News AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Specs, Pricing, and Launch Date Revealed

bigdragon

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We hear, and understand, the frustration from gamers right now due to the unexpectedly strong global demand for graphics cards. With the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT launch, we are on track to have significantly more GPUs available for sale at launch. We continue to take additional steps to address the demand we see from the community.
Sell the cards through Steam. Sell the cards through Epic. AMD, if you really want to help gamers, then sell the cards through storefronts that gamers use. Tom's should communicate to AMD that the sales channel is a huge problem right now. Amazon does not set quantity limits, Best Buy will let you buy 1 of every unique SKU, Newegg is happy to let the same people win Shuffles repeatedly, and Microcenter employees make sure their friends are first in line for morning stock drops.

The 6700 XT looks impressive. If those benchmarks hold up in real world testing, then the larger VRAM gives this AMD card a huge advantage over the Nvidia offerings. Unfortunately, AIBs have been selling at double AMD's MSRP and the scalpers are even higher than that. March 18 is going to be another train wreck of a launch.
 

Giroro

Splendid
It's times like this I get bummed out that most of the country does not have access to an in-person electronics store.
Well, except for best buy, who is going out of their way to help scalpers by exclusively selling their tiny selection of overpriced pc components online.

Does anybody know if a Radeon HD 8490 can drive a 1440p monitor? People need low cost GPU options to make their ryzen pcs bootable, which means looking into GPUs that nobody has ever heard of.
 

JarredWaltonGPU

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Sell the cards through Steam. Sell the cards through Epic. AMD, if you really want to help gamers, then sell the cards through storefronts that gamers use. Tom's should communicate to AMD that the sales channel is a huge problem right now. Amazon does not set quantity limits, Best Buy will let you buy 1 of every unique SKU, Newegg is happy to let the same people win Shuffles repeatedly, and Microcenter employees make sure their friends are first in line for morning stock drops.

The 6700 XT looks impressive. If those benchmarks hold up in real world testing, then the larger VRAM gives this AMD card a huge advantage over the Nvidia offerings. Unfortunately, AIBs have been selling at double AMD's MSRP and the scalpers are even higher than that. March 18 is going to be another train wreck of a launch.
You're assuming AMD and Nvidia actually care that much about gamers. Gaming is a big business, and that's why they both go after it, but Nvidia has been expanding in data center and automotive for years, and it's more than happy to take miners' money. AMD bet big on mining with Polaris 20 output, and ended up with a huge surplus because of it. There are ways to try and ensure 'fair' distribution, but they all are contingent upon the manufacturers actually caring whether a card ends up with a miner or a gamer. It's a lot easier to take a 30% higher price from a miner buying $1 million worth of cards than to deal with a thousand gamers each buying one card.

I heard a story that goes something like this. A business person walks into the headquarters of a graphics card company and says, "I want to buy as many of your RTX 3060 Ti cards as you've got." The company responds, "We don't actually sell direct to customers -- you have to deal with our partners." Then the person opens a briefcase with $10 million in cash and says, "I will pay 30% over your official street price." At this point, phone calls are made, the CEO or whoever gets involved, and amazingly this company that doesn't sell direct to customers has a new retail partner that just bought $10 million worth of graphics cards at a substantially higher price than normal.

I would wager money that such a story exists for every single graphics card and GPU company right now -- AMD, ASRock, Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Nvidia, PNY, Sapphire, XFX, Zotac, and whoever else I've missed. Those are listed alphabetically, not in order of how likely I think they are to have participated in such a backroom deal. Again, I think they're all complicit. Nvidia "estimated" $100 to $300 million in sales to miners for Q4. Does that include any and all direct sales Nvidia made with miners? Probably -- and it probably incorrectly estimates only a small number of retail sales going to miners. $300 million worth of RTX 3080 cards is "only" about 300,000 cards sold at $1,000 each directly to miners. Where are all the RTX 3080 cards produced in the past nine months? (¬_¬ )

Related: Is every GA106 GPU locked down on mining performance? I bet not. In fact, I bet there are "tests" being done with special mining cards that use the same GPU and still hit 50MH/s or whatever. Maybe they'll release as CMP cards in the coming months.

