The Situation with AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT Card

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT card is a highly anticipated product that has generated significant interest among gamers and tech enthusiasts. However, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that this card is not as impressive as its marketing claims would suggest. In fact, when compared to even prior generation cards, the RX 6700 XT falls short in several key areas.

One of the main criticisms of the RX 6700 XT is its VRAM capabilities. While it boasts a total of four gigs of VRAM, this is not enough to handle the demands of modern games at high resolutions and frame rates. In fact, even with the medium preset, the card struggles to maintain a stable 60 FPS in many titles. This means that gamers who want to play their favorite games at high settings will need to compromise on either resolution or frame rate.

Another issue with the RX 6700 XT is its PCI Express interface. While it's true that the card has a faster interface than previous generations, this doesn't necessarily translate to better performance in all scenarios. In fact, some games may be throttled by the PCI Express 3.0 bus, which can limit the card's potential.

The price of the RX 6700 XT is also a major point of contention. With an MSRP of $200 and selling on Newegg for over $200, this card is significantly more expensive than its predecessor, the RX 550, which launched at $100 five years ago. This raises questions about whether the additional features and performance are worth the extra cost.

AMD's initial marketing efforts claimed that the RX 6700 XT was a significant improvement over previous generations, with 47% of Steam users having a graphics card that was worse than this one in terms of performance. However, when put through its paces, the card fails to deliver on many of these promises. In fact, some games may not even reach 60 FPS at medium settings.

The situation is made more complicated by the current global market situation and supply chain breakdowns, which have driven up prices across the board. However, it's unclear whether this is a result of inflation or simply AMD trying to maximize profits through aggressive pricing strategies.

In terms of actual performance, the RX 6700 XT is capable of delivering good frame rates in many games at medium settings, especially those that are less demanding than others. For example, Doom Eternal runs smoothly at around 60 FPS with the medium preset, although this may not be representative of all titles.

Overall, while the RX 6700 XT has its strengths, it falls short in several key areas, including VRAM capabilities and PCI Express interface performance. Its high price point raises questions about whether it's worth the extra cost, especially when compared to previous generations of AMD cards. As always, gamers are left to choose between playing their favorite games at lower resolutions or frame rates, or settling for a card that doesn't quite live up to its marketing promises.

It's worth noting that AMD may have been better off releasing this card as a laptop-only product, rather than attempting to create a desktop card around it. By doing so, they may have avoided some of the criticism and negative reviews associated with this product. Regardless, the RX 6700 XT is not the game-changing product that some had hoped for, and its high price point makes it a tough sell for many gamers.

