There are plenty of Black Friday PC hardware deals going on right now, and PC gamers will probably be most interested in the Black Friday graphics card deals. This one might fly a bit under the radar, but we've received the Sapphire RX 6700 10GB Pulse graphics card for review and have finished most of our testing.
It's an interesting card in its own right, taking the Navi 22 GPU used in the RX 6750 XT and RX 6700 XT but trimming down a few of the specs. It's also on sale right now and that may not last, so we thought we'd give you a quick performance preview.
Overall, the RX 6700 10GB does quite nicely at 1080p ultra, coming in 12% behind the RX 6700 XT while shaving $50 off the price. It's also 25% faster than the Nvidia RTX 3060 and currently costs 11% less, and it's just a few percent slower than the RTX 3060 Ti at a price that's 21% lower. In terms of overall value, about the only GPUs that currently rate higher than the 6700 10GB are the RX 6650 XT and the RX 6600.
Sapphire's card isn't substantially faster, but the extra VRAM, bandwidth, and compute does give it a 9% lead on the 6650 XT and a 30% advantage over the vanilla 6600. It costs about 20% more than the cheapest 6650 XT and 58% more than the 6600. It's also 11% faster than the Arc A770 16GB and 24% faster than the Arc A750, at least in our standard (non-ray tracing) test suite.
Ray tracing doesn't do AMD's RDNA 2 architecture any favors, as usual. The gap relative to other AMD cards remains similar, though it does extend its lead a bit over the Navi 23-based RX 66xx-series parts. It's also only 10% slower than the RTX 3060, though it still beats the RTX 3050 by a healthy 28% margin. Intel's Arc A770 meanwhile delivered 34% higher performance and the A750 also beat the 6700 10GB by 19% — all of these DXR results are at 1080p medium, which is about as high as you'll want to go with ray tracing on AMD's midrange parts.
Overall, there's plenty to like with AMD's RX 6700 10GB card. We can't help but wonder what took so long, but so many things were wonky in the world of GPUs last year that we'll likely never know for sure. If you're looking for a good card that can mostly handle 1440p in standard games and cruises along at more than 60 fps with maxed out settings at 1080p, give the RX 6700 non-XT some thought.
