Graphics card
Radeon RX 6700 XT
Navi 22 joins the GPU party, trimming core counts, die size and price, as Jarred Walton discovers. If only you could get your hands on it…
SPECS
GPU: Navi 22
Lithography: TSMC 7nm
Die size: 336mm2
Transistors: 17.2 billion
Stream
processors: 2,560
CUs: 40
Ray accelerators: 40
Infinity
cache: 128MB
GPU
clock: 2,424MHz
Memory: 12GB GDDR6
Memory bus: 196-bit
Memory
speed: 16Gbps
Memory
bandwidth: 384GB/s
TFLOPS
FP32: 12.4
TBP: 230W
Recommended
PSU: 650W
Size: Two-slot
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT marks the debut of AMD’s smaller Navi 22GPU, which we’ll call Little Big Navi or Medium Navi or something. Officially priced at £419, AMD pits the RX 6700 XT against both the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, targeting the sweet spot for price and performance among the best graphics cards and landing in the upper ranks of our GPU benchmark hierarchy.
Architecturally, Navi 22 doesn’t lose any features from Big Navi and RDNA2. What AMD has done echoes what we’ve seen in previous generations of GPUs. It’s trimmed the fat, shrinking the die size by reducing the number of shader cores, memory controllers and Infinity Cache.
AMD made some serious cuts with Navi 22 compared to Navi 21, with half the potential CUs and shader cores. That’s the biggest change, but there are others that are worth mentioning. The Infinity Cache checks in at 96MB now, which is 25 per cent smaller than on Big Navi. Similarly, there are now six 32-bit memory interfaces instead of eight interfaces, which reduces bandwidth by 25 per cent. AMD compensates for the significant reduction in core counts by delivering the highest official GPU clocks so far, with a “Game” Clock rated at 2424MHz – and like other RDNA2 chips, it can and often will exceed that in gaming workloads, with a maximum boost clock of 2581MHz.