In conclusion, while the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has its moments, it ultimately falls short of expectations in several key areas. Its high price point, combined with its limitations in VRAM capabilities and PCI Express interface performance, make it a difficult product to recommend to all but the most die-hard AMD fans.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by micro center business yes business it's new building an office workstation for yourself might make you a little nervous are you bare handling that multiple thousand dollar business class processor about to drop it into your thousand dollar plus motherboard what what happens if you break something or do something wrong well you can get the help you need a micro center business from people that have 40 years of experience they will custom build whatever kind of workstation you're looking for but at a turnkey sort of uh process and that's going to meet whatever specifications you need plus once it's built they're going to continue to offer support and warranty services and everything like that now for me over the years i've spent thousands of dollars at micro center and they're not paying me to say that it's been a great source of parts and really good deals and good support for me personally so i like working with them and now microcenter is expanding with more business services and more business class computers servers workstations expertise and business class software you need to run computational fluid dynamics simulations or 64 core monster machines you know super micro dell server stuff whatever they've got you covered and guess what new customers who visit a micro center location can sign up for a free professional 240 gig ssd there's details in the link below but yeah free ssd no purchase necessary i mean be sure to check that out so thanks microcenter for sponsoring this video and now on with the show oh no it's an rx 6500 xt amd apology piece why why does everybody get so worked up over this it's just i don't understand a lot of the benchmarking on the 6500 xt was fair and believe it or not most of the benchmarking that i'm talking about and that i saw is accurate but i don't think it necessarily paints a complete picture of what's going on with the rx 6500 xt it's at the low end of the market and we'll talk about the pricing but as a successor to the rx 550 it's really not terrible it's not as terrible as it's been made out to be in some benchmarks let's talk about that so there's a lot not to like about this card it only has two outputs it doesn't have any hardware encoders i don't even if it had hardware encoders it would probably struggle with the pcie interface it's only got four lanes for its pcie interface it wants pci express 4.0 it'll work at pci express 3.0 but in a lot of common scenarios you'll suffer a performance penalty when you run at pci express 3.0 so if you are going to run a pci express 3.0 you got to keep that in mind and you got to look for that in the benchmarks to see if the benchmark takes into account okay was this card running at pci express 3.0 or 4.0 chances are if you're looking for a graphics card to upgrade your older system pc express 3.0 that's going to be a consideration something you're going to have to think about when you're thinking about this card a lot of time for an older system a used gpu might actually be a better choice than a new gpu but still even with all of that what's up with this gpu this is a desktop gpu really that was originally designed i think for laptops because it's only got a pci express four lane interface it's pretty unusual most of the time graphics cards have an eight or sixteen lane graphics card interface and so it's also only got four gigs of vram now the reason it's got four gigs of vram is probably to combat miners and to make it a little bit easier to manufacture you see amd could still be producing polaris based cards which to be sure the rx 480 is a legendary card not unlike the you know the 7970 gigahertz edition also another legendary card from amd this is not a legendary card this is a successor to the rx 550. now a couple of benchmarks i saw for things like far cry 6 reported the far far cry 6 was going to run at like 12 to 15 fps but that's not really true i think that the 12 to 15 fps is if you have installed the 40 gigabyte texture pack that's the only way that i could get close to approximating that on my test setup if i run with the ultra textures not the ultra hd texture pack but just regular ultra from the settings and i run through the canned benchmark we're actually doing pretty good you know our minimum there is like 38 fps at ultra medium is much better actually hopping in the game and spending some time playing it you know side by side we can see the the quality settings i would recommend medium in general i wouldn't recommend this card for the higher end graphics settings in the higher end texture settings you see 4 gigs of vram probably not enough for those really high fidelity things in games and strangely older cards do better even though they're also 4 gig it turns out the reason for that is the bus interface you see this thing only has 4 pcie lanes whereas those older cards typically have 16 pci express lanes even one generation back the rx 5500 from amd that had eight pci express lanes so it was at an advantage as compared with the uh rx 6500 xt that we're sort of talking about today back to far cry 6 far cry 6 you can get like 75 fps if you just go with medium at least in the canned benchmark now the the fps swing from 75 to like 15 or 16 is pretty significant and it's a combination of things it's one the vram limit and two if you do hit the vram limit then all of a sudden you're moving textures and data across the bus that doesn't have enough interface what happens is the io for things you really need like drawing stuff and the i o for moving textures in and out compete with one another and it's a very detrimental effect because there's not enough bandwidth at pci express 3.0 pci express 4.0 you double your bandwidth you have a little bit more room it's better but to be sure this is a low