Sapphire Radeon RX 6700

Strong competition for Intel's Arc

- JARRED WALTON

AMD ORIGINALLY launched its Navi 22 GPU with the RX 6700 XT in March 2021. We expected there would be an RX 6700 non-XT arriving shortly after, using harvested chips that couldn’t meet the requirements of the higher tier part. Then months passed with no such part in sight, and AMD went so far as to refresh its desktop parts with a higher binned and higher priced RX 6750 XT (see review, August 2022 issue).

Now that GPU cryptocurrency mining is dead and graphics cards aren’t immediately selling out, AMD and its partners are finally ready to release the long-awaited 6700 10GB. Why didn’t we get this GPU last year? Probably because AMD was using the same GPU in the mobile RX 6700M. That’s too bad, though it might not be too late.

This is exactly the sort of card we expected to see, with 36 Compute Units out of Navi 22’s maximum configuration of 40 CUs. One of the six 32-bit GDDR6 controllers also gets fused off, leaving a 160-bit interface. Along with the missing memory controller goes 16MB of Infinity Cache, leaving 80MB—still plenty for 1080p and 1440p gaming, which is where the 6700 10GB shines.

Of course, this is also the same old RDNA 2 architecture from over two years ago, which has certainly lost some of its luster now that we’re ready for RDNA 3 GPUs to arrive (see page 32). Then again, at roughly triple the cost, plenty of people are still looking for something to fit a midrange budget rather than blowing a huge chunk of cash on the latest and greatest hardware. But there will be compromises, like the mediocre ray-tracing performance that’s common for RX 6000-series cards, as well as the lower-quality video encoding hardware.