XT at USD $479 (MSRP), which is very likely to be bovine defecation, given the prevailing market situation. The company announced a simultaneous launch of its reference-design and AIB custom-design boards, starting March 18, 2021.AMD's performance claims follow.

AMD Radeon Technologies Group today is writing the third chapter in its return to competitiveness across the board, with the "Where Gaming Begins: Episode 3" online media event, which we are live-blogging here. We expect AMD to announce its much awaited Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card that competes against NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series performance-segment; as well as anticipate updates to the software feature-set of Radeon, and possible sneak-peaks to the future of the Radeon RX 6000 series and RDNA2 graphics architecture on the PC, including its mobile debut. Join us for more!15:44 UTC: 15 minutes to go, all we're seeing is a slick render of what's possibly the RX 6700 XT reference-design board.

15:50 UTC: Scott Herkelman, GM and VP of AMD's Graphics Business, will take centerstage ten minutes from now.

AMD is expected to debut its Radeon RX 6700 series with a solo launch of its top-spec RX 6700 XT, with the non-XT "RX 6700" following on at a later date, according to Cowcotland. As it stands the company could announce the RX 6700 XT at an online event on March 3, with availability expected from March 18. The French publication also reports that no more than 100 reference-design RX 6700 XT MBA (made by AMD) cards are on their way to France, and another 100-or-so custom-design cards. It's important to note here, that the RX 6700 XT and its competitors form the NVIDIA camp, the RTX 3060-series, are supposed to be middle-of-the-market products that are expected to sell the most each generation.

Here are some of the first pictures of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards, in the form of the ASUS Radeon RX 6700 XT DUAL, and the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6700 XT OC. Both cards feature 12 GB of memory, and use ASUS's latest generation of Prime Series DUAL and TUF Gaming board designs. The Radeon RX 6700 series is expected to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060-series "Ampere" graphics card in the high-volume "sweetspot" segment. The ASUS DUAL card is a lot larger than it looks, measuring a little over 29 cm in length, and using a pair of 100 mm Axial-Tech fans to ventilate a large heatsink underneath; while the TUF Gaming OC is about as large as any of the other TUF Gaming cards from this generation. AMD is expected to announce the RX 6700 series at an online event, on March 3, 2021.

AMD has recently announced their third "When Gaming Begins" event to announce the latest addition to the Radeon RX 6000 Series. AMD unveiled the first of their Ryzen 5000 Series processors during the first When Gaming Begins event and announced the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards during the second event. This third event will almost certainly be to officially unveil the Radeon RX 6700 XT and/or RX 6700 graphics cards which we have received various leaks and rumors about.

We expect the RX 6700 XT to come with 40 compute units, 2560 cores, and 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory and to compete with the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti. The card is rumored to retail for under 250 USD however it is unknown if the card will actually be available to purchase at this price. The RX 6700 features the same 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory but only includes 36 compute units and 2304 cores. AMD will likely also talk about their laptop plans and software features during the event. The third When Gaming Begins event will be live-streamed by AMD on March 3rd at 11 am ET.

AMD is expected to launch its Radeon RX 6700 XT performance-segment graphics card on March 18, 2021, according to French tech publication Cowcotland. This would put the launch over two weeks after NVIDIA's February 25 launch of the GeForce RTX 3060. The new RX 6700 series is expected to compete against the RTX 3060 series, and debuts the new 7 nm "Navi 22" silicon that's based on the RDNA2 architecture, and features 40 compute units (2,560 stream processors). The card comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory bus, much like the RTX 3060. Cowcotland expects availability of the RX 6700 XT to be "very limited" at launch. Who knew?

AMD is slowly preparing to launch its next-generation of mid-range graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture. Following the launch of Navi 21 GPU SKUs, next in line comes the slower Navi 22 variant with fewer compute units (CU). Envisioned to compete against NVIDIA's GA104 and GA106 GPU SKUs, the Navi 22 based GPU is targeting 1440p gamers mainly. Today, thanks to Andreas Schilling from the German website HardwareLuxx, we got a few pieces of information regarding AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. The source is claiming that we are getting this card sometime in the first half of this year, with the possibility to get it in Q1.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card is designed for 1440p gaming as mentioned, and its VRAM configuration is interesting. It features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is more than enough for the types of workloads this card is meant for. The memory communicates using 192-bit bus. The Navi 22 GPU is configured for 40 CUs in total, with 2560 cores maximum. The Radeon RX 6700 XT features the Navi 22 XT variant with the fully enabled die, while its smaller brother Radeon RX 6700 is featuring Navi 22 XL die that has possibly fewer CUs and smaller TDP. The pricing of the upcoming cards is unknown.

In her 2021 International CES keynote address, AMD revealed a slide with two upcoming reference board designs. The slide which points to what AMD has in store for 2021 illustrates two unannounced graphics cards, and a notebook. The first of these cards is a dual-fan sibling of the RX 6000 series that's been doing rounds for quite some time now, which is very likely the RX 6700 XT. The one next to it is interesting—a card with just one fan, which is likely the RDNA2 successor to the RX 5500 XT. The gaming notebook next to them brandishes both the Ryzen and Radeon logos, which means the company will not only launch the Ryzen 5000 mobile series based on "Zen 3," but also mobile variants of its Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 series. The best part, all these launch within the first half of 2021.

NVIDIA could take a similar approach to sub-segmenting the upcoming GeForce RTX 3060, as it did for the "Pascal" based GTX 1060, according to a report by Igor's Lab. Mr Wallossek predicts a mid-January launch for the RTX 3060 series, possibly on the sidelines of the virtual CES. NVIDIA could develop two variants of the RTX 3060, one with 6 GB of memory, and the other with 12 GB. Both the RTX 3060 6 GB and RTX 3060 12 GB probably feature a 192-bit wide memory interface. This would make the RTX 3060 series the spiritual successors to the GTX 1060 3 GB and GTX 1060 6 GB, although it remains to be seen if the segmentation is limited to the memory size, and doesn't also go into the chip's core-configuration. It's likely that the RTX 3060 series goes up against AMD's Radeon RX 6700 series, with the RX 6700 XT being rumored to feature 12 GB of memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface.

AMD is expected to debut its Radeon RX 6700 series based on the "Navi 22" silicon following its RX 6900 XT launch, to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060/Ti. Several rumored specifications of the RX 6700 series surfaced in an older report from last week, which referenced a similar compute unit count to the previous-generation RX 5700 series, but with a 25% narrower memory bus, at 192-bit. The memory amount itself has been increased by 50% to 12 GB, using higher memory density per memory channel. In that report we wondered how AMD could overcome the deficit of lower memory bandwidth, and whether an Infinite Cache solution is being used. Turns out, that the RX 6700 series should end up faster than the RX 5700 series on virtue of an enormous GPU clock (engine clock) increase, according to an Igor's Lab report.

Igor Wallossek analyzed two video BIOS images of Radeon RX 6700 series graphics cards, using MorePowerTool, and uncovered engine clock limits as high as 2854 MHz with 2950 MHz overdrive limits. Just to be clear, these are limits, and not manufacturer-set boost clocks. For example, the RX 6800 XT has a reference max boost frequency of 2250 MHz, whereas its clock limit set in the BIOS is 2800 MHz. One of the BIOS analyzed by Wallossek has a power limit of 220 W, and the other 186 W. Interestingly, the cards have the same 1075 MHz memory clock limit seen on the RX 6800 XT, which confirms that AMD is using 16 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory, and that over a 192-bit wide memory bus, this would yield 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Find more technical commentary by Igor's Lab in the source link below.

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?