The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT arrives at an awkward time for next-gen graphics card buyers. In the four months since AMD's first RDNA 2 Big Navi cards arrived on the scene, we've seen little to no improvement in the general availability of these new GPUs, and I wouldn't be surprised if the RX 6700 XT ended up suffering exactly the same fate when it launches tomorrow on March 18th, disappearing within an instant of going on sale and the prices of any remaining models skyrocketing as a result.
Still, even if we were in a position where stock shortages weren't an ongoing problem, the slower pace of AMD's release schedule means they're now playing constant catch-up to Nvidia's RTX 30 GPUs. Indeed, with its starting price of $479, the RX 6700 XT sits rather uneasily between Nvidia's $399 RTX 3060 Ti and $499 RTX 3070. AMD's more expensive Radeon RX 6800 was already competing with the latter, outperforming the RTX 3070 at 1440p but falling behind at 4K and overall ray tracing performance, which would sort of imply the RX 6700 XT is perhaps a more appropriate rival for the RTX 3060 Ti. And yet the combination of its higher price and there still being no sign of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution tech to help bolster its ray tracing chops against Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS gubbins ends up putting the RX 6700 XT in a very strange place. It's still a powerful card for 60fps 1440p gaming on max settings; it's just not particularly great value for money.
