If you hark back to AMD's keynote presentation at CES 2021, you might remember one of the last slides shown by Dr Lisa Su appeared to tease the Radeon RX 6700 (XT) and 6600 (XT) graphics cards. Coming at the end of the mobile-CPU-centric presentation, the minor slide detail hinted that these objects of desire arriving in H1 2021. This was also the timescale given for the new Ryzen 5000 powered laptops, and they have already arrived (depending on where you live) boasting Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 graphics options in many cases.
Yesterday, Hardware Luxx editor, Andreas Shilling, Tweeted an image showing off the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT logo that will be used in packaging, box art, etc. There is nothing surprising about the appearance of the logo, an artworker will have simply edited the numbers in an existing RX 6800 XT logo file perhaps. However, Schilling provided a couple of info nuggets alongside the reveal.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT will be targeting 1440p gaming, wrote the tech editor, and it will come packing 12GB of GDDR6 graphics memory. This falls in line with previous leaks, spills, and expectations.
PC enthusiasts and gamers are currently very keen on securing next gen GPUs so many will have their eyes on the release date hoping something (supplies) will be different this time. Looking at the top slide with the 'H1' timescale shown to the right of Dr Lisa Su, we already have the laptops, so it wouldn't be surprising if the 6700 (XT) will come shortly, followed by its smaller brother(s) later in the year. It might be this or some other insider knowledge which leads Schilling to question "or is it Q1?" in his Tweet. Referring back to our previous leaks article, again, CowCotLand's insiders touted a launch date for the RX 6700 XT as being the end of March, which is the end of Q1 2021.
It will be interesting to see what AMD say about supplies of GPUs when it launches the RX 6700 XT and the smaller RDNA 2 graphics cards. In our interview with Dr Lisa Su in mid-January, the AMD CEO stated that "supply catch-up is very high up on the priority list," and that product supply tightness should ease in mid 2021. The volumes that could ship and be bought up if supply were not an issue is creating a massive opportunity for the first graphics card player that can fix its supply issues.
