Watch the AMD RX 6700 XT announcement right here
It's a big day for AMD, as it's the day that we get to see what its Radeon team has planned for the mainstream graphics card market. Its third announcement under the 'Where Gaming Begins' banner takes place should see the Radeon RX 6700 XT revealed along with the specs and pricing.
The AMD event starts at 11am US Eastern Time (8am PT / 4pm UK).
The high-end has already been suitably covered with the release of the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and the RX 6900 XT—although the latter doesn't make much sense for gamers. But what about more affordable graphics cards? Price is going to be key for this card, although in the current market it feels like AMD and Nvidia could price their cards ridiculously high and they'd still sell. Which is utterly depressing.
The good news is that AMD's graphics arm is definitely back in the game, and so something a bit lower down the stack could be very interesting. Nvidia has already released its more affordable cards of course, so AMD has something to pitch its cards against. The main target here has to be the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, although if it can get performance closer to the RTX 3070, that's even better.
The latest rumours have AMD down to announce just one GPU today, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. If the tech whisperers are correct, we won't be getting a non-XT version to go along with it. In fact, we might get a higher-binned version of the 6700 XT at the same time. How AMD will market such cards? We'll have to see, but obviously, availability is going to be key.
Will AMD even talk about availability and the lack of stock out there? We doubt it, as AMD has said almost nothing on that topic so far, but you never know. Will it be producing more 6700 XTs than 6800 XT and 6800? This would be the norm, as manufacturers sell more of the more-affordable cards, although in the current market, who can say if that's the case.
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Then there's the question of crypto miners picking up stock. It's fair to say that the new RDNA 2 cards don't rate very highly on the hash rate charts, but still, with GPU demand far outstripping stock, we could see a statement from AMD on this front. Will we see AMD nerfing the hash rate of its card to dissuade miners in the way that Nvidia did with the 3060s?
Finally, there's also a chance that AMD may talk about its answer to Nvidia's DLSS, which it calls Super Resolution. This may be wishful thinking on our part, but Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling really stands out as the defining tech of this generation. AMD really needs an answer to it, and it's been rumoured for a March airing for a while.
We've got a lot of questions going into this event, let's see if AMD has any answers.