AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU is being touted as a competitor to the unavailable Nvidia RTX 3070, priced at $479 and $499, respectively. Unfortunately, leaked benchmarks suggest that AMD's new card may struggle against the $399 Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti.

Leaker @TUM_APISAK shared some Geekbench 5 tests of the RX 6700 XT paired with an AMD Ryzen 3700X CPU and 32GB of RAM, but the results were disappointing.

In the Vulkan test, the RX 6700 XT achieved a total of 55,278 in Geekbench 5, which is about 42% lower than the 95,856 average achieved by the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti in the same benchmark. On the same page, even the entry-level RTX 3060 outperformed with an average score of 79,528. [Of course, not all benchmarks are equal, and in Geekbench 5's OpenCL test, the RX 6700 XT does much better with a score of 102,831. While this is definitely an improvement, it is still far from the average score of 120,576 of the 3060 Ti using the same test.

So what is going on here, and a few things to remember before ruling out AMD. First, the RX 6700 XT score is based on just two benchmarks, whereas the 3060 Ti figure is an average from all tests on the site. This reduces the impact of external factors such as weak auxiliary hardware or lack of driver optimization. [The RX 3060 XT will not be released for another week, so the drivers used for these benchmarks may not be ready for prime time. In short, we would be very surprised if the benchmark performance of the RX 3060 XT is not significantly improved by the time retail drivers are released that will allow it to reach its full potential.

The million dollar question is what its "full potential" is: is the RX 3060 XT a true competitor to the RTX 3070, or does it simply make the RTX 3060 Ti look like an absolute bargain?

We'll have to wait until March 18 to find out, but depressingly for gamers, that may be moot for the time being, as Nvidia's RTX 30 series cards have been in very short supply since their launch, thanks in part to crypto mining. The latest models in the AMD Radeon family, which will be released next week, are likely to be similarly hard to find.