The next AMD RX 6000 GPU is being announced on March 3rd

The latest addition to AMD's RX 6000 family of next-gen Big Navi GPUs will be announced on March 3rd at 11am ET, which is 4pm GMT for us folks in the UK. AMD announced their announcement event yesterday afternoon just as eager graphics card buyers were rapidly hitting refresh on Nvidia's RTX 3060 cards, although whether this one will be any easier to buy is anyone's guess.

AMD kept it fairly cryptic in their initial tweet, revealing neither the name of their new graphics card (although we can all probably assume it's going to be the RX 6700 or RX 6700 XT, given the only way AMD can go is down the power ladder now they've launched the 4K-capable RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT), how much it's going to cost, or when it's actually going on sale. All those details will probably be included in the announcement stream itself. In any case, it would appear to confirm previous rumours about the RX 6000 card coming sometime before the end of March.

Technically, AMD first revealed this card back in January during their CES 2021 keynote presentation. While they didn't mention the card by name, they did include the same image on one of their presentation slides, which said this and another, single-fan GPU would be here before the end of June.

However, given the tweet only says "latest addition" (singular), it looks like they're probably only going to announce one type of GPU, making another double whammy of an RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT unlikely. If I had to guess, I'd probably bet on AMD calling this new one the RX 6700 XT, based on their previous naming conventions. Both of their last-gen RX 5500 XT and RX 5600 XT graphics cards also had non-XT variants, for example, but they were confined to pre-built systems and OEM parts rather than something you could buy as a standalone add-in card.

Still, whatever AMD end up calling it, it will most likely be their answer to Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti. The RX 6800 is already pretty much neck and neck with the RTX 3070 (it's a faster at 1440p, but about the same at 4K) if you take ray tracing out of the equation, although if AMD somehow managed to produce a card with near-RTX 3070 levels of performance for less, then it could potentially take out both Nvidia cards with one stone. Indeed, as you may have already seen from my RTX 3060 Ti vs RTX 3070 benchmark comparison, there's not a huge amount of wiggle room between the two cards right now, so I'll be interested to see where the RX 6700 XT lands once I get one in for testing.

I'm also hoping AMD will finally give us some more details about their rival DLSS tech FidelityFX Super Resolution gubbins during this stream, as this is the one thing that's sorely missing from AMD's next-gen GPU line-up at the moment. Ray tracing support is all well and good, but when so many recent ray tracing games have been nigh-on unplayable without some sort of performance booster like DLSS to help bump up your frame rate, it makes little sense to go with AMD right now if you want a decent ray tracing experience. Here's hoping we'll not only find out more about it during AMD's reveal stream next week, but that it will also launch alongside this new graphics card.