France's Cowcotland claims that its "network" has leaked privileged information about the impending launch date of the AMD RX 6700 XT. The new mainstream midi Navi graphics card is said to be available on March 18 of this year, but as one would expect from a hardware launch in these dark times, supply will be ultra-limited.

Really limited. So limited that "we don't even know when the launch inventory will be in stock". According to Cowcotland, specifically, "We have already been told that quantities will be very limited."

If these rumors turn out to be true, it seems rather difficult to call this a paper launch. But if people like Frank Azor can buy it with just a few clicks of an update on the AMD.com store page, the rest of us can have our shiny new Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU if we want it bad enough.

It goes without saying that anything attributed to the ephemeral concept of "networking" by media insiders must be treated with caution. The rumor probably stems from a contact within one of AMD's graphics card partners, and not all regions or all partners are dealing with the same inventory levels.

So while one partner's supply in one region may be "very limited," that does not necessarily mean that the entire supply of AMD's new mainstream GPUs will be. This is the high-volume end of the graphics card market, which means that we must expect adequate supply to be available for AMD because we know that demand is there.

However, given that the past 6 months of launches have dried up in a matter of minutes, I don't hold out much hope that things will change much.

The AMD RX 6700 XT and its smaller sibling, the RX 6700, are the next graphics cards to come out of the Radeon stable and are expected to feature AMD Navi 22 GPUs. The top-of-the-line chip will come in the same 40 CU configuration as its RX 5700 XT predecessor, but it is designed to compete with the impending Nvidia RTX 3060, and both feature 12 GB of VRAM.

However, if we are to believe the recent PowerColor RX 6700 EEC listing, the lower-end RX 6700 will most likely ship with 36 CUs and 6GB of GDDR6 memory.

We expect the two RX 6700 series cards to cost around $400 and $350, respectively, but it may depend on how close or far ahead the new AMD GPUs are of the RTX 3060 cards.