Introduction

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT Nitro+ is the company's most premium take on AMD's new RX 6700 XT graphics card that's debuting today. Positioned bang in the middle of the performance segment, with a starting price under $500, the RX 6700 XT launches AMD's second, smaller silicon based on the RDNA2 architecture and brings the full DirectX 12 Ultimate experience from the AMD stable to this segment, including real-time raytracing. Although targeting the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti in performance, AMD claims that the card can trade blows with even the pricier RTX 3070.



The new RDNA2 graphics architecture powers not just AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series discrete graphics, but also the latest consoles, including the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, making it easier for game developers to optimize for the cards. The company has mostly leveled up to NVIDIA on the features front thanks to DirectX 12 Ultimate. Its approach to real-time raytracing involves using special hardware called Ray Accelerators to calculate ray intersections and a hefty compute muscle for everything else, including de-noising.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT maxes out the new 7 nm Navi 22 silicon, which packs 40 RDNA2 compute units, working out to 2,560 stream processors, 40 Ray Accelerators, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The company went with 12 GB as the standard memory amount and uses fast 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips; however, the memory bus width is narrowed to 192-bit. The card now only needs six 16 Gbit memory chips. This bandwidth deficit over the previous-generation RX 5700 XT is claimed to be overcome by the Infinity Cache technology—a fast 96 MB scratchpad directly on the die, operating at over five times the speed and much lower latencies than even the GDDR6 memory.

The Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ comes with the slimmest iteration of the company's Nitro+ cooling solution that has many innovations, such as dedicated memory/VRM heatsinks with aluminium fins, wave-shaped aluminium fins that add turbulence to improve heat-dissipation, double ball-bearing fans, and a generous amount of addressable RGB bling. Sapphire has given this card its highest factory-overclock, with the maximum boost frequency set at 2.65 GHz (compared to 2.58 GHz reference). Sapphire is pricing the card at USD $579, a $100 premium over the $479 baseline price.

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 | PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT Red Devil | XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319