end graphics card shadow of the tomb raider at medium 76 fps i don't know about you but i think 76 fps at medium is pretty playable on shadow of the tomb raider yeah you can go high or ultra but if you're using three four five times as much vram as you actually have the performance is going to be terrible and it is going to be terrible in a different way as compared with previous generations you can definitely show that an older card is faster than this one by sort of exploiting that weakness in this card so the pattern with this card is going to be the higher you set the graphics fidelity settings the dramatically worse it's going to perform see in days gone by the difference between medium and ultra high with exceptions like crisis generally wasn't you know 150 percent 200 percent and moving from about 15 or 20 fps which i'm not disputing the accuracy of that's that that is probably accurate if you have you know the 40 gigabyte texture pack loaded moving from 15 or 20 fps to like 50 to 60 fps going from ultra hd 40 gigabyte texture pack to like low settings and pci express 3.0 i mean that's quite a swing oh i almost forgot about doom eternal doom eternal is a really interesting one it literally will not let you set a setting that will dramatically exceed the vram this is interesting if you said ultra it's like you don't have enough vram and there's no option you can set ultra and then dial down the textures so that it'll still let you but you still have other things on ultra if you do that this card's only going to run at about 31 fps and remember i've still dialed in to pci express 3.0 by 4 on this system i mean it's a nice system but i'm still running it pci express uh four lanes in generation 3.0 and uh yeah 31 fps on ultra except for the textures which it won't let you set now if you just set everything to medium with the medium preset that it's about 60 fps and again that's sort of a unique situation compared with even prior generation cards and it's not the vram it's more the pci express interface but doom eternal was a pretty good play experience at about 60 fps with the medium preset actually playing the game it is possible as a gamer for you to buy this card and enjoy 1080p 60fps gaming and most of the titles that i tested are close to 60 fps as long as you're willing to deal with medium and low and i'm not sure that that was really covered everywhere now there's a lot to be unhappy with with this product and there's a lot of other ways that it regresses over prior generation products things like the encoder and four gigs of vram and the bus interface and stuff that i've mentioned before but you know the the big one of course is price like if this was a card that was debuting at 100 and it was more clear that it was a successor to the rx 550 which launched with two gigs of vram then i think that there would be probably a lot a lot less vitriol now on the one hand you can say that the 200 price is because of the global situation and the supply chain breakdown and a whole bunch of stuff out of amd's control on the other hand you can say that miners will buy literally anything and uh this is a a money grab to have better profit margins because the profit margins are there wouldn't you rather have it go to you know amd as opposed to a scalper or can we flood the market or this is the margin that amd would have enjoyed had this gone into a laptop and this is a desktop product instead you know i don't know it costs 200 or at least the msrp is 200 it's selling on newegg for over 200 i think that's a bit much considering the rx 550 cost 100 you know five six years ago and i think it's a bit much considering that the rx 480 six years later is still really good you know amd and some of their initial stuff they said 47 of people on steam have a graphics card that's a gtx 1060 or worse in terms of performance and this is potentially quite a bit better performance than one of those cards assuming that you fit within vram and you are not running in this situation where a pc express 3.0 interface is uh throttling you too hard well you know i really would have liked for this card to be even more better at an even more better price point but if there are other people willing to pay more for the card for the purposes of mining then it costs what it costs i mean based on the first round of feedback i'm sure that amd probably thinks these probably would have been better just keeping them in laptops and not bothering to try to create a desktop card around this product i can't even say with confidence whether or not you can buy it at actual msrp prices i don't know i get this quarter this quarter's from 1962. the silver content in this quarter is worth more than the quarter itself in 1962 this quarter would buy a little bit less than a gallon of gasoline meaning the gallon of gasoline and a quarter is close like 25 30 cents depending on where you were in the country you know 35 cents something like that gallon of gas 1962 when this quarter was minted um today if i melt this quarter down which you shouldn't do that for its silver content then it's also still worth about a gallon of gas actually gallon gas is a little bit less than a the silver that's in the quarter but you know overhead selling it converting it you know converting the one fungible token into bullying and then into you know other yeah i don't know it's a it's a weird situation i don't know if the pricing is entirely inflation or if it is entirely profit driven or if it's driven by wanting a cut of the the market the choice for four gigs is probably driven by trying to build something for gamers and to lower the production costs so at least maybe there could be price cuts in the future i don't know that's just conjecture i'm just telling you that with this card if you're willing to play it medium low 1080p a lot of the games that are out right now will have reasonable performance but this is definitely not a six year card like the rx 480 which also cost two hundred dollars six years ago so that's all that's it that's all i'm saying saying that far cry 6 runs at 15 or 20 fps which is not technically inaccurate doesn't really tell the