AMD RX 6700 XT review: revisiting the super-performers

Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Control, Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Richard Leadbetter

Updated on 9 Aug 2021

We're starting with results from four modern games, ones that we've found can take the greatest advantage of AMD and Nvidia's latest architectures. Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Control and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were all released in the last few years, and all use modern graphics APIs - Vulkan for Doom and DirectX 12 for the rest.

This helps the games take good advantage of modern multi-core processors, including the Core i9 10900K in our test rig, reducing the likelihood of CPU bottlenecking even at low resolutions like 1080p. As with other AMD Big Navi and Nvidia Ampere graphics cards we've tested, we expect to see some of the highest gen-on-gen performance uplifts for the RX 6700 XT right here.

Our benchmark results are presented a little differently to what you might be used to elsewhere on the web. On mobile, you'll get a basic overview, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is a bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Note that we'll be focusing our analysis on 1440p results, where this card is positioned to shine, but you can check out our 1080p and 4K numbers if you're aiming to pair the RX 6700 XT with a monitor at one of these resolutions.

Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal is the only Vulkan game in our current test suite, and given developer id's technical wizardry perhaps it's no surprise that it's also one of the easiest games to run at very high frame-rates - even at the highest Ultra Nightmare preset. The RX 6700 XT is pitched as a 1440p card, but here it can exceed 100fps even at 4K. That's 81 per cent of the performance of the RX 6800, and places the new $479 Big Navi card almost exactly between the $399 RTX 3060 Ti and $499 RTX 3070.

At 1440p, you'll get 216fps with the RX 6700 XT, while at 1080p it's a comfortable 308fps - so you'll definitely make good use of any high refresh rate monitors in your possession. Interestingly, even the 1440p test shows some signs that the extra VRAM on the RX 6700 XT compared to the RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 is making a difference, with the end of the bench showing a lead for the AMD card after trailing earlier. (Dropping down from Ultra Nightmare to Ultra would solve this with little change to visual fidelity, but the fact the AMD card leads at all is still intriguing.) In all three resolutions, the RX 6700 XT is around 35 per cent faster than the old ($399 launch price) RX 5700 XT, showing a strong generational uplift.

Doom Eternal: Vulkan, Ultra Nightmare, 8x TSSAA

Borderlands 3

Next up is Borderlands 3, one of many recent mainstream games to use the Unreal Engine 4. We don't recommend the top 'Bad Ass' preset for general use, as it's quite punishing, but it does make for some interesting analysis. The RX 6700 XT gets around 43fps at 4K, which is more or less playable, and almost exactly 80 per cent as powerful as the RX 6800. The newest Big Navi card plays better against the RTX 3070 here, achieving 97 per cent of the 4K performance for 96 per cent of the price - not bad.

Moving to 1440p, the RX 6700 XT becomes 83 per cent of the RX 6800 and actually outperforms the RTX 3070 by a few percentage points despite costing $20 less. Compared to the RX 5700 XT, the RX 6700 XT is around 30 per cent faster regardless of resolution. That's a decent upgrade, but probably one not many RX 5700 XT users are going to go for. If you're instead using a GTX 10-series card, like many people are, you get a much more sizeable upgrade at 1440p - the RX 6700 XT is 2.25 times faster than the GTX 1070 or 1.75 times faster than the GTX 1080. If you bought into the mid-range of the first RTX generation, you could see a 60 per cent improvement to frame-rates from the RTX 2070 to RX 6700 XT.

Borderlands 3: Bad Ass, DX12, TAA

Control

After two games where AMD is competitive, we're going onto home turf for Team Green: Control. Remedy's weird-fi epic loves Nvidia hardware, even with ray tracing effects disabled as we're testing here. The RX 6700 XT manages only 32fps at 4K at the high preset, which places it 4fps behind the $399 RTX 3060 Ti and 10fps behind the $499 RTX 3070 - hardly an impressive result for a $479 card. Moving to 1440p, where the newest Big Navi card is actually intended to play ball, and things don't get too much better. The 68fps result is more than playable, of course, but the 6700 XT is still well behind the 3060 Ti and 3070 it's meant to contest, only outdoing the $329 RTX 3060 (and the last-gen RTX 2080, barely). The RX 6700 XT is at least around 30 per cent faster than the RX 5700 XT, for what that's worth.

We'll look at Control's RTX performance later on in this same review, so stay tuned for that!

Control: High, DX12, TAA

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Our last super-performer is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, another title where AMD can sometimes struggle. True to form, the RX 6700 XT (56fps) trails the RTX 3060 Ti (59fps) and RTX 3070 (63fps) at 4K, but equals the Ti card at 1440p (both at 109fps) and draws closer to the 3070 (115fps). We are looking at a better gen-on-gen improvement in Shadow, where the advancement from Navi to Big Navi is in the region of 40 per cent. Finally, once again the RX 6700 XT is around 81 per cent of the strength of the RX 6800, but comes at 83 per cent of the cost, making the bigger card a marginally better value here.