AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

Big Navi slims down and speeds up

- JARRED WALTON

SO FAR, AMD’s Big Navi (aka RDNA2) line-up has focused on the heavyweight end of the spectrum, but that all changes with the Navi 22 GPU and the RX 6700 XT. Take a brawny GPU with 80 compute units, and tell it to go work out and get down to half that size, and you end up with a smaller chip that happens to clock exceptionally well.

Building a fast graphics card involves striking a balance between many competing goals. Larger chips perform better, but they also cost a lot more and use more power. Crank up the clock speeds on a beefy chip and you’ll end up with extreme temperature requirements. AMD has learned a lot over the past several generations, and while Navi 22 might not be the sleekest kid on the track, it has some seriously tuned engine performance.

And by that, we mean it clocks like a bat out of hell. We’ve grown accustomed to maximum GPU clocks in the 1.9GHz range. AMD’s Navi 21 GPUs blast past that with Game Clocks of up to 2.25GHz. Navi 22 revs the engine even higher, and we routinely saw clock speeds of over 2.5GHz while gaming. Clock speed isn’t everything, but all else being equal, higher clocks mean faster performance.