whole story of this card i wanted this level one i'm signing out and you can direct your victory all below or to the level one forums i don't know signing out i'll see you there foreignthis video is brought to you by micro center business yes business it's new building an office workstation for yourself might make you a little nervous are you bare handling that multiple thousand dollar business class processor about to drop it into your thousand dollar plus motherboard what what happens if you break something or do something wrong well you can get the help you need a micro center business from people that have 40 years of experience they will custom build whatever kind of workstation you're looking for but at a turnkey sort of uh process and that's going to meet whatever specifications you need plus once it's built they're going to continue to offer support and warranty services and everything like that now for me over the years i've spent thousands of dollars at micro center and they're not paying me to say that it's been a great source of parts and really good deals and good support for me personally so i like working with them and now microcenter is expanding with more business services and more business class computers servers workstations expertise and business class software you need to run computational fluid dynamics simulations or 64 core monster machines you know super micro dell server stuff whatever they've got you covered and guess what new customers who visit a micro center location can sign up for a free professional 240 gig ssd there's details in the link below but yeah free ssd no purchase necessary i mean be sure to check that out so thanks microcenter for sponsoring this video and now on with the show oh no it's an rx 6500 xt amd apology piece why why does everybody get so worked up over this it's just i don't understand a lot of the benchmarking on the 6500 xt was fair and believe it or not most of the benchmarking that i'm talking about and that i saw is accurate but i don't think it necessarily paints a complete picture of what's going on with the rx 6500 xt it's at the low end of the market and we'll talk about the pricing but as a successor to the rx 550 it's really not terrible it's not as terrible as it's been made out to be in some benchmarks let's talk about that so there's a lot not to like about this card it only has two outputs it doesn't have any hardware encoders i don't even if it had hardware encoders it would probably struggle with the pcie interface it's only got four lanes for its pcie interface it wants pci express 4.0 it'll work at pci express 3.0 but in a lot of common scenarios you'll suffer a performance penalty when you run at pci express 3.0 so if you are going to run a pci express 3.0 you got to keep that in mind and you got to look for that in the benchmarks to see if the benchmark takes into account okay was this card running at pci express 3.0 or 4.0 chances are if you're looking for a graphics card to upgrade your older system pc express 3.0 that's going to be a consideration something you're going to have to think about when you're thinking about this card a lot of time for an older system a used gpu might actually be a better choice than a new gpu but still even with all of that what's up with this gpu this is a desktop gpu really that was originally designed i think for laptops because it's only got a pci express four lane interface it's pretty unusual most of the time graphics cards have an eight or sixteen lane graphics card interface and so it's also only got four gigs of vram now the reason it's got four gigs of vram is probably to combat miners and to make it a little bit easier to manufacture you see amd could still be producing polaris based cards which to be sure the rx 480 is a legendary card not unlike the you know the 7970 gigahertz edition also another legendary card from amd this is not a legendary card this is a successor to the rx 550. now a couple of benchmarks i saw for things like far cry 6 reported the far far cry 6 was going to run at like 12 to 15 fps but that's not really true i think that the 12 to 15 fps is if you have installed the 40 gigabyte texture pack that's the only way that i could get close to approximating that on my test setup if i run with the ultra textures not the ultra hd texture pack but just regular ultra from the settings and i run through the canned benchmark we're actually doing pretty good you know our minimum there is like 38 fps at ultra medium is much better actually hopping in the game and spending some time playing it you know side by side we can see the the quality settings i would recommend medium in general i wouldn't recommend this card for the higher end graphics settings in the higher end texture settings you see 4 gigs of vram probably not enough for those really high fidelity things in games and strangely older cards do better even though they're also 4 gig it turns out the reason for that is the bus interface you see this thing only has 4 pcie lanes whereas those older cards typically have 16 pci express lanes even one generation back the rx 5500 from amd that had eight pci express lanes so it was at an advantage as compared with the uh rx 6500 xt that we're sort of talking about today back to far cry 6 far cry 6 you can get like 75 fps if you just go with medium at least in the canned benchmark now the the fps swing from 75 to like 15 or 16 is pretty significant and it's a combination of things it's one the vram limit and two if you do hit the vram limit then all of a sudden you're moving textures and data across the bus that doesn't have enough interface what happens is the io for things you really need like drawing stuff and the i o for moving textures in and out compete with one another and it's a very detrimental effect because there's not enough bandwidth at pci express 3.0 pci express 4.0 you double your bandwidth you have a little bit more room it's better but to be sure this is a low end graphics card shadow of the tomb raider at medium 76 fps i don't know about you but i think 76 fps at medium is pretty playable on shadow of the tomb raider yeah you can go high or