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 RDNA 2 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 is that the L3 Cache (Infinity Cache) is 96 MB on Navi 22, while it is 128 MB on Navi 21.

On average, over our brand-new, 22-game strong test suite, we measured the Gigabyte RX 6700 XT Gaming OC to almost exactly match the AMD reference design. In some tests, it's a tiny bit faster, and in others a tiny bit slower, which is as expected because of random test-run variation. The result is still surprising since specifications show that Gigabyte has the card come with a factory overclock, but it doesn't turn into a tangible performance benefit. Other custom designs we tested at launch have exactly the same problem, so it doesn't look like it's Gigabyte's fault. While it's not a huge deal—factory OCs only give you 1, 2, or 3% these days—no gains is still unexpected. Other reviewers are seeing similar results, I wonder what's going on.

Overall performance sits right between 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%. 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.

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 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.

With the Gaming OC, Gigabyte designed a cost-effective RX 6700 XT that doesn't go overboard with cooling, yet has sufficient cooling power to beat the AMD reference card at both noise and temperatures. With just 69°C under full load, the card has plenty of thermal headroom left. At the same time, noise levels reach 34 dBA, which is definitely audible, but not "loud" or "noisy." Some other Radeon RX 6700 XT cards we've tested are much quieter, whisper-quiet even, but they use much bigger coolers, too. The test results of our apples-to-apples heatsink testing clearly show that Gigabyte's cooler is very decent, the temperature difference to the top models is just a few degrees. That means if you want lower noise from this card, you can easily do so with a customized fan curve at the cost of slightly higher temperatures; the cooler has plenty potential left. It's great to see that idle fan stop has become a standard capability nowadays—all Radeon RX 6700 XT cards, including the Gigabyte Gaming OC in this review, will shut off their 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.

Unlike some other RX 6700 XT cards, overclocking worked very well on the Gaming OC. We gained around 7% in real-life performance, which is more than on most cards. In absolute terms, the maximum overclocked performance was better than all other models we've tested except for the much more expensive ASUS STRIX, which got 2.5 FPS more. It's a slap in the face of overclockers that AMD insists on artificially capping the maximum OC 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—this pricing didn't even last for a day. In my launch-day reviews, I speculated that we'd see pricing of around $700 to $750 depending on how premium a RX 6700 XT variant is, and people sent me nice emails declaring me insane. The reality today is that the RX 6700 XT is completely sold out and scalpers have listed them at $900 and above. At that price point, there's absolutely no reason to buy an RX 6700 XT, almost every alternative offers a better price/performance ratio. That's why I feel the pricing will settle closer to $800 in the near-term. All this is not Gigabyte's fault, of course. The problem is that AMD isn't able to produce enough graphics chips because their 7 nanometer allocation at TSMC has to be juggled between producing Ryzen, EPYC, PS5, Xbox X, and Radeon. Gigabyte's RX 6700 XT is a slightly more premium card than the AMD reference—I'd definitely be willing to pay $20 more for it than the baseline price. Especially if you're looking for a no-frills RX 6700 XT that doesn't break the bank with features you don't need could Gigabyte's card be an excellent choice. There are several alternatives: the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 or a used RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 2080 Super even.