AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Review

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is AMD's latest mainstream GPU release, expected to land on retailers' shelves a day after this review goes live, that is, immediate availability on August 11. Naturally, the $380 MSRP is a mere indication of the actual street price for this product.

Expect to pay a hefty premium due to the shortages, cryptomining and scalping going around. If we use the 6700 XT equally a price guide, you can await to pay around $600 for the 6600 XT. We'll save the detailed retail pricing discussion for after when examining the cost per frame data, for now let'southward focus on the claimed MSRP, which sees the 6600 XT coming in at a 21% discount when compared to the 6700 XT.

We're looking at new silicon with the 6600 XT equally the Navi 23 GPU is based on a 237mm2 dice packing 11.ane billion transistors, about a billion more than the older 5700 XT. Enabled are 32 compute units providing 2048 stream processors, 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs. That'due south a xx% reduction in cores and TAUs when compared to the 6700 XT.

The 6600 XT suffers a substantial downgrade to the retentivity subsystem, dropping from a 192-flake wide jitney to a 128-flake memory autobus, a 33% reduction which ways that despite using the same sixteen Gbps GDDR6 memory, the bandwidth has too been reduced past 33%, dropping from 384 GB/s to simply 256 GB/s.

Retentivity capacity has also been reduced from 12GB to 8GB. AMD is targeting 1080p gaming with the 6600 XT, and they propose 8GB of VRAM is suitable for this resolution in 2022. The downgrades don't terminate there either. The Infinity Enshroud has been slashed by a massive 67%, reducing it from 96 MB down to 32 MB and with that bandwidth has dropped from 1459 GB to 922 GB, a 37% reduction.

Put differently, the Radeon 6600 XT is 21% cheaper than the 6700 XT and on paper it appears it's going to exist at least xx% slower.

Interestingly, AMD's been keen to suggest that the 6600 XT competes with the RTX 3060, rather than the 3060 Ti. But we're having none of that, at $380 information technology's 15% more expensive than the 3060 and only 5% cheaper than the 3060 Ti. Then a flake cheeky there and in reality AMD'due south is barely offering a $twenty discount for a product that volition no doubt deliver lackluster ray tracing performance. While nosotros similar FSR so far, it's by no means good enough to neutralize the DLSS threat either.

Another potential upshot is that AMD has gimped the PCI Express interface and although it still uses PCIe 4.0, the bandwidth has been reduced to x8. When installed in a PCIe 4.0 system this is a non-issue, simply performance related problems could arise when installed in a system that only supports PCIe 3.0, which right now is most systems.

This is because when using PCIe iv.0, the Radeon 6600 XT connects to the CPU using a 16GB/s link which is sufficient for modern graphics cards as that's what you get with PCIe 3.0 x16. However, when limited to an x8 interface the bandwidth for a PCIe 3.0 system is reduced to simply 8 GB/southward, and we've found in the by this can heavily limit performance, particularly when fetching data from arrangement retention. We'll wait at PCIe iii.0 vs 4.0 performance a little after on.

Let's at present go over some benchmarks using the MSI Gaming 10 model we have on mitt. All criterion results are based on AMD and Nvidia GPUs running at the official specs, with no manufactory overclocking. In total, we've tested 12 games at 1080p and 1440p using our Ryzen 9 5950X examination arrangement which has been configured with 32GB of dual-rank, dual-channel DDR4-3200 CL14 memory.

Benchmarks

Starting with Assassin'due south Creed Valhalla, the 6600 XT gets off to a flyer, beating the RTX 3060 Ti by a convincing xiii% margin and the standard 3060 by a massive 31%. We're looking at RTX 3070 Ti-like operation in this game, while still lagging behind the 6700 XT.

That margin was extended at 1440p where the 6600 XT trailed the 6700 XT by nineteen%, rendering 60 fps on average, which is a solid consequence.

Something worth noting is that the 6600 XT is just 5% slower than the 5700 XT. That's disappointing given information technology's but five% cheaper than the 2-year-old Radeon GPU (at MSRP, not the inflated toll). So while impressive when compared to GeForce offerings in this AMD-sponsored championship, the results are less impressive than they seem.

Moving on to Shadow of the Tomb Raider and we've got to say, these results look less favorable for the new mid-range Radeon GPU. Here at 1080p the 6600 XT was 19% slower than the 6700 XT and 17% slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, while it was merely 2.5% faster than the 3060 and 4% faster than the old 5700 XT.

