1080P became the ultimate goal for gamers back when the seventh generation of consoles launched, and even the PCs of mere mortals were able to reach that holy grail with AAA titles by the time the Radeon HD 5970 and G-Force GTX 480 came out in 2010.
So why are we still getting excited about 1080P graphics cards in 2022, especially when they cost, what almost $400? Am I in a time loop? Oh man, not again!
Why AMD radeon RX 6600 XT makes sense
The AMD radeon RX 6600 XT is a strange release in many ways. Yeah, it makes sense to release a GPU that's less than half the die size of the AMD radeon RX 6800XT. And, yeah, it makes sense that it would use 16 gigabit GDDR6 chips. Both of those things make it far easier to manage supply constraints that have been strangling production and are projected to continue into 2022 or even 2023, depending on who you ask.
No, what's strange is the pricing, which we will get to, I promise, but also the fact that because there isn't an AMD branded card this time around, AMD has made the decision to send factory overclocked cards to reviewers, which means that everything you see from this point on needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Sure, the card has all the same basic features. It's got 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, 32 compute units, and as many megs of infinity cache, and all the goodies that come with RDNA2, like Ray Accelerators, real-time Ray tracing support, but that's where the similarities between the basic spec and what they've sent us end. And what they've sent us is AsRock's seriously overbuilt Phantom Gaming D card. With a whopping three fans and as many heat pipes to handle the 160 Watts worth of heat this thing is supposed to be kicking out.
The overclock itself is pretty mild at about 80 megahertz in game and under 20 megahertz at peak boost, which Andy says will be typical of other factory overclocked cards, so this atypical cooler is probably overkill. The back plate for its part is thin and seems to mostly be for show with what looks to be a pair of thick boy thermal pads on the back of the PCB. I say looks like, because in order to get the back plate off, you need to take the cooler off, and we've got benchmarks to do before we mess with the card's thermal characteristics.
You know the drill: GPU bench, latest updates, AMD's immediate family, and the two Nvidia GPUs that the 6600 XT is most likely to take head-on. You'll note we're using more RAM than before. Dual write memory is good for you, you should try it. Helps keep Ryzen fed anyway. All our games will be running 1080P max settings with Ray tracing turned to minimum where applicable.
Gaming benchmarks - AMD radeon RX 6600 XT
Starting off with some surprising wins, Forza Horizon 4 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla put AMD's mid tier GPU ahead of NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti by about 15 to 25%, which is absolutely fantastic considering the cards are priced so close together.
Unfortunately, this pattern doesn't hold up as we move on to other games like Final Fantasy 14 and F1 2021, where even with Ray tracing off, the Radeon loses out by about 10%, putting it closer to the cheaper RTX 3060. This gets even worse when Ray tracing is enabled and especially for a global illumination title like Metro Exodus, where we see the diminished Ray Accelerator count really bring the pain.
Thankfully, global illumination is not really common yet, but it's worth testing them all the same. None of these results are especially bad, to be clear. The lowest non Ray tracing result was still well over 60 FPS and 1% minimums. And it's consistently much faster than the RTX 3060, but when you're forking over 3060 Ti money, it all starts to look like an advertisement for that card instead.
Productivity benchmarks - AMD radeon RX 6600 XT
As always with cards this low on the ladder, productivity isn't a major consideration, but we're including benchmarks here, because it's very possible that you need something affordable for work at home. And given that for $20 more, the RTX 3060 Ti punches up to trade blows with the AMD radeon RX 6700 XT, it's no surprise that the cutdown AMD radeon RX 6600 XT can't really compete here either even against the RTX 3060.
That's not to say that there aren't some AMD wins in productivity though, even though the infinity cache is much smaller with this card, its ridiculously fast speed helps it in memory intensive tasks like in the energy and medical tests in SPECviewperf. Although, chances are this class of card will never see that kind of workload, so it's a hollow victory.
Thermals and power - AMD radeon RX 6600 XT
For thermals, considering neither the cooling nor the clocks are stock, and this card's probably not destined for a workstation, we'll do something a little different today and use two loops of five laps in F1 2021 to simulate gameplay and see if that game clock can endure some heat. As it turns out, AMD's total power estimate was pretty accurate, with an average of about 180 Watts and a peak of 225, well below the RTX 3060 Ti. But unfortunately also about as far above the RTX 3060.
The extremely overbuilt cooler does the job fantastically though, with temperatures hovering around 60 degrees at all times in our closed chassis bench. It kept boosting too, with clocks throughout the test staying stable at about that 2.6 gigahertz advertised maximum. Not a bad showing at all, but then again, this is a factory overclocked card.
Some other weird stuff about AMD radeon RX 6600 XT
Your mileage may vary. And here's another weird thing about this launch. See these, these pins here. As the pre-launch rumor suggested, they're 100% for show. You can even see where they stopped being connected to anything. Yeah, this GPU is wired for only eight lanes of PCI Express, which seems like a waste of material. Like, why have a full x16 cartridge connector filled out with pins? I guess it helps with physical stability?
I mean, this genuinely threw me for a loop when I first noticed it, but eight lanes of Gen 4 makes sense when you think about it. Not only are they equivalent to 16 Gen 3 lanes, most GPUs at this performance level won't even begin to utilize the full bandwidth of a 16 lane slot. This means that you're giving up nothing to use one of these cards in one x16 slot and then populate the other with a dual NVMe card or something, without compromising the performance of either. Heck, if you're not squeamish, you can safely mod the card for use as a server chassis or something without losing any functionality.
AMD radeon RX 6600 XT Price on Amazon
now, we've gotta talk about the price. At $349 for the base model, it's a steep ask. When this card was announced, we went into the reasons why this price, while painful, makes sense in today's marketplace, but it's going to continue being compared to the launch price of the RTX 3060 and especially the 3060 Ti, which is priced very competitively at $400. The only problem with this take though is those prices no longer exist and arguably never did. Third parties were charging well in excess of that before those cards launched.
There's no founders edition for the 3060, and third parties are going to prefer higher margin cards with the precious few GPUs they're able to get. In my opinion, that MSRP only really exists as a contractual obligation to make it seem like it's cheaper than it really is in order to undercut the competition. And I suspect the same is true of the AMD radeon RX 6600 XT's MSRP too. Just look at how much backlash they got for saying $379.
In fact, it seems that they're so concerned with perception that they wouldn't even tell us how much this particular AsRock card costs and neither did AsRock. If they pipe up before the video is done, I'll put the price on screen now.
Conclusion - AMD radeon RX 6600 XT
All of which is to say, it's impossible to tell you what the real MSRP of any of these cards is other than what Nvidia and AMD say they are. That makes it difficult to put the AMD radeon RX 6600 XT into perspective.
On the one hand, it's slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, that is its true price competitor, but on the other, whether that price exists or not depends on who you ask. Our recommendation therefore is this: if MSRP matters to you, the AMD radeon RX 6600 XT is an underwhelming, but not disastrous, GPU.
check out AMD radeon RX 6600 XT