As for the VRAM, the capacity won't matter much in the real world. There will be edge cases where it helps (Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the games I test with that likes more than 8GB of VRAM at ultimate settings), but the 3060 Ti easily beats the 3060 12GB in every game I've benchmarked so far. And when you encounter a game that actually uses more than 8GB in a way that hurts performance, dropping one or two setttings will fix things.
 

Udyr

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You're assuming AMD and Nvidia actually care that much about gamers. Gaming is a big business, and that's why they both go after it, but Nvidia has been expanding in data center and automotive for years, and it's more than happy to take miners' money. AMD bet big on mining with Polaris 20 output, and ended up with a huge surplus because of it. There are ways to try and ensure 'fair' distribution, but they all are contingent upon the manufacturers actually caring whether a card ends up with a miner or a gamer. It's a lot easier to take a 30% higher price from a miner buying $1 million worth of cards than to deal with a thousand gamers each buying one card.

I heard a story that goes something like this. A business person walks into the headquarters of a graphics card company and says, "I want to buy as many of your RTX 3060 Ti cards as you've got." The company responds, "We don't actually sell direct to customers -- you have to deal with our partners." Then the person opens a briefcase with $10 million in cash and says, "I will pay 30% over your official street price." At this point, phone calls are made, the CEO or whoever gets involved, and amazingly this company that doesn't sell direct to customers has a new retail partner that just bought $10 million worth of graphics cards at a substantially higher price than normal.

I would wager money that such a story exists for every single graphics card and GPU company right now -- AMD, ASRock, Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Nvidia, PNY, Sapphire, XFX, Zotac, and whoever else I've missed. Those are listed alphabetically, not in order of how likely I think they are to have participated in such a backroom deal. Again, I think they're all complicit. Nvidia "estimated" $100 to $300 million in sales to miners for Q4. Does that include any and all direct sales Nvidia made with miners? Probably -- and it probably incorrectly estimates only a small number of retail sales going to miners. $300 million worth of RTX 3080 cards is "only" about 300,000 cards sold at $1,000 each directly to miners. Where are all the RTX 3080 cards produced in the past nine months? (¬_¬ )

Related: Is every GA106 GPU locked down on mining performance? I bet not. In fact, I bet there are "tests" being done with special mining cards that use the same GPU and still hit 50MH/s or whatever. Maybe they'll release as CMP cards in the coming months.

As for the VRAM, the capacity won't matter much in the real world. There will be edge cases where it helps (Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the games I test with that likes more than 8GB of VRAM at ultimate settings), but the 3060 Ti easily beats the 3060 12GB in every game I've benchmarked so far. And when you encounter a game that actually uses more than 8GB in a way that hurts performance, dropping one or two setttings will fix things.
Absolutely true. Some people forget these companies are after the money, not pleasing people. They have to advertise these cards as "for gaming" to cover their behinds from the storm that would fall upon them if they'd openly admit the mining business comes first. Take Zotac's tweet as an example of how great of an idea that would be.
 

Giroro

Splendid
Nvidia probably isn't interested in where their GPUs go, but AMD should be. A desktop user who can't buy any GPU is a desktop user who is forced to buy an Intel CPU with an Intel chipset running Intel's integrated graphics. So every gpu AMD sells to a miner is a minimum of 2 lost sales on their other products.

AMD's midrange APUs are gone, their low end dual core athlons are creeping up to $150. GT 710 gpus are also very hard to find at this point even GT 210 are getting tight, but can be found for $80+. GT 1010 never launched, as far as I can tell. If the card has GDDR memory, it's either sold out or being sold at a minimum of 2x retail, which is a lot when you're talking about a class of GPUs that gets called overpriced at $40.