The 1440pp data is worse and you can see the 6600 XT suffering due to the more than limited memory bandwidth, especially when compared to the 6700 XT which it now trails by a 24% margin. The 6600 XT was only able to friction match the cheaper RTX 3060 and we're looking at 5700 XT-like operation which is disappointing given the price point.

Watch Dogs: Legion is another game where the 6600 XT proves its essentially a 5700 XT in terms of performance. With 72 fps on boilerplate, information technology found itself situated between the RTX 3060 Ti and 3060 at 1080p, but that meant it was 18% slower than the 6700 XT, which isn't a bad upshot.

You tin encounter why AMD were similar 'wink wink nudge nudge' about the whole 6600 XT being a 1080p gaming GPU, they were probably hoping to persuade reviewers to ignore 1440p. Here nosotros meet that with 51 fps on average it only matched the 5700 XT and that meant now it was just 6% faster than the RTX 3060 and 16% slower than the 3060 Ti and 22% slower than the 6700 XT, so a weak issue at 1440p.

Those of you playing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p probably don't require the 6600 XT, but in instance you practise, hither are the results. The new Radeon GPU was good for effectually 300 fps on boilerplate and that's the same level of performance you'll receive from the quondam 5700 XT or 2070 Super, or the newer and cheaper RTX 3060. So not a especially impressive showing given it was 25% slower than the 6700 XT.

Every bit we've seen a number of times now, the margins increase at 1440p and not the way a potential 6600 XT owner would want them to. Hither information technology was 29% slower than the 6700 XT while losing out to the old 5700 XT and the new and cheaper RTX 3060.

Moving on to Horizon Zero Dawn, we find that at 1080p the new 6600 XT can only match the 5700 XT while offer a very minor improvement over the RTX 3060, and I think it'due south fair to say that'due south a disastrous event for the suggested cost.

Worse nevertheless, the 1440p results favor the cheaper RTX 3060 and now it's able to match the 6600 XT while the 3060 Ti was 23% faster! Information technology does appear as though AMD'south competing quite poorly with Nvidia's Ampere lineup at this cost point.

The Doom Eternal frame rates are certainly very loftier. The 6600 XT had no trouble pushing over 200 fps in our test, though that was but enough to match the RTX 3060 and the old 5700 XT. Information technology was 21% slower than the 3060 Ti and 25% slower than the RTX 3070.

The 1440p results are heart-opening as nether these conditions Doom Eternal starts to max out the 8GB VRAM buffer and although it's possible to plough down certain settings in society avoid this, with no real noticeable touch to image quality, we deliberately opt non to do that and instead utilize this equally more than of a forrard-looking blazon criterion.

This is what we expect to meet in future memory-enervating titles. The key here is that both the 6600 XT and 3060 Ti use 8GB of VRAM, nonetheless the GeForce GPU is 55% faster, so how can that be? We believe this has more to practise with memory bandwidth and the RTX 3060 Ti only has a lot more than of it -- 75% more, thanks to the wider 256-bit memory bus.

The 5700 XT too enjoys 75% more memory bandwidth though it was only 19% faster, which is nonetheless a massive margin and the but reason it's non larger is considering shader functioning is limited. This is an interesting expect at how poorly the 6600 XT performs relative to competing parts in memory-intensive games.

Like most Radeon GPUs, the 6600 XT performs well in Decease Stranding, delivering 158 fps on boilerplate at 1080p, assuasive it to match the 3060 Ti which frankly should be the minimum level of performance offered by this production.

Jumping to 1440p doesn't change the picture all that much. We're still looking at 5700 XT-like operation, which is also close to the 3060 Ti in this championship.

Adjacent up we accept Cyberpunk 2077, where the 6600 XT was good for 75 fps on average at 1080p, making it comparable to the 5700 XT, RTX 2070 and RTX 3060. Disappointingly though, it was 14% slower than the 3060 Ti and twenty% slower than the 6700 XT.

As expected the margins go along to head in the wrong direction for the 6600 XT when increasing the resolution. At 1440p information technology'due south at present xviii% slower than the 3060 Ti and 24% slower than the 6700 XT.

Borderlands 3 is an AMD sponsored title and information technology does play actually well with Radeon GPUs, spitting out 92 fps at 1080p and that allowed it to match the RTX 3060 Ti.

The 1440p margins are almost the same. The 6600 XT is able to match the RTX 3060 Ti as it delivered 5700 XT-like performance, which is not amazing and what yous'd await to run across at this toll point.

