 Oh, hey, ow, quit it. What are you, stop, hey. What is- I'm logging paper at you. Ah, I get it. AMD, you on the other hand, I just don't get sometimes. We're in the middle of one of the biggest chip shortages in a long time, maybe ever. And here you are proudly announcing your newest graphics card to the world. Is it that you know something I don't? Because this move feels like a confusing one given how people have reacted to all the other graphics cards that have launched this year with functionally zero stock available to actual gamers. Maybe there's a method to the madness though. Maybe there's a 4D chess game here that we just can't see. Maybe there's a segue to today's sponsor, Honey. Honey is a free web browser extension that'll find you the best promo codes on shopping websites like Amazon, eBay and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. Our first glimpse at the RX 6700 XT came just one day before Nvidia launched their RTX 3060, which seemed kind of like a rotten move, but you know what they say, all's fair in love in gaming. The first party card has a design similar to the larger RX 6800 and 6900 series, except that Team Rocket stole the third fan. And as soon as that teaser went up, speculation and leaks began to fly, leaks that turned out to be rather accurate. What they got exactly right was the price. At 479 US dollars, it's much higher than the RTX 3060 MSRP, but this card isn't targeting the 3060. It's landing somewhere between the 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070. Now you might be scratching your head thinking, didn't AMD target the RTX 3070 with the RX 6800? Yes, but as AMD points out, the lower VRAM available to the RTX 3070 can be a potential bottleneck for more demanding titles at higher resolutions. And AMD wants 1440p max quality out of this card, all at a price point that will still be appealing, just like this insulated 40 ounce stealth water bottle from lttstore.com. Ah, tastes like winning. Of course, the price AMD targets matters very little right now, thanks to the one-two punch of a crypto mining boom and a worldwide silicon shortage. It's gotten so bad that retailers are now raffling off the opportunity to buy a card instead of selling them directly. Nvidia's attempt to tackle this involved nerfing Ethereum mining efficiency on their 3060, nevermind that there are tons of other GPU mined cryptos, and launching a separate series of mining GPUs, while AMD is taking a different approach. They're going to be selling the cards directly to gamers, and AMD tells us they'll be releasing the RX 6700 XT in weekly drops on AMD.com, saving consumers multiple chances to buy, this is at suggested pricing, in spite of the retail landscape. This could be a viable method of getting the cards into the hands of actual gamers, but one of the problems with announcing when the cards will drop is that you're still relying on strong protections against bots and scalping groups, which is not going to be easy. And it also doesn't tell us anything about how many units will be available for each region, or even in each drop. Fortunately, if you're not into that strat, it's not just AMD who's going to be selling these. So on March 18th, both AMD's cards and their partner boards will go on sale simultaneously, which also gives better odds that they won't all be sold out as soon as they go live. And they've also got a host of system integrators that are geared up and ready to go. But hold on a minute, are these things going to be worth buying? Well, we will have a full review, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. But here's what we know so far. Compared to the RX 6800, the 6700 XT has a third fewer compute units, 25% less infinity cache, and four fewer gigs of GDDR6 memory. To offset that though, the game clock is substantially higher at 2424 megahertz, a 25% increase. As a result, we can probably expect ray tracing performance to be lacking, even compared to AMD's own higher end cards. But as we've seen when we overclocked the RX 6800 XT to near 6900 XT levels, higher core clocks can have a huge impact on the RDNA2 architecture's raster performance. With that said though, there's a bigger gap in compute units with the 6700 XT. So we'll have to see how this all plays out. Now, AMD didn't mention this in the presentation, but there's another potential pitfall for the 6700 XT, and that is memory bandwidth. Unless AMD is using lower capacity chips for memory, which we doubt, it's likely the memory interface has dropped from 256 bit to 192 bit. Now, AMD may be clocking the memory higher in order to compensate, and we were surprised at how much of a difference the infinity cache makes in memory intensive games on the bigger radions. So maybe it won't be such a big deal here, especially at sub 4K resolutions. But remember, the infinity cache is smaller too, so this gives me reason to temper my expectations. As for what resolution people will be gaming at, 1440p display adoption, at least according to AMD, has increased by 44% over last year. And while that still puts it below high refresh rate 1080p, high refresh rate 1440p displays have made a 98% jump in sales, thanks to declining prices and improved capabilities. What this means is that a growing percentage of gamers are looking to drive fast 1440p panels, and that's exactly what AMD is banking on for the RX 6700 XT. On paper though, high refresh rate 1440p looks like a bit of a stretch, especially in AAA titles, but AMD hopes their Radeon Boost hardware accelerated adaptive resolution function in DirectX 11 mode, and variable rate shading in DirectX 12 mode will make up some of this ground. That is, as long as you're willing to give up some image quality in your peripheral areas and in high motion scenes. Curiously missing from the presentation is any further explanation as to how and when FidelityFX Super Resolution, that's AMD's answer to Nvidia's DLSS, is going to make an appearance. What they did do is give us a few insights though into what's taking them so long. Apparently, rather than rushing it out the door on only one new top-end card, they want it to be cross-platform in every sense of the word. So they actually want it running on all of their GPUs, including the ones inside consoles before they pull the trigger. It would have been nice to have it ready by the time the cards launched, but as we saw with Nvidia's DLSS 1.0 versus DLSS 2.0, it could be for the best. I mean, lots of people still think that DLSS sucks thanks to the poor image quality of V1 and Nvidia's confusing marketing where they actually referred to it as an anti-aliasing technique. Still more proof if you needed it that lots of people, and Nvidia for that matter, can in fact be wrong about things. Anyway, in the meantime, AMD is pointing to Radeon Boost and FidelityFX contrast adaptive sharpening for their upscaling. Whether that's an acceptable compromise, or whether it's worth it to wait for FidelityFX super resolution, or whether this question is utterly meaningless until such time as these cards can be purchased for a reasonable price, all of that is up to you, the viewer. What's not up to you is whether I'm gonna tell you about our sponsor, FreshBooks. 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