AMD's RX 6700 XT is the best mainstream GPU, now only $310

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AMD's RX 6700 XT is the best mainstream GPU, now only $310

If you are in the market for a new graphics card and your budget is under $330, you may be tempted to get a Radeon RX 7600 XT or GeForce RTX 4060. Both are the vendor's latest generation GPUs, but they are not the fastest graphics cards you can get for that kind of budget.

AMD's previous generation models are by far the best value GPUs available today, and the Radeon RX 6700 XT is the best value graphics card available, despite being three years old.

With 2,560 shaders running at up to 2,581 MHz, it is more than adequate for all modern games at 1080p, often 1440p Unlike the RTX 4060, it has 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM running at 16 Gbps for a total memory bandwidth is 384 GB/s.

This may not sound like much, but the RDNA 2 GPU in the card has a huge 96 MB L3 cache, which greatly reduces the burden on the memory bus. The downside to this technology is that it consumes a significant amount of power, easily registering 230W. It is also AMD's first consumer GPU to support ray tracing, which makes it much weaker in games, especially compared to Nvidia's latest graphics processors, when ray tracing is enabled.

Another advantage the RTX 4060 has over the RX 6700 XT is its full support for DLSS 3.5-AI upscaling, frame generation, and noise reduction for ray tracing. AMD achieves the first two by using clever shaders (aka FSR 3) It can do so, but not to the extent of Nvidia's technology.

But forget about that and just enjoy the basic rendering capabilities. It is at least as good as Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti, and as we found when we reviewed the RX 6700 XT, it is noticeably faster in some games.

And for $20 more, you can get the Radeon RX 6750 XT. This is almost identical to the RX 6700 XT, but with a boost clock of 2,600 MHz, 12 GB VRAM running at 18 Gbps, and 432 GB/s of bandwidth. These are only slight improvements, but if you like to tinker with your GPU, you may be able to overclock it to go even further.

When the RX 6750 XT was released in 2022, the slight increase in performance was not worth the extra expense. It should be noted, however, that the increased speed comes with a peak power consumption of 250W. [Both are excellent mainstream graphics cards and a much better value than the RTX 4060 or RX 7600 XT.

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