The Hitman 2 results are typical of what nosotros've seen in the majority of titles and that ways the 6600 XT performs closer to the RTX 3060 rather than the 3060 Ti, despite being priced closer to the latter. At 1080p, it was 14% slower than the 3060 Ti and just 4% faster than the 3060. Equally we've seen fourth dimension and time again, the margins extend slightly in Nvidia'southward favor at 1440p.

Resident Evil 3 has the 6600 XT expert for 166 fps on average at 1080p. That's 7% faster than the 3060, while lagging behind the Ti version by 14%.

At 1440p we're even so looking at a salubrious 102 fps on average, though the new Radeon GPU was 22% slower than the 3060 Ti, which is a disappointing event overall.

F1 2022 is some other game where the 6600 XT is close to overkill at 1080p, rendering 163 fps on average using the highest in-game quality settings. That saw it trail the 3060 Ti by a 6% margin while besting the standard 3060 by a 12% margin, though at the end of the day you could merely call it a 5700 XT.

1440p sees more 5700 XT-similar functioning and that meant the 6600 XT was again a piffling over ten% slower than the 3060 Ti. That'south our look at all dozen games tested, now let's have a look at the average performance.

Average Functioning

Hither's a breakdown of the 1080p benchmarks from our 12-game sample. As you can see, the Radeon 6600 XT came out nine% slower than the 3060 Ti which is weak and won't position information technology well in terms of cost per frame, at least based on the mythical MSRP, but we'll get to that soon...

Even if nosotros ignore the Ampere competition, the 6600 XT is still underwhelming when compared to AMD's previous efforts, such as the 5700 XT. For basically the same price, you're getting basically the same performance years later.

This really does expect like AMD's Turing moment.

While AMD would similar to tell you the 6600 XT is a 1080p gaming graphics carte du jour, the fact is many of you will want to use a ~$400 graphics bill of fare at 1440p and frankly that'southward non asking much. At this resolution the new GPU slips further behind the 3060 Ti, trailing it by 16% and showing information technology isn't much faster than the standard 3060 -- and one time again, information technology's basically a 5700 XT.

For those interested, here'south what 4K gaming performance looks like. As games go more demanding, the 3060 Ti should still be able to evangelize a sixty fps experience for the most office, while the 6600 XT could autumn off a cliff due to its limited bandwidth.

Previously we saw that the 6600 XT was 9% slower than the 3060 Ti at 1080p, then 16% slower at 1440p and hither at 4K it's 26% slower.

Ability Consumption

Where the Radeon 6600 XT does shine is when looking at power consumption. In our examination with Doom at 1440p, it used no more than power than the older 5600 XT and even so it managed to deliver 23% more than operation.

Yous're also looking at an increment of 100 watts for the total system with the 3060 Ti. So in terms of efficiency the 6600 XT is very practiced.

Ray Tracing

At present let's motility on to some ray tracing testing and we'll offset with Cyberpunk 2077, and please annotation due to limited time with these cards nosotros've only compared the 6600 XT against the nigh relevant role, the RTX 3060 Ti. Standard rasterization performance saw the 6600 XT trail the 3060 Ti by a 14% margin at 1080p, and with both using ray traced reflections that margin blows out to a 44% arrears.

Without the aid of DLSS, the RTX 3060 Ti tin deliver playable operation whereas the 6600 XT simply cannot. Worse still, at that place's no way to boost the performance of the Radeon GPU outside of lowering other quality settings.

Using DLSS the 3060 Ti can exist boosted back to almost 90 fps on average and while information technology's non an apples to apples image quality comparison, information technology'south nevertheless an choice to achieve much greater performance with ray tracing enabled. Alternatively, you tin can use DLSS without ray tracing for an impressive 125 fps on average.

Doom Eternal is even more than fell for the 6600 XT, dropping from 228 fps on average to just lx fps with ray tracing. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 Ti dropped from 288 fps to 150 fps and while that'due south an extreme 92% functioning striking, the frame rate at 1080p was withal far more what most gamers would crave at 150 fps on average.

Enabling DLSS reduced the functioning striking to merely 29%. But even without information technology, the 3060 Ti was 150% faster than the 6600 XT with ray tracing enabled, so nosotros're not sure the word 'barbarous' really conveys simply how much of a not bad that really is.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition can merely be played with a GPU supporting real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing and is therefore enabled by default. Using the lowest level, which is labeled as 'normal', the 6600 XT was about 50% slower than the 3060 Ti and although it did still deliver playable operation, 137 fps is worlds better than 79 fps.

