AMD's Radeon RX 6700 and 6700 XT could be here by the end of March
But will they be any easier to buy?
The next graphics cards in AMD's Big Navi and RDNA 2 line-up could be here in just a couple of months time, according to fresh internet rumours. The purported Radeon RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT GPUs will both launch before the end of March according to French publication CowCotLand, whose unnamed sources claim they're currently scheduled to be released by the end of the first quarter of 2021.
Is there any truth to these rumours? Given the sparse number of details included in the report, it's difficult to say how watertight they are at the moment. Three months is a large enough time frame that it might hold a shred of accuracy regarding their intended launch window, but it could all still be a load of old bobbins. Instead, we'll likely know for sure once AMD's CEO Dr Lisa Su gives her CES 2021 keynote speech on Tuesday January 12th at 11am PST / 4pm GMT.
AMD have previously used CES keynotes to launch new graphics cards, such as their very first 7nm GPU, the Radeon 7, so there's a strong possibility they might use this year's speech to unveil the RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT as well.
As for the technical specifications of each card, they're currently rumoured to have 12GB of GDDR6 RAM at the moment, down from the 16GB you'll find on the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. The RX 6700 XT will also allegedly have 40 compute units and 2560 stream processors, but the vanilla RX 6800 is still a bit of a mystery.
In any case, I'd imagine that both cards will be aimed at the 1440p end of the spectrum, as AMD have previously positioned the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT as more of a 4K offering (the vanilla RX 6800 being their entry-level 4K card and the RX 6800 XT being their flagship 4K card). Of course, the RX 6800 is also a pretty great 1440p GPU, capable of delivering around 80fps on max settings in pretty much all of today's big games at this resolution, so it's possible the RX 6700 XT may be more of a 60fps 1440p GPU on max settings to rival Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, while the standard RX 6700 is more of an entry-level 1440p card - presumably to counter Nvidia's inevitable vanilla RTX 3060 whenever that gets announced as well.
Whether they'll be any easier to buy, of course, remains unknown. The three month window could be to help ensure there's actually enough stock available once the RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT do eventually launch, but we'll just have to wait and see. Whenever they do end up coming out, here's hoping they'll stick around longer than three seconds so some of us can actually get them into our shopping baskets.