AMD is back!
On Wednesday, March 3rd, AMD announced their latest addition to the 6000 series of GPUs. Its name, the 6700 XT.
A few days ago, I wrote an article talking about how Nvidia’s new RTX 3060 was destined to be the next budget GPU king (link to that: bit.ly/3060article). In AMDs announcement, we were expecting a new card to rival it in the same price range (maybe called the 6700, who knows) as well as the 6700 XT, but instead, they only released the 6700 XT that doesn’t rival any of Nvidia’s cards. It is a card that costs and performs somewhere between the 3060 ti and the 3070. AMD basically made a card that is a sweet spot for people who want great performance at a low price, especially for those with a Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series CPU (because of Smart Access Memory and all that stuff).
I think that AMDs approach to a budget-ish GPU was better than Nvidia’s approach in certain ways. First of all, they targeted a more popular group of gamers, those who play at 1440p at over 100 fps (I’m actually part of the average gamer group myself). Because they explicitly said this in their event, it may entice these “average gamers” (who are the majority of gamers) to check out their website and attempt to get one (side-note: if you actually manage to beat the scalpers and pay MSRP, you are a god).
According to AMDs first party benchmarks, the 6700 XT even manages to beat out the 3070 in some situations which is impressive considering that it isn’t even competing against it directly. While this should be taken with a grain of salt since these are first party benchmarks (I will make an article about third party benchmark when they are available and will put a link here when its up), it does give us a good idea of how well it competes against Nvidia.
Now we weren’t going to make a GPU article without talking about availability, where we? This new graphics card is going to be a pain it the you know where to get at MSRP. AMD is trying to implement new ways to have more stock available on day one by dropping both AMD reference models and other retailer’s 6700 XTs on day one. While I’m sure this wont help much, I guess it will help a little. At least AMD is showing us that they’re trying.
I think I’m going to leave it at that. If you are interested in third party benchmarks, I will post an article about that the day they’re available. I’ll put a link to it here when it’s up.
Here are a few videos from reliable sources to help influence your decision on whether or not you are even going to attempt to snag one of these on launch day:
