The 6700 XT is the newer version of the popular 5700 XT graphics card from last generation,
so what are the differences and is it worth upgrading?
I’ve compared both in 10 games at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions to show you what
the differences are.
Here’s what we’re looking at when it comes to spec differences between these two graphics
cards.
Both have the same number of compute units, stream processors, ROPs, and texture units.
The newer 6700 XT has more memory, but it’s not as fast as the 5700 XT, and the board
power of the 6700 XT is slightly higher.
The 6700 XT also has support for ray tracing and it’s got AMD’s new infinity cache.
This is the system that I’m using to test both graphics cards in, so overclocked i9-10900K
and 32 gigs of memory are the key specs, and both cards were tested with the same drivers
and Windows updates.
I’m testing with AMD’s reference cards, so the 5700 XT uses a blower style cooler
while the 6700 XT is different.
This cooler change appears to translate into lower temperatures, with Control running at
4K for half an hour the newer 6700 XT was around 4 degrees Celsius cooler while also
performing better, as you’ll see very soon in the game benchmarks.
The system with the 6700 XT installed was drawing about 6% more wattage from the wall
compared to the 5700 XT.
More power generally equals more heat, and despite using more power, as we just saw the
6700 XT was still a bit cooler too.
Like we saw earlier in the specs, the 6700 XT is able to clock higher with a game running.
Alright so now let’s see how that actually translates into gaming performance.
We’ll start with 10 games at 3 resolutions, then look at pricing & availability and content
creator workloads afterwards, or you can use the timestamps down below to time travel to
a relevant section.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested using the games benchmark.
I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom, 1440p results in the middle, and 4K up the
top.
At 1080p the 6700 XT was reaching 23% higher average FPS, though this increases to a larger
28% lead at the higher 1440p resolution.
4K was only just short of the PCMR 60 FPS with the 6700 XT, though you could of course
run with lower settings to boost frame rate.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little China with the street kid life path.
Despite the new RX 6000 series GPUs having ray tracing support, this isn’t currently
a game that’s supported so I’ve only been able to test without ray tracing.
The 6700 XT was able to reach 1% lows that were ahead of even the averages from the 5700
XT at all three resolutions.
The frame rates at 4K aren’t great on either card at these settings, but again you could
of course lower them.
Otherwise the 6700 XT was 35% ahead of the 5700 XT at 1440p in average FPS, and 28% ahead
at 1080p.
Control was tested with and without ray tracing, let’s start with ray tracing off results.
Again the 1% lows from the 6700 XT beat even the average frame rates that the 5700 XT was
able to offer.
Like Cyberpunk, the differences in this game were above average out of the 10 titles tested.
The average FPS at 1080p was 32% higher on the newer card and 34% higher at 1440p.
Performance dips down with ray tracing enabled, and I was only able to test it with the 6700
XT because the older 5000 series doesn’t support it, so this is an advantage of the
newer hardware.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was tested in the Sydney landing challenge.
Ultra settings are pretty intense in this game, there wasn’t much difference between
the two cards at the lower 1080p resolution, in fact this was the smallest difference out
of all 10 games I’ve tested at this resolution.
The differences are much larger at higher resolutions, the 6700 XT was able to reach
a 28% higher average frame rate at 1440p.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was tested with the game's benchmark, and also saw some small
differences between these two cards.
The differences at 4K and 1080p were the smallest out of all 10 games tested at those resolutions,
though the 6700 XT was still reaching 20% higher average FPS at 1080p and 1440p, then
a smaller 16% difference at 4K.
Watch Dogs Legion was also tested with the games benchmark, and was another where the
1% lows of the 6700 XT exceeded even the average FPS from the 5700 XT at all resolutions.
The newer GPU was 23% higher in average FPS at 1080p, and 28% higher at the next resolution
up, 1440p.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature using the same replay file with both cards.
The 6700 XT wasn’t quite able to get to 60 FPS at max settings 4K, though it was still
reaching 31% higher average FPS compared to the older 5700 XT, and again you could of
course lower settings to boost this.
The 6700 XT was reaching 33% higher average FPS at 1440p, and 30% higher at 1080p, so
some nice gains, but it’s not as if the 5700 XT is offering a bad experience at these
two levels.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode.
1% lows aren’t too far behind the averages with either, so both should be quite stable
relative to many other games tested, though the 1% lows from the 6700 XT once more beat
even the average FPS of the 5700 XT.
The newer card was 29% ahead in average FPS at 1080p, and about 31% ahead at 1440p and
4K resolutions.
