AMD RX 6700 XT review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

The RX 6700 XT benchmarking marathon continues as we grapple with Far Cry 5, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Death Stranding and Hitman 2. All four games use a recent DirectX release, with Ubisoft's open world titles on the more common DX11 and the rest on DX12, allowing us to see how 1440p-tier Big Navi handles games with slightly less modern architectures.

As we mentioned on the first page, we're using our early 2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K, locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a flagship Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4 RAM at 3600MHz CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All this is powered by a 1000W Corsair RM1000i PSU.

Death Stranding

Strand-type games are the future, so we had to include Death Stranding in our 2021 benchmarks. There's no integrated benchmark here, so we made our own by lining protagonist Sam up with a river and holding W until he hits an inevitable boulder. The game features DLSS support on Nvidia cards, but to keep things even we're testing without here. That allows the RX 6700 XT to perform excellently, trading blows with the RTX 3070 at 1440p (122fps average versus 124fps; within the margin of error). That means the 6700 XT is the better value option, despite only outperforming the RX 5700 XT by around 28 per cent, which is the lowest gen-on-gen boost we've seen thus far. The RX 6700 XT is also 87 per cent as fast as the RX 6800 at 1440p, making it the better value choice by a good margin thanks to its lower price tag, but it's only 80 per cent as fast at 4K.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5's reliance on single-core processor performance means that we see some level at CPU bottlenecking at 1080p and 1440p even with a high power Core i9 10900K. At 4K, where GPUs do show distinct differences, the RX 6700 XT is only a few fps behind the RTX 3070 and around 10 per cent faster than the RTX 3060 Ti. The RX 6700 XT achieves 81 per cent of the RX 6800's 4K frame-rate, so you get a 1:1 ratio between extra cash spent and extra performance gained. At 1440p, the advantage for the RX 6800 is just nine per cent, making the RX 6700 XT the better value option. The RX 6700 XT is also equally as fast as the slightly more expensive RTX 3070 at this resolution, again a good result for Team Red.

Hitman 2

Hitman 2's benchmark is a highlight of our current suite, ticking all the boxes for a great benchmark: it's indicative of real gameplay, it's accessible from outside of the game and it allows game settings to be changed easily, without digging through .ini files or searching for arcane launch flags. (If any game developers are reading this article, if you include something like this in your game it'll translate into more or less guaranteed coverage from the gaming tech press!)

This benchmark is notoriously CPU-limited at 1080p, so let's look at 1440p. The RX 6700 XT manages 81 per cent of the RX 6800's frame-rate, a margin we've seen quite a few times already, but against Nvidia it's another poor result. The RX 6700 XT trails the RTX 3060 Ti by three per cent and the RTX 3070 by 12 per cent, so you're getting considerably better value from an Nvidia card in this DirectX 12 game. In fact, even the last-gen RTX 2080 almost equals the frame-rate of the RX 6700 XT.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Last up on this page is Assassin's Creed Odyssey. This game gives some of the best performance we've seen from the RX 6700 XT, with the new AMD card outperforming the RTX 3070 by almost five per cent at the middle resolution. That's a great result, and means that the RTX 3060 Ti is 15 per cent adrift - the 6700 XT is in another league. Compared to the RX 6800, the RX 6700 XT also manages 92 per cent of its bigger brother's performance at 1440p. Compared to the last-gen RX 5700 XT, the new card is 37 per cent faster at its target frame-rate.

Note that aware that Odyssey's integrated benchmark includes variable weather - an oddity for what is meant to be an objective and repeatable test - so be wary of clouds on the horizon that can tank performance. We also see a decent amount of variance in lowest one per cent scores from run to run, especially at 1080p, so it's best to look at the averages here and not read too much into the other metrics.

Next, let's look at our final set of rasterised game benchmarks - including a classic 'banana skin' title from the archives.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware and Power Analysis
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Game Benchmarks Part 2 [This Page]
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity, Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• RT Game Benchmarks - Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5
• Resizeable BAR Testing - Watch Dogs Legion, Battlefield 5, Metro Exodus
• AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - the Digital Foundry verdict