 AMD has truly changed the game. While outplaying Intel in nearly every way, they're still making brand new GPUs for gamers around the world to enjoy. It's a tough job to battle two giants at once, but they can't let Nvidia take all the glory in graphics. And tomorrow, AMD makes their next move. Yes, on March 18th, AMD releases the RX 6700 XT, a GPU literally no one is asking for in the middle of a massive shortage of existing graphics cards we'd be happy to buy. But that doesn't mean it has to be bad. No, many people will buy these. But the question is, will you be happy to have one? Like I'm happy to tell you about our sponsor Redux. Redux is a PC builder striving to bring PC gaming to the masses by offering the same prices as if you built it yourself, plus a $75 build fee. Check the link in the description below and start creating your PC today. Paper launch jokes aside, we've already discussed what availability is going to be like for this GPU. Basically, if you don't have a well-maintained F5 key or a bot, you're probably not going to be able to buy one on launch day. As with Nvidia and the RTX 3060, I don't know why AMD has decided now is the best time to release a new GPU. But this is a review of the card itself. So let's start with that. The reference RX 6700 XT, that is what it is, right? Reference. It looks pretty sharp. It's not identical to the rest of the big Navi lineup, but it's got enough of the styling to let you know they're related. There's much less weight to the cooler than even the two-slot RX 6800, which is curious given that card is rated for just 20 watts more power. It also has four fewer gigs of GDDR6 memory, which AMD confirmed is running at the same speed but is now constrained to a 192-bit bus instead of a 256-bit one, meaning the diminished 96 megabytes of affinity cache will need to somehow pick up a lot more slack. But the RX 6700 XT is in a completely different price bracket than the RX 6800, so maybe these changes won't be such a big deal in practice. So let's meet the cards we think will make a better comparison. We've got the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, the 3060 Ti, the 2080 Super, and AMD's own last-gen RX 5700 XT. And they'll all go into our GPU bench for a fair fight. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has the 6700 XT right in between the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti, which isn't a strong start. When we turn on ray tracing, even the RTX 2080 Super outdoes it. We did predict this in our announcement analysis, but it's still a shock to the system given how much worse it performs than even the RTX 3060 Ti, which I should remind you is a card that, allegedly, retails for $80 less. Apparently there's relatively simple optimizations that can significantly improve AMD's performance in ray tracing though, so stay tuned for that in future titles and patches. For now, let's go back to our tests. It's not just Tomb Raider that's kind of disappointing. The RMX 6700 XT is only as good as the RTX 3060 Ti in F1 2020, Wolfenstein Youngblood, and Flight Sim 2020. Thankfully, Forza Horizon 4 provides some relief for AMD, placing the 6700 XT at the very top of the pack for once. It's not a great showing, unfortunately. It is worth noting though that Hardware Unboxed recently did a video on running modern GPUs with weaker hardware and found that lower-end CPUs like the Ryzen 5 from 1st Gen to 3rd Gen actually perform better with Radeon GPUs than NVIDIAs do, so perhaps that's another angle to consider when looking at these results. This class of GPU isn't really for productivity, and AMD says gaming is RDNA 2's top priority. But the workstation arena is definitely not a Radeon stronghold anymore. The RX 6700 XT is getting slaughtered in Blender, and this is before we even consider the Ray Accelerated Optics renderer. Puget Bench doesn't do AMD any favors either, even though the CPU does most of the heavy lifting here. It's placing well below even the RTX 2080 Super through most of these tests, although it does come a little closer to the cheaper 3060 Ti in Indigo renderer. Luxmark is a bloodbath. I'm not sure what's going on here to make AMD fall so far behind, but if you do any productivity on the side, you probably don't want to reach for Team Red. Well, at least you can always reach for a water bottle with LTCStore.com. There it is. Maybe power consumption is a lot lower? That wouldn't excuse this kind of cost-to-performance imbalance, but it would give AMD a niche to occupy at least. Except it isn't a lot lower. Peak recorded power draw is higher than the RTX 3060 Ti, although on average it is nearly 10 watts less. Decent, but definitely not a niche maker. Thermals, well, they're well-controlled, but not as good as Nvidia's Founders Edition. Aside from when Nvidia just kind of takes a nap in the more memory-hungry tests, that is. Clock stability looks a little more varied than Nvidia, although it is well above the advertised 2.4 GHz game clock. So, in the end, the Radeon 6700 XT didn't really stand out at all by our numbers anyway. Most frustratingly, AMD's official marketing positions it as a competitor to the similarly priced RTX 3070, but if you average it all out, it's a good 7% off of that card, while only being about 3% better than the RTX 3060 Ti. This thing should really be priced closer to $429 and positioned as an answer to the 3060 Ti, not against the 3070. As it stands, the pricing is completely out of whack, and if I were more cynical, I'd say that they price it this way because they know gamers will pay for it under current market conditions. But I'm not going to say that with a straight face. I want to give AMD the benefit of the doubt here. From what AMD tells us, our numbers are roughly in line with their internal testing. So, when we compare AMD's published performance numbers, we can see that, in some cases at least, it should perform closer to what its price point suggests. It just may well be that the true value of the RX 6700 XT will be wildly different depending on what games you play and at what settings. It just so happens that the test suite we've been using for the past several GPU launches hasn't been particularly kind to it. And maybe that's the real conclusion here. For those of you who have been waiting for the opportunity to buy a new GPU, any new GPU, well, you could do worse. For those of you waiting for pricing to settle first, it seems like the RTX 3060 Ti is simply the more well-rounded card. But if the stars align, and the games you care about run well in Radeon, and especially if you're running older hardware, then it could be a great deal after all. Just like our sponsor, Ting. Thanks to Ting Mobile for sponsoring today's video. Their new rates make it easier to see how much you can save by switching. You've got unlimited talk and text plans for $10, data plans start at $15, and unlimited data for $45. If you liked their previous pay what you use plans, they're still there. They're just called Ting Flux plans now, and they charge just $5 per gig. Data can also be shared if you have a family plan, and you can connect more phones to save more. And you'll still get award-winning nationwide coverage. Pretty much any phone will work with Ting Mobile, so check them out at linus.ting.com and receive a $25 credit. Thanks for watching guys. If you're looking for more Unobtainium to watch, go check out a review of the RTX 3060, a lower-end GPU that goes for double this card's price on eBay, and whose mining limiter was recently bypassed as we all knew it would be. Because miners. Yay. Unhackable.