Second last game before the big comparison.
The differences in Shadow of the Tomb Raider were the largest seen out of all games tested
at 1080p and 1440p, 32% gain on the 6700 XT at 1080p, and 36% at 1440p, while 4K was closer
to a 37% gain over the 5700 XT.
The Witcher 3 is a game I’ve been testing the same way for about 5 years now, so it’s
a good one if you want to compare with my older videos.
The differences were below average compared to most of the others just tested, so let’s
just take a look at all the differences.
These are the differences in all 10 games tested between the newer RX 6700 XT and older
RX 5700 XT.
The 6700 XT was almost reaching 25% higher FPS on average out of these games.
Some titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator down the bottom just had a 10% gain, while
others like Control and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the top were able to hit 30% gains
over the older card.
Stepping up to 1440p and the 6700 XT was now reaching almost 30% higher average FPS.
The smallest difference now was in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, though it still almost had
a 21% gain.
The difference increases as we move up to higher resolutions as more pixels better loads
up the GPU.
In most GPU comparisons the difference at 4K is usually larger, however the average
difference actually lowers a little here, though the 6700 XT still has a 29% lead over
the 5700 XT on average.
Best case now we’ve got a couple of games at the top that were reaching 37% higher average
FPS with the newer card.
As shown earlier, the 6700 XT is drawing a little more power, though relative to the
performance gains, the extra 6% or so power sounds worthwhile to me.
This results in the 6700 XT being able to offer better performance per watt, yeah it’s
using a little more power but the gains in games are much larger compared to the extra
power required to achieve this.
I’ve also tested some content creator workloads to see what the differences are outside of
gaming.
I’ve tested DaVinci Resolve with the Puget Systems benchmark.
This test generally seems to be fairly GPU heavy, and the newer 6700 XT was scoring 15%
higher compared to the older 5700 XT in this test.
Adobe Premiere was also tested with the puget systems benchmark, however the GPU seems to
be less of a factor here, so the 6700 XT was scoring just 5% higher than the 5700 XT in
this video editing suite.
Blender was tested with the Open Data Benchmark with the BMW and Classroom tests using OpenCL.
The longer classroom test was completing 33% faster on the newer 6700 XT, so closer to
the differences seen in many of the games.
SPECviewperf tests out a bunch of professional 3D workloads, and the 6700 XT was ahead in
all tests, though the margins could vary a fair bit depending on the specific test.
Now let’s discuss pricing, you can find updated prices linked down in the description,
of course assuming there’s actually stock available, as this has been a pretty big issue
lately.
The older 5700 XT launched in 2019 with a $400 MSRP, but if we check out current prices
on Newegg, well, I think things can be summed up as “ouch!”.
The newer 6700 XT is meant to have a $480 MSRP, but based on what we’ve seen so far
that’s probably pretty unlikely, that’s just the way of the current market as unfortunate
as it is.
As prices are just insane at the moment, the cost per frame graph isn’t really going
to be useful.
Hopefully this is more useful for those that already own a 5700 XT that got one at a reasonable
price and want to see what an upgrade may look like if prices for the 6700 XT get to
what they’re meant to be.
Anyway, assuming MSRP in the purple bars, the newer 6700 XT is offering better value
over the older 5700 XT.
Yeah, the newer card costs more, but the performance gain is still larger relative to the higher
cost.
It of course comes down to what your budget is and what level of performance you’re
targeting, but assuming MSRP the 6700 XT seems to be the better choice.
That said, the 5700 XT is still very capable, so if you’ve already got one you’ll need
to decide if the performance gains shown in this video justify going for the 6700 XT as
an upgrade.
Depending on pricing and availability though, you may be better off just holding onto the
5700 XT for a while longer.
The extra memory in the newer card may be more of an advantage in the future, but for
now, the 8 gig in the 5700 XT still seems pretty decent for 1080p and 1440p gaming.
It’s worth noting that I chose to test with resizable BAR disabled, as I wanted comparable
results for other videos, but this would give a boost to both cards, so considering both
can take advantage of it, I can’t see this changing the conclusion in a meaningful way.
I’ve also compared the 6700 XT against a number of other graphics cards in these videos
over here, so I’ll see you over in one of those next if you want to get an idea of how
the 6700 XT stacks up, otherwise if you’re new to the channel then get subscribed for
future comparisons and tech videos like this one, and if you want to help support the channel
then you can join our discord chat or get behind the scenes videos with patreon.