With the imminent launch of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, many of us wonder if we can install this graphics card on our computers or it will happen as the rest of recent releases from NVIDIA and AMD, which have been almost unseen due to the fact that they will return it to lead miners and speculators. Well, it seems that the RX 6700 XT will not be so much of interest to miners. We explain the reasons.
One of the biggest current concerns for any potential buyer of a graphics card is being able to find the model they are looking for in stores and that it is at a reasonable price. The reason for this is known to all and has to do with cryptocurrency mining. However, a GPU that is good for gaming does not have to be good at mining cryptocurrencies. Which is the case with AMD's RX 6700 XT. Will it be saved from the clutches of the miners? Let's see the reason and the causes of it.
AMD RX 6700 XT worse on Ethereum than RX 5700 XT
Through a blog dedicated to cryptocurrency mining on VideoCardz we have learned that in the face of mining the cryptocurrency Ethereum, the RX 6700 XT has worse performance than the RX 5700 XT. This is surprising since the transition from RDNA to RDNA 2 we should expect much higher performance.
According to said blog, the RX 6700 XT has a hash rate of 43.5 MH / s, which is much lower than the 54.75 MH / s of the RX 5700 XT. This is surprising when you consider not only the improvement in architecture but also the higher clock speed of the new AMD graphics card.
This, which in principle is bad news for miners, translates into good news for those who want to update their PC with a new graphics card, either to play video games or for more professional tasks such as scene modeling and rendering. professionally as an amateur.
Bandwidth, an important factor when mining Ethereum
The reason the AMD RX 5700 XT is superior to the RX 6700 XT in mining is because of the bandwidth of the VRAM memory. We cannot forget that while the AMD RX 5700 XT makes use of a 256-bit GDDR6 bus, in the case of the RX 6700 XT its bus is 25% narrower with only 192 bits under the same type of memory.
That is why at the level of mining Ethereum the most powerful graphics card by AMD is not precisely an RDNA, but the almost unpublished Radeon VII that with its bus of more than 1 TB / s of bandwidth via HBM2 memory exceeds than far in bandwidth from VRAM to the RX 6900 XT.
So the advantage is not in terms of architecture but memory bandwidth. Although this leads us to the question: what about the Infinity Cache? Theoretically, it gives RDNA 2-based GPUs an advantage in bandwidth and especially in consumption, which in theory should be beneficial for mining.
The Infinity Cache is completely useless to miners, as it is a Victim Cache, it does not participate in the VRAM data capture process, where the process is the same on both the CPU and GPU. The job of the Infinity Cache is to adopt the cache lines and therefore the discarded data from the second-level cache of the GPU itself so that when it comes to searching for them, the GPU does not have to access the GDDR6. It allows access using less power and thereby increasing the clock speed margin.
So not only does the RX 6700 XT not have any advantage when it comes to mining Ethereum, but the same can also be said for the rest of the AMD RX 6000 range.
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