AMD Radeon RX 6700 may not be launching alongside RX 6700 XT on March 18

AMD Radeon RX 6800XT
(Image credit: AMD)

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is expected to be announced on March 3 through AMD's official launch event, but we won't be seeing its rumored less-powerful counterpart, the RX 6700.

According to French publication Cowcotland "Only the RX 6700 XT will be announced. There was indeed an RX 6700 in the red program, for March 15th, but it has been delayed (for the moment) and we will therefore only have the RX 6700 XT which will be commercially available on March 18th."

Videocardz has reported that Cowcotland was unable to confirm any further details, but as with any speculative information, we should wait for official confirmation from AMD.

Gamers should be concerned however regarding the rumors that France will only receive only 100 units of the reference card (in other words, the model created directly by AMD and not a third-party GPU company).

This is better than the embarrassingly low stock released for the RX 6800 series in which some countries were ignored completely, but it still doesn't bode well for the inevitable rush to purchase stock before it flies off the shelf.

It seems the stock concerns regarding graphics cards won't be disappearing any time soon, and if these numbers are accurate and reflective of what other regions can expect to receive, the chance of buying a shiny new GPU at an uninflated price may be slimmer than we thought.

Should you wait to buy the RX 6700?

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These upcoming GPUs will both reportedly sell for less than $500, bringing the next-gen Radeon cards more in line with the RTX 3060 Ti. These two new cards are also expected to use AMD's Navi 22 GPUs, with the Navi 22 XT powering the RX 6700 XT, and the Navi 22 XL powering the less-powerful RX 6700.

We don't know a lot about either of these GPUs, but the Navi 22 XT may have around 40 compute units, 2,560 stream processors, anywhere from 12GB to 16GB VRAM, along with 16Gbps dies, providing up to 384GB/s of bandwidth. The Navi 22 XL configuration should be less powerful than this, but without an official launch on the horizon, we may be waiting a while to find out.

Via CowCotland

Jess Weatherbed

Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.