Introduction

XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319 is the company’s premium custom-design Radeon RX 6700 XT card debuting today. With this, AMD intends to dominate the performance segment, taking the fight to popular NVIDIA Ampere SKUs such as the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and even RTX 3070. The card is targeted at serious gamers seeking maxed out 1440p gaming, and also supports real-time raytracing, as 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 intersection; while much else of it is handled by the enormous compute muscle of these cards. This also means increased performance in non-raytraced games, as 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 located in the GPU, which 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 outgrows the PCB not just lengthwise, but also in height, which means a significant amount of airflow from the three fans flows right through, resulting in 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 max boost, up from 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 fantasy in today’s market situation, and one can expect to pick this up 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