AMD doesn't need another $400+ gaming GPU right now, they need literally anything to make images appear on a screen at a price that keeps their CPUs competative with Intel's integrated graphics.

I don't think AMD is prepared for that, because this is a new problem for them. But I do expect AMD to lose desktop market share again, even though its not that hard to find a 5800x right now. I think investors are going to be pretty unhappy if that happens.
 
As for the VRAM, the capacity won't matter much in the real world. There will be edge cases where it helps (Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the games I test with that likes more than 8GB of VRAM at ultimate settings), but the 3060 Ti easily beats the 3060 12GB in every game I've benchmarked so far. And when you encounter a game that actually uses more than 8GB in a way that hurts performance, dropping one or two setttings will fix things.
I saw this marketing slide on the interwebs and sort of mentally facepalmed:
amd-radeon-rx-6700-xt-ram-game-titles-768x768.jpg


This figure doesn't matter unless you can show that it degrades performance in a meaningful way. And as you and probably a lot of other people have found, maxing the VRAM doesn't immediately lead to degraded performance. Not to mention, I've yet to see any meaningful presentation on how VRAM is used and how it impacts performance. The only thing I've seen are snippets and pieces.

Nvidia probably isn't interested in where their GPUs go, but AMD should be. A desktop user who can't buy any GPU is a desktop user who is forced to buy an Intel CPU with an Intel chipset running Intel's integrated graphics. So every gpu AMD sells to a miner is a minimum of 2 lost sales on their other products.

AMD's midrange APUs are gone, their low end dual core athlons are creeping up to $150. GT 710 gpus are also very hard to find at this point even GT 210 are getting tight, but can be found for $80+. GT 1010 never launched, as far as I can tell. If the card has GDDR memory, it's either sold out or being sold at a minimum of 2x retail, which is a lot when you're talking about a class of GPUs that gets called overpriced at $40.

AMD doesn't need another $400+ gaming GPU right now, they need literally anything to make images appear on a screen at a price that keeps their CPUs competative with Intel's integrated graphics.

I don't think AMD is prepared for that, because this is a new problem for them. But I do expect AMD to lose desktop market share again, even though its not that hard to find a 5800x right now. I think investors are going to be pretty unhappy if that happens.
I think this would only affect businesses who still deploy desktops en masse, since many of them would probably prefer a simpler system. But otherwise, last I checked laptops were still king and AMD has a potent APU for that.
 
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Why do GPUs run at much reduced speeds compared to CPUs ?
GPUs have significantly more transistors than CPUs. For example, the Ryzen 3700X has 5.99 billion transistors in total (this is spread among three chips). The GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 have 28.3 billion. Even the RTX 3060 only has 13.25 billion. As power is a function of both frequency and transistor count, trying to push GPUs as fast as CPUs is going to result in a glass tile.
 

Giroro

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I think this would only affect businesses who still deploy desktops en masse, since many of them would probably prefer a simpler system. But otherwise, last I checked laptops were still king and AMD has a potent APU for that.
Laptops are what they are. I did say desktop market share. AMD is probably at least aware that most their desktop and HEDT parts are totally nonfunctional bricks without a basic GPU. A basic GPU which you can't buy, and they don't sell.

FWIW, all these markets are peanuts compared to servers. I have no doubt that high Epic demand is cannibalizing a big chunk of the AMD's consumer production. I don't know where the bottleneck is between Nvidia and Samsung, though.
 

Pirx73

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Sell the cards through Steam. Sell the cards through Epic. AMD, if you really want to help gamers, then sell the cards through storefronts that gamers use. Tom's should communicate to AMD that the sales channel is a huge problem right now. Amazon does not set quantity limits, Best Buy will let you buy 1 of every unique SKU, Newegg is happy to let the same people win Shuffles repeatedly, and Microcenter employees make sure their friends are first in line for morning stock drops.
My thoughts exactly. Since gaming industry is going to be extinct if no one will be able to afford GPU.
 
