Radeon RX 6700 XT benchmarks leak ahead of launch, and they look promising

AMD's next GPU launches later this week, and a potential sneak peek of its benchmarks leaked out.

What you need to know

• Alleged benchmarks have leaked of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.
• The benchmarks suggest that it outperforms the NVIDIA RTX 3070 in some areas.
• The RX 6700 XT goes on sale on March 18 with a starting price of $479.

AMD announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT earlier this month. The GPU is built to deliver 1440p gaming at max settings, and should be among the best graphics cards you can buy. New leaked benchmarks give us an early glimpse of how the RX 6700 XT could stack up to its competition, including the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070.

The benchmarks come from Bilibili (via VideoCardz) and show off the power of the RX 6700 XT. If the benchmarks are accurate, the RX 6700 XT stacks up well against the RTX 3070.

The leaked benchmarks show a Fire Strike Extreme score of 17,435, a Fire Strike Ultra score of 8,568, a Time Spy score of 11,921, and a Time Spy Extreme score of 5,583. The 6700 XT's Fire Strike Extreme score beats out the RTX 3070's score of 16,573 in the same test, but the other benchmarks of the RX 6700 XT rank lower than the RTX 3070.

The leaked benchmarks claim to be from a system running the Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+.

It's always important to take leaked benchmarks with a grain of salt. It's not always known what other hardware a person has in a setup, so benchmarks might not be a direct comparison to other pieces of hardware. Additionally, some people fabricate benchmarks.

With the grain of salt noted, it wouldn't be surprising if we saw benchmarks similar to these leaks once the RX 6700 XT launches. AMD compared the RX 6700 XT to the RTX 3070 during its own presentation, so it makes sense that the cards would be in the same ballpark when it comes to performance.

An important distinction when comparing the RX 6700 XT and the RTX 3070, or when comparing any AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, is that the cards will vary when it comes to ray tracing. AMD graphics cards don't have ray tracing capabilities as advanced as that of the NVIDIA RTX 30 series. As a result, you'll see some AMD GPUs outperform comparable NVIDIA GPUs without ray tracing but then lag behind when ray tracing is enabled.

Luckily, we won't have to wait long to find out how the RX 6700 XT does in real-world use. It's set to ship later this week.