Over at WCCF Tech a rather extensive set of AAA gaming benchmarks has been published, claiming to show 1440p, and the 1080p with ray tracing, gaming performance of the yet to be released AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. In related news, crypto miners have started to test AMD's newest gaming GPU and found that it is has an approx 25 per cent slower hash rate than the previous gen RX 5700 XT.
Gaming benchmarks
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is being positioned by AMD as a 1440p gaming graphics card and at the launch event in early March AMD shared a few of its internal benchmarking results comparing its new product (in titles like Borderlands 3, AC: Valhalla, and Cyberpunk 2077) vs Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. Its tests were at 1440p at max settings, but we didn't get an official glimpse of any ray tracing comparisons.
WCCF Tech's sources provided it with data showing the following; 1440p max settings gaming vs the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, 1080p gaming with ray tracing vs the same GeForce pairing, and 1440p max settings gaming vs the Radeon RX 5700 XT and GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.
Predictably, we see the Radeon RX 6700 XT comfortably beat the RTX 3060 Ti with ray tracing out of the picture, and leading the RTX 3070 in a decent selection of titles too. With ray tracing on it typically becomes the poor relation, with notable exceptions in Dirt 5 DX12, Fortnite DX 12, and WoW.
The common test system is said to have the following spec. For more tables/data, please hit the source link.
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- Motherboard: ASRock X570 Taichi
- Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x8GB) DDR4-3200MHz
- HDD: Sabrent Rocket Q 4TB NVMe
- Display: Samsung U28D590D 3840x2160 Display
- Display: Driver Version 20.50-210215n, Nvidia Driver 461.40 WHQL
- Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit Version 20H2 (19042.804)
You have to take these leaked benchmarks with a pinch of salt but as we are so close to release day (Thursday) they look quite certain to be genuine.
Can it mine?
Reports suggest that the new AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is significantly slower at crypto-mining than its predecessor, the RX 5700 XT. According to figures reported by the Crypto-Mining Blog the RDNA 2 card delivers around 43 MH/s in ETH mining apps, compared to the 54.3MH/h of its predecessor.
It appears to be the case that AMD's RDNA 2 reduced raw memory bandwidth, facilitated by Infinity Cache, while good for gamers, and keeping costs down, is not good for crypto-mining activity. The ETH mining workload is too large to fit in the Infinity Cache so does not benefit from it. Simultaneously, the narrower memory bus compared to the previous gen has a negative impact for ETH mining activity.
A week ago HEXUS reported on rumours of AMD preparing RDNA (Navi 1X) crypto-mining GPUs, which looks an even better idea in light of the above early ETH mining tests.
