During the CES 2021 keynote, AMD’s CEO Dr.Lisa Su confirmed that mainstream Radeon RX 6000 cards will be arriving in the first half of 2021. And according to a recent report published by Cowcotland, AMD is expected to launch its Radeon RX 6700 series by the end of March 2021.

It appears that these Navi 22 GPUs are launching later than previously expected, as previous rumors actually pointed out for a January release date. Now a new marketing logo picture of this upcoming mainstream Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card has been teased by HardwareLuxx’s editor, Andreas Schilling on twitter.

This seemingly confirms the existence of this GPU, and that the card is going to feature 12 GB GDDR6 memory as well. Andreas claims this GPU will target the 1440p gaming segment. The specs align with previous rumors which have been circulating before.

Schilling also teased that this graphics card could launch in Q1, further solidifying the already rumored March 2021 launch date.

AMD has already released its Navi 21 flagship Big Navi graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, respectively. The Navi 22 SKU might end up in the RX 6700-series of GPUs. The Navi 22 GPU might initially come in two variants, the Radeon RX 6700 XT and the Radeon RX 6700, respectively.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT will be based on the NAVI 22 XT GPU, whereas the non-XT plain RX 6700 GPU variant will sport the NAVI 22 XL silicon. Coming to the specs, the Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU will have 40 Compute Units, which amounts to 2560 Stream processors/SPs. This is the same CU count as the RX 5700 XT, making it an RDNA 2 replacement of this GPU.

And as reported by Andreas Schilling the card will feature 12 GB of VRAM, likely being attached to a 192-bit memory bus interface. The RX 6700 non-XT GPU is also expected to feature 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, and a 192-bit memory bus interface. The exact CU count of this non-XT SKU has not been fully confirmed yet, but the card will be a cut-down variant having fewer CUs.

This places the card in direct competition with the Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12GB GPU. AMD will also most likely use 16 Gbps memory dies which would provide a total bandwidth of 384 GB/s.

Few months ago, a picture of one RX 6700 series “reference” design SKU was also leaked on the web. The card is expected to feature a dual-fan cooler design, and may also require up to two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. It supports the PCIe Gen4 interface as well.

Though, we can also expect an 8+6 PCI-E/PEG power configuration for these cards. AIB partner cards will obviously offer a much beefier cooling solution, along with a custom design PCB. These mainstream Radeon 6000 series GPUs might offer more value for money than the other flagship Big Navi cards, but assuming you can buy one at the MSRP rate set by AMD.

These cards are aimed at the sub-$500 GPU market segment, and target 1440p gaming. Once again, GPU’s stock and availability is going to an issue, given the recent market trend of demand/supply, and manufacturing and shipping costs.

Though, this still won’t stop AMD from releasing new SKUs, but gamers are still helpless in the end if they cannot grab any new GPU due to scalping and other issues. Also, don’t expect this card to be easily sold in retail shelves at least at the MSRP value set by AMD.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT will replace the company’s existing RX 5700 series models, offering gamers the benefits of the new RDNA 2 architecture. The cards will support Microsoft’s DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set, higher clock speeds and hardware-accelerated ray tracing (via Vulkan, and DX12 mode).

Both XT and non-XT variants will also feature AMD’s Infinity Cache memory, Smart access memory/SAM, and RAGE Mode. Lastly, Radeon RX 6000 GPUs will also support the DirectStorage API, which might help reduce the game load times.

Stay tuned for more tech news!