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Soaptrail

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My thoughts exactly. Since gaming industry is going to be extinct if no one will be able to afford GPU.
How do you figure? lots of people are buying GPU's for $1K or more and i am sure it is still a large enough pool without crypto miners. I have yet to spend over $230 on a GPU but that may change and i might have to spend $330.
 
Laptops are what they are. I did say desktop market share. AMD is probably at least aware that most their desktop and HEDT parts are totally nonfunctional bricks without a basic GPU. A basic GPU which you can't buy, and they don't sell.
I'm sure they're aware. The problem is that the crypto GPU grab came out of no where and whenever Zen 2/3 were being planned out, they figured there wouldn't be a problem. Also, Intel's HEDT's don't have GPUs either.

Hindsight's 20/20 after all. Maybe they'll throw in an iGPU in the future. Maybe they won't.
 

JarredWaltonGPU

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You can buy an amd ryzen 5 5600x and ryzen 7 5800x for RETAIL RIGHT NOW from AMD's web site. GO NOW: Products Available For Purchase | AMD
Yup, and those are the two Ryzen 5000 CPUs that only use a single compute die (82mm^2 size). That means they're relatively cheaper to produce, and AMD can sell twice as many single die chips as it can dual chiplet options. They're not bad, but honestly I don't find the 8-core/16-thread or 6-core/12-thread options nearly as compelling as the 12-core/24-thread 5900X. Basically, a 5900X gives you 50% more computational performance as the 5800X. That's 22% more money ($550 vs. $450) for up to 50% higher performance. It won't be that much faster in games, but if you're only running games you could buy a 9900K or 10700K and have nearly the same level of performance for $100 less money.

I figure the cIO chiplet is perhaps $50, packaging is $50 tops, and the compute chiplets are $100. So, AMD can make a $200 CPU and sell it for $450 (5800X), which means $250 in profit. Or it can make a $300 CPU and sell it for $550 (5900X), which makes the same $250 in profit. Except AMD can't get enough 7nm compute chiplets from TSMC, which is the real bottleneck.
 

Pirx73

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How do you figure? lots of people are buying GPU's for $1K or more and i am sure it is still a large enough pool without crypto miners. I have yet to spend over $230 on a GPU but that may change and i might have to spend $330.
Where exactly do you see those "lots of people"? Steam data shows most of the people still use GTX1070 or lower class cards. Those with 2060 and higher are minority.
I still have GTX970 and having missed good moment (only myself to blame) to upgrade, now i am forced to sit on it until mining craze cools off. Because i am not gonna pay 900+ euros for 300+ MSRP card.
Another point to consider - AMD and nVIDIA themselves - those sky-high prices means nothing for them, because it's not them who gets this money, it goes to scalpers.
I don't think they are very happy with this situation.
And that statement about $330 - what exactly can you get for this money? If situation would be normal - RTX 3060, but now - best you can get for that money is GTX 1650
 

woot

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Sell the cards through Steam. Sell the cards through Epic. AMD, if you really want to help gamers, then sell the cards through storefronts that gamers use. Tom's should communicate to AMD that the sales channel is a huge problem right now. Amazon does not set quantity limits, Best Buy will let you buy 1 of every unique SKU, Newegg is happy to let the same people win Shuffles repeatedly, and Microcenter employees make sure their friends are first in line for morning stock drops.

The 6700 XT looks impressive. If those benchmarks hold up in real world testing, then the larger VRAM gives this AMD card a huge advantage over the Nvidia offerings. Unfortunately, AIBs have been selling at double AMD's MSRP and the scalpers are even higher than that. March 18 is going to be another train wreck of a launch.
Selling video cards through digital distributers like steam or epic?, how would that help?, what would stop scalpers from creating a few extra accounts to find the products they are looking for?