AMD’s RX 6700 XT hits shelves in just a few days time, aiming to be the best graphics card for high refresh rate, 1440p gaming. Its MSRP is set at $479, although you should expect it to cost significantly more once it’s being resold, as no GPU launch is safe from an inevitable lack of stock in the current climate. That fee is a little less than the $499 price tag on Nvidia’s RTX 3070, but if leaked 3DMark scores are any indication of the 6700 XT’s performance, it could be a serious contender against Nvidia’s offering.
Chinese hardware channel Big Hardware Player shows scores of a Sapphire RX 6700 XT in numerous 3DMark benchmarks. The Fire Strike Extreme score of the card outperforms the RTX 3070 by 5.2%. And, in the 4K resolution Fire Strike Ultra benchmark, the RX 6700 XT and RTX 3070 have near-identical scores of 8,568 and 8,473 respectively.
However, in the DirectX 12-based Time Spy benchmark, the RX 6700 XT scores just 11,921 compared to the RTX 3070’s 13,480. In the Port Royal benchmark, measuring ray tracing performance, it also lags behind the 3070 by 26.6%.
The source states this could be down to AMD’s beta drivers, which naturally are less optimised than the RTX 3070 that’s been out for a number of months – reminding us that whilst these scores are a useful gauge of potential performance, they’re not the be-all and end-all. Real-world performance in the best PC games is always a better measure for comparison between GPUs.
These scores, along with AMD’s benchmarks from its announcement, make the RX 6700 XT look like a great value card to pick up at launch this week – but with European availability rumoured to be just a few thousand, you’ll be lucky to pick one up near MSRP.