The Nvidia RTX 3060 is an impressive piece of technology for under 400. They give you 12 gigabytes of VRAM, upscaling technologies, great tracing support, and excellent gaming performance. It’s easy to understand why it’s become one of the most popular GPUs in 2023. Well, I recently picked up another GPU that is a little competition for NVIDIA.
I will be telling you about AMD’s RX 6700 XT. I had a chance to pick up this GPU recently, and I decided to compare it to the RTX 3060 because, after all, they do cost almost the same right now. Now, you may be curious, so I’ll start with what GPUs I have here on the table. The first one is obvious: the PowerColor Fighter RX 6700 XT. And with prices dropping on last-gen hardware and drivers maturing, I wanted to see how this GPU compares today against Nvidia. The primary GPU I decided to put up against the 6700 XT is the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3060.
Let me go over the specs of each card first, so you have an idea of what each brings to the table.
One of the most important things that people are shopping for now is VRAM. The RTX 3060 and the 6700 XT both come with 12 gigabytes of GDDR6. Now, the 3070 only comes with 8 gigabytes, also GDDR6. The boost clocks are all over the place. The 3060 is 1882 megahertz, the 6700 XT goes up to 2581 megahertz, and the 3070 I’ve got here boosts to 1905 megahertz. These numbers may be different depending on what model you get or what style card. These are just the boost clocks of the cards that I have here in the tests.
The memory bus speed is 192 bits for the 3060 and 6700 XT, and for the 3070, you’re talking about 256 bits. It gives an effective memory speed of 15 gigabits per second for the RTX 3060, 16 gigabits per second for the 6700 XT, and 14 gigabits per second for the RTX 3070. Power recommendations come in at 650 Watts for the 3060 and 6700 XT, and 750 watts are recommended for the RTX 3070. The cards are also all over the place. The 3070 needs two eight-pin power connectors, the 6700 XT needs an 8-pin and a 6-pin, and the 3060 only needs one eight-pin connector.That’s it for the basic specs.
Now, when I purchased my 6700 XT, I got it over on Amazon, and I got to pick up The Last of Us Part One for free with the card. So, if you think about it, I paid less than 300 for my 6700 XT. AMD is always offering discounts on their GPUs and usually includes free games with them, so keep your eyes open. You may get lucky.
Here is a quick look at the test setup that I put together for this comparison. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and make it more realistic to what someone may pair with these peers at home. I hit the mark. I used a Ryzen 7 5700X CPU on an Asus ROG Strix B550F Gaming motherboard. Cooling the CPU is the Deepcool AK-500 Zero Dark air cooler, and the RAM is 16 gigabytes of G.Skill’s Trident Z RGB running at 3200 megahertz. Yes, that is the motherboard box supporting my test bench. Don’t judge.
I completed three test runs, both at 1080p and 1440p, so this is a lot of data. Please bear with me if my chart looks crowded.
The first game I tested was Apex Legends. I still really enjoy this game, even after all these years. Let’s look at the 1080p results first.
You can see the RX 6700 XT and RTX 3070 are both over 200 FPS, while the 3060 trails are at 189.3. What was most interesting to me was the one per cent lows. Look at the higher numbers the AMD card achieved versus both Nvidia offerings. That surprised me a lot, and it wasn’t just limited to 1080p results. Take a look at 1440p. Once again, the one per cent low on the 6700 XT is higher than both Nvidia cards. Remember, the RX 6700 XT is the same price as Nvidia’s RTX 3060. I just threw the 3070 in here for performance benchmark numbers.
Moving on to Forza Horizon 5, we see a slight shift in the top performer in this title. The RTX 3070 achieves the highest average FPS with 153 at 1080p. Once again, we have an impressive showing for the one per cent lows from the 6700 XT, achieving 121.6 as the highest number. Switching over to 1440p gave the 3070 more of a lead over the 6700 XT. However, it still beats the 3060 by about 24 average FPS, and again, AMD holds the highest one per cent lows of all three cars.
Hogwarts Legacy is a relatively new game, and it’s a little hard to test, considering I had to walk the same path in each run to keep it as consistent as possible. At 1080p resolution, the 6700 XT saw a 174.4 FPS average, with the 3060 only hitting 110.1. 1440p saw similar performance for both the 3070 and 6700 XT, with the 3060 falling short of 100 FPS.
Cyberpunk 2077 was next, and it’s quite a demanding title. Even at 1080p, the 3060 struggles to achieve 77.2 FPS, while the 3070 pumps out 113.4. The 6700 XT hit 91.9. All are perfectly playable frame rates, though. Now, the same thing happened to those one per cent lows in Cyberpunk. Three out of five titles isn’t that bad. 1440p starts to tax these GPUs, as the 3060 can’t even hit 60fps, and the 6700 XT barely got there. The 3070 came in just over at 76.6 average. That’s rough.
The last game up was Fortnite. At 1080p, the 3070 ran away with it, achieving 187.1 FPS, while the 6700 XT got 145.7, barely beating the 3060 with 131.3. The 6700 XT is back with those highest one-percent lows, though. Very impressive. Battle Royale games are challenging to benchmark since the surroundings change every time. Sometimes, people jump to different locations, or items don’t spawn at all. This is just me playing the game as you would at home if you bought one of these cards.
So those are the results you can expect across a variety of different maps. I didn’t run ray tracing tests in any of these benchmarks. It doesn’t make sense in this tier category. The performance hit that you receive is too great to be able to use that. I mean, these things can barely run Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings at 60fps. Don’t worry about ray tracing. I didn’t run any DLSS or FSR testing either. Honestly, everyone knows Nvidia’s upscaling technology beats AMD’s, but really, the 6700 XT doesn’t even need upscaling to compete with the 3060. If anything, it’s the other way around.
Overall, I’m very impressed with the RX 6700 XT from AMD. It can keep up with the RTX 3070, even though it costs about 130 dollars less. And the 12 gigabytes of VRAM make much more sense for future-demanding titles like Hogwarts Legacy and The Last of Us Part One.
Now, your use case is the last thing to consider before making that GPU purchase. Are you going to be doing content creation or some streaming, or are you strictly going to be gaming with your computer? Those are two things that you should consider before buying because AMD’s performance outshines Nvidia’s when it’s precisely rasterization, no ray tracing or anything. You’re not going to be doing any content creation stuff. Nvidia is clearly better when it comes to productivity, and AMD’s ray tracing support and upscaling technologies still need to catch up, too.
Out of these three card choices, I would definitely recommend AMD’s RX 6700 XT purely for gaming performance. It outshines the competition at a hundred and thirty dollars less than something comparable to it. Honestly, they’re both great cards and with prices continuing to drop, they’ll stay quite popular for some time. That is, until one of the companies comes out with something new.