In fact, with the highest level of ray tracing enabled at 1080p, the 3060 Ti was good for 97 fps on average while the 6600 XT struggled with just 45 fps. Then with DLSS information technology was possible to heave operation upwardly to 143 fps, and then another ray tracing bloodbath here.

Fifty-fifty in Resident Evil Village the 6600 XT couldn't hold a candle to the ray tracing performance of the 3060 Ti, offering ~40% less functioning using the low and mid tier options.

So we take the Nvidia sponsored Watch Dogs Legion and no surprises, the 6600 XT gets dominated and is unable to deliver playable performance, dropping from an impressive 118 fps without ray tracing to merely 36 fps using the medium quality settings.

PCI Express Testing

As mentioned before, the Radeon 6600 XT is limited to PCIe Express x8 bandwidth, which is fine if you're running in PCIe 4.0 mode, but could exist an effect for those with PCIe iii.0 systems.

The performance hit running Assassin's Creed Valhalla at 1080p is fairly minimal, though we are looking at a 5% reduction in performance and that does bring the 6600 XT closer to the 3060 Ti in a title where previously it had quite a large performance advantage.

Nosotros as well establish a 5% reduction in performance when testing with Death Stranding and this saw the 6600 XT go from slightly leading the 3060 Ti to trailing information technology by a small margin.

However, in some games the reduced PCIe bandwidth makes no departure and we meet that in Cyberpunk 2077.

As we've seen earlier, Doom Eternal is very memory intensive when using the Ultra Nightmare setting, and while we could simply tune the settings for improve results, I'd rather take a wait at how these graphics cards perform when saturated equally information technology should provide some insight into future performance.

When I saw performance drop from 228 fps to only 182 fps when using PCI Express iii.0 my immediate reaction was something else had changed, maybe a quality setting or even the resolution. Just we double-checked everything and subsequently several back and forths it became articulate that this massive twenty% drop in functioning was due to the PCIe mode.

This ways when using both the RTX 3060 and 6600 XT in a PCIe 3.0 arrangement while playing Doom under these conditions, the GeForce GPU will be almost 30% faster. Just as shocking is that we found a fashion to make the 6600 XT slightly slower than the 5600 XT equally the older 5000-series part supports x16 bandwidth.

Of the 12 games tested, we found that the 6600 XT was merely three% faster using PCIe 4.0 on average, or v% faster if nosotros include the Doom Eternal event. For the most part those with PCIe 3.0 systems should receive fairly like performance to what's shown using PCIe 4.0, just in extreme cases the margin tin exist more than significant and this is possibly something nosotros could see more of over the next few years, so I tin't say I'thousand particularly impressed with AMD's decision to potentially gimp the functioning of the 6600 XT in this manner.

Cost Per Frame

Let's outset our analysis by looking at toll per frame using the MSRP, which has go a suggested price that'south no longer remotely accurate. Fifty-fifty if demand dried up overnight which isn't possible, but let'southward say it did, would we come across a return to MSRP pricing and so? We probably would for time to come releases, but I doubt that would exist the case for current generation products.

Pricing for this generation was nearly gear up in stone when Nvidia released Ampere back in September 2022. Since and so a lot has changed. Besides the natural demand from gamers and and then miners, shipping costs take risen, various tariffs accept been introduced, and prices for not simply components but also raw textile has increased, in some instances quite significantly.

Since the release of the GeForce RTX xxx series, raw fabric prices have risen by 30 to 50%. Materials like copper, aluminum, and even plastics, for instance. Now, if need did dry upwards for graphics cards, that doesn't mean pricing of DRAM along with all the raw materials would decrease as demand would likely continue from numerous other sources. That means getting 6600 XT'southward on shelves for the $380 U.s. could be extremely tight and mayhap not even possible without selling them at a loss.

Right now and likely for the foreseeable, the MSRP is BS. But if information technology weren't, well, the 6600 XT would kind of suck, offering worse value per frame than both the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti while offering inferior ray tracing operation, no true DLSS competitor and a gimped PCI Express interface.

For a more realistic have on pricing, allow'south expect to eBay in the US. What we're looking at hither is the typical sale price for each product on eBay over the past month, though of course the 6600 XT hasn't gone on sale even so, so we're using the same markup as the 6700 XT every bit that's probable where it'll end up.

If you're confused by the 3060 Ti pricing, information technology is very close to the 3070 Ti later on all, that'south because the need for the 3070 Ti from miners is lower equally all 3070 Ti models are 'Lite Hash Rate' and therefore aren't as efficient for cryptocurrency mining.