ultra but if you're using three four five times as much vram as you actually have the performance is going to be terrible and it is going to be terrible in a different way as compared with previous generations you can definitely show that an older card is faster than this one by sort of exploiting that weakness in this card so the pattern with this card is going to be the higher you set the graphics fidelity settings the dramatically worse it's going to perform see in days gone by the difference between medium and ultra high with exceptions like crisis generally wasn't you know 150 percent 200 percent and moving from about 15 or 20 fps which i'm not disputing the accuracy of that's that that is probably accurate if you have you know the 40 gigabyte texture pack loaded moving from 15 or 20 fps to like 50 to 60 fps going from ultra hd 40 gigabyte texture pack to like low settings and pci express 3.0 i mean that's quite a swing oh i almost forgot about doom eternal doom eternal is a really interesting one it literally will not let you set a setting that will dramatically exceed the vram this is interesting if you said ultra it's like you don't have enough vram and there's no option you can set ultra and then dial down the textures so that it'll still let you but you still have other things on ultra if you do that this card's only going to run at about 31 fps and remember i've still dialed in to pci express 3.0 by 4 on this system i mean it's a nice system but i'm still running it pci express uh four lanes in generation 3.0 and uh yeah 31 fps on ultra except for the textures which it won't let you set now if you just set everything to medium with the medium preset that it's about 60 fps and again that's sort of a unique situation compared with even prior generation cards and it's not the vram it's more the pci express interface but doom eternal was a pretty good play experience at about 60 fps with the medium preset actually playing the game it is possible as a gamer for you to buy this card and enjoy 1080p 60fps gaming and most of the titles that i tested are close to 60 fps as long as you're willing to deal with medium and low and i'm not sure that that was really covered everywhere now there's a lot to be unhappy with with this product and there's a lot of other ways that it regresses over prior generation products things like the encoder and four gigs of vram and the bus interface and stuff that i've mentioned before but you know the the big one of course is price like if this was a card that was debuting at 100 and it was more clear that it was a successor to the rx 550 which launched with two gigs of vram then i think that there would be probably a lot a lot less vitriol now on the one hand you can say that the 200 price is because of the global situation and the supply chain breakdown and a whole bunch of stuff out of amd's control on the other hand you can say that miners will buy literally anything and uh this is a a money grab to have better profit margins because the profit margins are there wouldn't you rather have it go to you know amd as opposed to a scalper or can we flood the market or this is the margin that amd would have enjoyed had this gone into a laptop and this is a desktop product instead you know i don't know it costs 200 or at least the msrp is 200 it's selling on newegg for over 200 i think that's a bit much considering the rx 550 cost 100 you know five six years ago and i think it's a bit much considering that the rx 480 six years later is still really good you know amd and some of their initial stuff they said 47 of people on steam have a graphics card that's a gtx 1060 or worse in terms of performance and this is potentially quite a bit better performance than one of those cards assuming that you fit within vram and you are not running in this situation where a pc express 3.0 interface is uh throttling you too hard well you know i really would have liked for this card to be even more better at an even more better price point but if there are other people willing to pay more for the card for the purposes of mining then it costs what it costs i mean based on the first round of feedback i'm sure that amd probably thinks these probably would have been better just keeping them in laptops and not bothering to try to create a desktop card around this product i can't even say with confidence whether or not you can buy it at actual msrp prices i don't know i get this quarter this quarter's from 1962. the silver content in this quarter is worth more than the quarter itself in 1962 this quarter would buy a little bit less than a gallon of gasoline meaning the gallon of gasoline and a quarter is close like 25 30 cents depending on where you were in the country you know 35 cents something like that gallon of gas 1962 when this quarter was minted um today if i melt this quarter down which you shouldn't do that for its silver content then it's also still worth about a gallon of gas actually gallon gas is a little bit less than a the silver that's in the quarter but you know overhead selling it converting it you know converting the one fungible token into bullying and then into you know other yeah i don't know it's a it's a weird situation i don't know if the pricing is entirely inflation or if it is entirely profit driven or if it's driven by wanting a cut of the the market the choice for four gigs is probably driven by trying to build something for gamers and to lower the production costs so at least maybe there could be price cuts in the future i don't know that's just conjecture i'm just telling you that with this card if you're willing to play it medium low 1080p a lot of the games that are out right now will have reasonable performance but this is definitely not a six year card like the rx 480 which also cost two hundred dollars six years ago so that's all that's it that's all i'm saying saying that far cry 6 runs at 15 or 20 fps which is not technically inaccurate doesn't really tell the whole story of this card i wanted this level one i'm signing out and you can direct your victory all below or to the level one forums i don't know signing out i'll see you there foreign\n"