A PowerColor GPU listing posted today highlights the difference in memory capacity between the AMD RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT graphics cards. The higher spec XT version will come with the expected 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and the straight RX 6700 will ship with just 6GB of the same video memory.
The new AMD RX 6700 series of graphics cards is on its way soon, likely following hot on the silicon heels of the Nvidia RTX 3060 GPUs dropping at the end of this month. As such we're getting more leaks and solidifying rumours about the new mainstream Radeon cards.
The listing on the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) site shows a whole bunch of new AMD PowerColor cards, mostly of the 12GB RX 6700 XT variety, but it also lists four separate Radeon RX 6700 cards with 6GB capacities. That means the XT GPU will match the new RTX 3060 on memory, though the non-XT version will have a significantly reduced pool of GDDR6 to play with.
Now EEC listings aren't always exactly representative of what eventually comes to market, but given the proximity to AMD's RX 6700 series launch this looks like a genuine lineup and not PowerColor being speculative.
Interestingly this also means the RX 6700 will come with less GDDR6 video memory than AMD outfitted the last-gen RX 5700 card with back in 2019. That second-tier GPU matched its RX 5700 XT brethren with an 8GB VRAM capacity. It feels like a little bit of an odd decision when AMD has been the one championing the cause of the high memory capacity GPU for a while now.
Though it could potentially be down to the fact that AMD knows it has a chance to sell a whole lot of the RX 6700 cards, and the limited availability, and high price of GDDR6 memory right now would significantly hamper those efforts. Given the way things have gone for AMD's recent hardware releases I'd say it's got more than enough on its plate trying to get a good spread of new cards out into the market without having to worry about filling its mainstream GPUs to the brim with video memory they're not necessarily going to use.
The RX 6700 should still be able to use the Infinity Cache feature, which allows it to multiply the effective memory bandwidth at its disposal. Though that's not necessarily something that matters a whole lot at the lower resolutions the RX 6700 series of cards is targeting.
Aside from the memory capacity we do know that these mainstream AMD RDNA 2 cards will come built around the 7nm Navi 22 GPU, and that the RX 6700 XT will likely come with the same 40 CU (compute unit) configuration as the old-school RX 5700 XT. Though, thanks to optimisations within this second-gen Navi design, we should see some serious performance uplift.
In the RX 5700 series the non-XT card then arrived with 36 CU, which would give the two RX 6700 siblings a core count of 2,560 and 2,304 RDNA 2 cores respectively.
The mainstream head-to-head is going to be one of the most interesting battles in graphics cards this year, with the Nvidia RTX 3060 and AMD RX 6700 XT fighting it out for hearts and noggins. Though who can get actual GPUs onto the shelves is arguably going to be far more important than who delivers the higher frame rates.
