Introduction

The XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319 is the company's premium custom-design Radeon RX 6700 XT card debuting today. With the RX 6700 XT, AMD intends to dominate the performance segment, taking the fight to such popular NVIDIA Ampere SKUs as the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and even RTX 3070. The card is meant for serious gamers after maxed out 1440p gaming, and it also supports real-time raytracing since it supports the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set. It's based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the RX 6900 XT "Big Navi."



The latest RDNA2 graphics architecture debuted with next-generation consoles, making its way to the PC with the Radeon RX 6000 series. This gives AMD a unique advantage as game developers optimizing for console also end up doing so for Radeon. AMD's raytracing architecture involves specialized hardware called Ray Accelerators, which compute ray intersections, while much else is handled by the enormous compute muscle of these cards. This also results in increased performance in non-raytraced games since these programmable shaders can be made to do anything.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is based on the new 7 nm Navi 22 silicon and maxes it out. The chip is equipped with 40 RDNA2 compute units, which means 2,560 stream processors, 40 Ray Accelerators, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The company has also generationally increased the memory amount to 12 GB, which is certainly welcome; however, the memory bus is narrower at 192-bit. The company worked to overcome this bandwidth deficit by using the fastest 16 Gbps JEDEC-standard GDDR6 memory chips and deploying its Infinity Cache technology; a fast on-die 96 MB cache in the GPU, it also operates at much higher bandwidths and lower latencies, cushioning data-transfers between the GPU and memory.

The XFX RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319 features a large triple-slot cooling solution with a heatsink that is bigger than the PCB not just lengthwise, but also in height, which results in a significant amount of airflow from the three fans flowing right through for much better ventilation. The design has certainly come a long way from the THICC series. XFX is giving the card its highest factory OC, running it at 2.65 GHz maximum boost, up from the 2.58 GHz reference. The company is pricing the card at $570 USD, a $90 premium over AMD's reference price. Both these prices are unobtainable in today's market situation, and one can expect to pick this graphics card up for closer to $750. In this review, we take the card for a spin across our brand-new test bench.

Our Radeon RX 6700 XT launch-day coverage includes six articles including this one. Do check them out!
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (reference) | MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X | ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT OC | Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT NITRO+ | PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT Red Devil