In AMD's recent announcement of the RX 6700XT, the company revealed that the new GPU would feature a game clock of 2,424 MHz. That spec is much higher than any of AMD's other RDNA2 GPUs, but now, according to a Geekbench 5 benchmark (Tweeted by APISAK), we have evidence that the RX 6700 XT could boost much higher than that.
In the openCL test for this specific RX 6700XT, Geekbench identified the GPU running at a peak core frequency of 2.85 GHz, which is 17% higher than the card's rated game clock.
With modern GPU algorithms, this type of behavior is not uncommon, both AMD's and Nvidia's GPUs for the past few years, including all the best graphics cards, have the ability to boost beyond their rated boost frequencies if power and temperature allow it.
But with the 6700XT in particular, the alleged extra headroom available is impressive. With AMD's Navi 21 GPUs, the extra headroom available is not as high as on the 6700XT without manually increasing power limits.
This could be a surprising benefit from AMD's new Navi 22 GPU (that the 6700XT is using), which features a 50% reduction in core count compared to Navi 21. The benefits of a reduced core count include less power output and as a result, less heat.
So theoretically, if the power delivery and cooling system on an RX 6700XT stay similar to that of an RX 6800, the RX 6700XT's remaining cores can boost much higher and gobble up all the remaining thermal and power headroom the other cores were using.
However, what Geekbench 5 reported was the GPU's maximum frequency, not the card's average clock speed which could be much lower, depending on how large the thermal and power envelope is. Plus we don't know if the card was manually overclocked.
But, if the RX 6700 XT can sustain anything close to 2.85 GHz, then this will be exciting news for RDNA2 enthusiasts and RX 6700XT buyers, as AMD is letting the cores boost as high as they can within reason.
