AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Linux Performance
When taking the geometric mean of all the tests, the Radeon RX 6700 XT was 10% faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Particularly if you are still playing many games with an OpenGL renderer or not can further sway that metric. The Radeon RX 6700 XT in these tests was delivering 82% the speed of the Radeon RX 6800. The Radeon RX 6700 XT delivered 30% faster performance than the previous-generation Radeon RX 5700 XT. All the test results in full can be found over on OpenBenchmarking.org.
One of the big areas left to be explored is the Vulkan ray-tracing with the Radeon RX 6000 series. For that we are still waiting on AMD to release a driver with the necessary extensions whether it be their packaged driver or AMDVLK. RADV support for the Vulkan RT extensions will presumably come in time. There are some Vulkan demos available for Linux that exercise these extensions while the first games on Linux making use of Vulkan ray-tracing will likely be through Valve's Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton working on allowing DirectX 12 Ray-Tracing to be implemented over Vulkan. Stay tuned for more benchmarks on that front.
There also still isn't any upstream ROCm compute support for the Radeon RX 6000 series but that is hopefully coming soon. At least OpenCL support will be available through their packaged driver for the RX 6700 XT and I will be working on some OpenCL compute benchmarks with the RX 6700 XT soon.
The Radeon RX 6700 XT should be retailing for around $479 USD but given the ongoing chip shortages, we'll see how availability this week is for the RX 6700 XT. With existing cards still selling at well inflated prices, that is why there are no performance-per-dollar metrics due to the likely large variations from the suggested pricing.
When looking at the GPU temperature of the Radeon RX 6700 XT throughout all of the benchmarks carried out, the average core temperature was 71 degrees with a peak of 79 degrees, roughly in line with other current graphics cards. Granted, depending upon the RX 6700 XT AIB card, you may see different results.
When looking at the GPU power consumption during the span of all the benchmarks conducted, the Radeon RX 6700 XT had an average power draw of 147 Watts and peaked at 189 Watts. This was on Linux 5.12 Git with as noted there are some power management improvements where as if using Linux 5.11 you are likely to see the card maintain an average closer to the 189 mark. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti meanwhile in these tests had an average power draw of 158 Watts and a peak of 200 Watts.
Thanks to AMD for providing today's launch day Radeon RX 6700 XT review sample for Linux benchmarking and there will be more tests to come.
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