There is certainly some momentum behind the idea that an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT will launch soon. Last week we saw benchmarks of the supposedly upcoming graphics card unearthed from the depths of the 3DMark results browser. Around the same time Igor's Lab shared its thoughts on the GPU and asserted that we would see the first RX 5600 XT products in week 3 of 2020 (week starting 13th January).
Over the weekend some pretty substantial evidence of AIBs preparing to deliver AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT SKUs emerged to add weight to the above. Twitterer Tum Apisak shared a screenshot, which may have been Reddit sourced, which included the specification highlights of an ASRock Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger D 6G OC. At the time of writing it seems like the Redditor bowed to pressure from some source and removed their screenshot but Apisak's version remains, and VideoCardz tweeted that it rejected a request from ASRock to remove its story and images. Of course the ASRock pages detailing these unannounced graphics cards have been taken down.
Moving on from the tale of this story's provenance and onto the substance, please consider the screen grab of the product highlights embedded above left, and the supplemental specs page embedded below.
The big news is that the configuration of the RX 5600 XT looks to be much nearer to the RX 5700 (which costs about £300 today) than the RX 5500 XT (about £170). You can see that the RX 5600 XT features 2,304 stream processors, just like the RX 5700 (not the 5700 XT model, which has 2,560SPs). However, the GPU clocks are somewhat lower in the new entrant to the graphics card market. Being positive, this could make the RX 5600 XT a good overclocking card in the hands of enthusiasts.
Perhaps most significantly, to create product range differentiation, AMD's silicon scissors have been used to pare back the memory configuration of the RX 5600 XT. While the RX 5700 has 8GB of 14GHz GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory bus (448GB/s of memory bandwidth), the RX 5600 XT features 6GB of 12GHz GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus (288GB/s of memory bandwidth).
The launch date of mid-January seems reasonable given the early leak of these specs. Price/performance will be crucial to AMD in this hotly contested market segment - so even though we know these specs there remain enough unknowns to make or break this upcoming new offering.
