PowerColor's GPU listing posted today highlights the difference in memory capacity between the AMD RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT graphics cards. The higher-specification XT version comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, while the straight-up RX 6700 has just 6 GB of the same video memory.

The new AMD RX 6700 series graphics cards will soon follow the silicon heels of the Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU, which will be available later this month. This has led to more leaks and rumors about new mainstream Radeon cards.

A list on the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) website lists a number of new AMD PowerColor cards, primarily the 12GB RX 6700 XT, but also four 6GB Radeon RX 6700 cards. This means that the XT GPUs will match the new RTX 3060 in memory, but the non-XT versions will have a much reduced pool of GDDR6. [However, given the upcoming launch of AMD's RX 6700 series, this appears to be a real lineup, not PowerColor speculation.

Interestingly, this also means that the RX 6700 will feature less GDDR6 video memory than AMD's previous generation RX 5700 cards in 2019. That second-generation GPU had the same 8GB VRAM capacity as its RX 5700 XT brethren, which seems like a bit of a strange decision after AMD has been championing the cause of large memory GPUs for some time now. [However, AMD knows that there is an opportunity to sell a large number of RX 6700 cards, and the limited availability and high price of GDDR6 memory could hinder such an effort. Given the state of AMD's recent hardware releases, it seems likely that mainstream GPUs AMD has more than enough on its plate to get new cards well into the market without having to worry about filling them up with video memory that it does not necessarily plan to use.

The RX 6700 should still be able to use the Infinity Cache feature, which doubles the effective memory bandwidth at its disposal. However, this is not necessarily important at the lower resolutions that the RX 6700 series is targeting.

Memory capacity aside, we know that these mainstream AMD RDNA 2 cards will be built around 7nm Navi 22 GPUs, and the RX 6700 XT will likely have the same 40 CU (compute unit) configuration as the older RX 5700 XT. However, thanks to the optimizations of this second-generation Navi design, performance should improve significantly.

For the RX 5700 series, the non-XT cards will come in 36 CUs, giving the two RX 6700 siblings a core count of 2,560 and 2,304 RDNA 2 cores, respectively.

With the Nvidia RTX 3060 and AMD RX 6700 XT vying for hearts and brains, the direct mainstream matchup is shaping up to be one of the most interesting graphics card battles of the year. But which one can get an actual GPU onto store shelves is arguably far more important than which one delivers higher frame rates.