We have a total of six Radeon RX 6700 XT launch-day reviews for you today: AMD RX 6700 XT Reference, ASUS RX 6700 XT STRIX OC, MSI RX 6700 XT Gaming X, PowerColor RX 6700 XT Red Devil, Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+, and XFX RX 6700 XT Merc 319.

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD is releasing a highly competitive SKU for the upper midrange—a segment for which NVIDIA launched two cards recently, the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. This market is very important because it defines the serious gamer willing to spend a little bit extra for higher FPS or better image quality without going overboard. The Radeon RX 6700 XT uses the Navi 22 GPU, while the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT are powered by Navi 21. Both are built on the same RDNA2 architecture with support for Raytracing using a 7 nanometer production process—Navi 22 is basically a cut-in-half Navi 21 with 192-bit memory. The only deviation from that is that the L3 Cache (aka Infinity Cache) is 96 MB on Navi 22, whereas it is 128 MB on Navi 21.

On average, over our brand-new 22-game strong test suite, we measured performance that sits right in the middle of two NVIDIA Ampere cards. The RX 6700 XT is 8% faster than the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, but 4% behind the RTX 3070. Compared to AMD's own Radeon RX 6800, the performance difference is 17%. 25% generation-over-generation over the Radeon RX 5700 XT with no increase in power consumption is an incredible feat. An important result I want to highlight is that the RX 6700 XT is able to nearly match the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti—isn't that a huge achievement? Just a few months ago, most people wouldn't have dared to dream that AMD's x7xx card would be able to compete with NVIDIA's last-generation flagship. What's surprising on the RX 6700 XT is that the factory-overclocked custom designs are not faster than the RX 6700 XT reference. I've tested so many cards today, and they all share the same performance no matter their boost rating. While it's not a huge deal—factory OCs only give you 1, 2 or 3% these days—it's still unexpected. Other reviewers are seeing similar results, I wonder what's going on.

With those performance numbers, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is the perfect choice for the huge 1440p gamer crowd out there; the card also has enough muscle to run many titles at 4K 60 FPS, especially if you are willing to dial down settings a little bit. The RX 6700 XT is also a great choice for 1080p Full HD if you want to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor with 120 or 144 Hz. AMD's new card has support for raytracing, but unlike the competition from NVIDIA, it lacks hardware units for many RT tasks, which means NVIDIA has the upper hand here in terms of performance. RT performance varies greatly between the titles we've tested, I'd say you can roughly expect RTX 2080 raytracing performance from the RX 6700 XT, which is not bad at all. It really comes down to how essential you consider RT support. If you consider it an optional "better than Ultra" setting, it is not paramount to you yet—RT performance won't be a dealbreaker if you may or may not activate it. If you believe RT is the future and want to be ready for games to come, NVIDIA looks like the better option, also because they have the DLSS upscaling technology, which cushions the raytracing performance hit at the cost of a little bit of image quality.

Visually, AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT clearly looks like a Radeon RDNA2 graphics card. Thanks to a vibrant mix of chrome, metal, red trim, and matte surfaces, the RX 6700 XT reference design offers a compelling option, especially if you don't have a lot of space in your case. The dual-fan, dual-slot thermal solution achieves reasonable temperatures with reasonable fan noise. If you remember our RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT reviews, I praised the cooler and fan settings big time, almost to where the reference design was better than any custom design from board partners. I somehow suspect AMD changed their approach slightly for the RX 6700 XT and made the reference card "good enough" without going overboard, which leaves plenty of room for their board partners to innovate—it also saves a few bucks in production cost. With 35.2 dBA, the RX 6700 XT cooler is audible in your case when fully loaded, but it's not "loud." I've reviewed a total of six Radeon RX 6700 XT cards today, most of those are whisper-quiet, so don't worry if noise is important to you. The bigger coolers on these cards also achieve impressive temperatures. It's great to see that idle fan stop has become a standard capability nowadays—all Radeon RX 6700 XT cards, including the reference card in this review, will shut off the fans in idle, desktop work, and internet browsing.

AMD shocked the world with the energy efficiency of Navi 21, which beats even NVIDIA's Ampere. The Radeon RX 6700 XT with its Navi 22 GPU is highly efficient, too, but "only" matches NVIDIA's RTX 3080. It seems AMD pushed the design a bit above its optimum operating point for efficiency, possibly to sneak the RX 6700 XT right into the performance gap between the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. With 220 W during gaming, the RX 6700 XT is gentle in its power supply requirement, as basically any power supply from a known brand will power it just fine. Power consumption in single-monitor idle and media playback has been improved considerably over Navi 21. AMD now only needs to figure out multi-monitor power, which is still higher than on any NVIDIA graphics card.

Overclocking was a bit of a bust. While we could raise the clocks by quite a lot, it never turned into a significant performance improvement. Our maximum manual overclock improved real-life performance by just 1%. Once the power consumption limit was manually maxed out, things looked different, and the card was able to match our best overclocker, the ASUS RX 6700 XT STRIX OC. It's a slap in the face of overclockers that AMD insists on artificially capping maximum overclocking potential of their products by limiting the slider length in Wattman. Memory overclocked to 2150 MHz was 100% stable on every single card we've reviewed, so why not give us more? Or set no limit at all, like NVIDIA.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT offers 12 GB of memory because the underlying memory architecture uses a 192-bit interface design. With a 192-bit interface, your design options are 6 GB and 12 GB unless you're willing to mix memory chips of mismatched capacity. Obviously, 6 GB VRAM is not enough for 2021 and beyond in this market segment, so AMD really had no choice here. The only alternative would have been to go with a 256-bit wide bus interface, which would have enabled 8 GB variants while increasing the manufacturing cost of the GPU and PCB. Looking at our benchmark results, I can't find a single instance where the 12 GB RX 6700 XT significantly beats the 8 GB RTX 3070—not even at 4K, so VRAM really is no issue. From a marketing perspective, "12 GB" on the RX 6700 XT is more than "8 GB" on the RTX 3070, so that could win AMD some customers, too.

According to AMD, the Radeon RX 6700 XT comes at an MSRP of $479—a fantasy that won't last for half an hour. Supply of the AMD reference design is extremely limited; even big shops have only received a handful of units. How much stock AMD is selling on their own site nobody knows, but I'm sure bots will have grabbed it by the time you complete the checkout process manually. Thinking of these fake MSRPs, I'm wondering, shouldn't AMD shareholders start complaining that AMD is not giving them the returns they deserve? Obviously, the market is willing to pay much more for these cards, so why is shareholder money lost by selling too cheap? Announcing the card at such a low price and selling tiny volume on AMD.com might also direct the rage of buyers at board partners and merchants in that they are overcharging since AMD says the card should cost $479. Several board partners told me that it's impossible to build these cards for $479 and turn a profit. Another random thought: If you were an AIB with a warehouse full of RX 6700 XT cards, wouldn't it be a REALLY bad idea to sell them now, near MSRP? Just send out a few alibi cards and wait a few weeks to then sell them at the real market price.

The real price? I'm going with $700+ since the card pretty much matches the RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070, which are being sold for around that price, so there's no reason anything would be different for the RX 6700 XT. Board partners tell me that AMD has given them fairly limited supply. Apparently, AMD-exclusive brands got more inventory than those who manufacture both NVIDIA and AMD cards. I still doubt that any of them will have enough to last more than a day. So what should you do? I'd say that up to $700 is very reasonable for the RX 6700 XT; it's a great card with excellent performance that's extremely competitive with what NVIDIA offers. Beyond that, definitely check the alternatives: the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, or a used RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 2080 Super even.