As well, the demand from crypto miners for the Radeon RX 6000 series is lower, as the Infinity Cache and RDNA 2's relatively small retention motorbus width doesn't brand them terribly efficient for mining.

The 6600 XT probably won't exist a sought-after mining card and therefore should terminate up being one of the most affordable electric current generation GPUs, estimated to be coming in around $570 at a cost of $four.45 per frame. In that sense, it should be adequately decent value and I guess that'southward what AMD's banking on.

Temperatures

Before we wrap this up, here'south a quick look at how the MSI Gaming Ten version of the 6600 XT performed in our GPU exam organisation, which is an enclosed setup using the Corsair Obsidian 500D.

Under load for 30 minutes, the GPU hotspot temperature peaked at 80 C with a peak edge temperature of just 67 C. The cores clocked at 2640 MHz on boilerplate which is about an eight% increase over the AMD reference spec. This as well raised the GPU power to 145 watts which is 15 watts higher up stock.

Despite the small overclock, the Gaming X ran cool and extremely quiet with the fans operating at just 1100 RPM. Overall, that's a fantastic issue for what is a well-made graphics bill of fare. My simply complaint, and information technology is a bit of a frustrating 1, is that it doesn't feature a dual BIOS.

What We Learned

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is as close as it gets to an RX 5700 XT in terms of pricing and performance, with the addition of ray tracing and DirectX 12 Ultimate support. It's an underwhelming release at a time when we weren't expecting to be wowed.

Nonetheless, I exercise experience AMD managed to make the 6600 XT even worse than anticipated by gimping the PCI Express interface and heavily reducing the Infinity Cache capacity, making this GPU weaker than expected, particularly for 1440p gaming.

If the suggested retail pricing was effective on the 6600 XT and the remainder of the market, this release would be a joke, the laughing stock of the RDNA2 lineup. Even based on the 1080p data, information technology's worse value than either of Nvidia'southward offerings in terms of rasterization performance, and of course, it gets worse as you increase the resolution.

The merely adept thing I can say virtually the Radeon RX 6600 XT is that it sips power, and due to the lower need you lot should be able to buy information technology. However, although we anticipate that the 6600 XT will be the best value option at places like eBay, it's hard to get excited about. Had AMD fabricated the MSRP $300, then sure the 6600 XT would be a pretty decent offering and honestly given the ray tracing functioning, lack of a true DLSS competitor for 1080p gaming, and the PCIe limitations, that's the about AMD should be charging for this part.

Only of course, with the industry existence what it is correct now, AMD's basically maxim they'll happily make their margin on the $380 MSRP considering you have no choice only to buy it at any that translates into in the real world. At the end of the day, if these are widely available for $570, AMD would exist able to sell a expert deal of them, probably.

If we take a local PC office seller equally an example, we tin encounter that anything high-end is really difficult to buy, fifty-fifty at the farthermost prices. Notwithstanding, parts like the RTX 3060 Ti and 6700 XT or lower are easier to buy, admitting at inflated prices. I believe this is considering gamers with deep pockets who have their sights on a high-cease graphics card are willing to spend whatever they need to and not every bit willing to wait.

Whereas buyers on a tighter budget are the opposite. They're less willing to participate in price gouging and more patient, and are therefore likely to wait it out. So overpriced RX 6700 XTs and RTX 3060 series graphics cards aren't selling nigh as quickly as expected and demand for the mediocre 6600 XT is almost certainly going to exist even lower.

We've been told by a retailer that every bit shortly as parts similar the 3060 Ti are available for under $750, they fly out the door. Basically it's not possible to continue them in stock at $650. So this supports my theory regarding mid-range shoppers.

Availability and Pricing

Right before going alive, we received some concluding-minute information from retailers and AMD. AMD seems very confident that you'll exist able to purchase a 6600 XT at or very almost the MSRP. Yep, nosotros've heard that one before. Nonetheless, checking in with retailers it does sound like that might actually be true, at least for the initial moving ridge of stock which nosotros're told is substantial compared to previous releases this twelvemonth.

This sounds pretty crazy, merely I take been told by retailers, that at that place will exist 6600 XT models available on Aug 11 selling at the MSRP. If that'southward the case, then the 6600 XT could be significantly cheaper than both the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti, and if so it'll exist worth ownership and a highly successful release. But everything hinges on pricing and availability. If what nosotros're hearing is true then the 6600 XT might really terminate up beingness a sought-afterwards GPU, despite its diverse shortcomings.