After much talk and anticipation, AMD has finally revealed its newest graphics card. The Radeon RX 6600 XT, a ‘1080p beast’, is a mid-range graphics card launching on August 11th, 2021, for $379 and may give the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB variant some serious competition.
There aren’t going to be any reference graphics cards out for the RX 6600 XT. Instead, the design and dispatch job will be on AMD’s board partners right from the get-go.
ASRock, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, Powercolor, Sapphire, Yeston, XFX, and Asus all have plans for the new GPU. We will also be getting factory overclocked models of the RX 6600 XT at launch, but those will come at a price premium.
The Radeon RX 6600 XT will come with 32 Compute Units for a total of 2,048 steam processors, the fundamental units responsible for gaming performance in AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture.
For comparison, The RX 6600 XT has only four cores less than the PlayStation 5 GPU at 36 cores. And it has eight cores less than the RX 6700 XT, which sells for around $479 MSRP if it weren’t for the ongoing chip shortage.
This new graphics card will operate at extremely high speeds, as it’s the claim to fame for all RDNA 2-based cards. We will see a game clock of 2,359MHz, which puts it on the list of some of the fastest graphics cards ever made. This also explains the total board power, which starts at 160W.
Another similarity amongst RDNA 2 cards from AMD is the Infinity Cache, and the RX 6600 XT will come with 32MB.
This can act as surrogate memory in some cases, handling some of the work instead of accessing the 8GB of onboard GDDR6 memory. Time will tell how the 32MB of Infinity Cache work on the RX 6600 XT compared to other RX 6000-series cards, which have a lot more – either 96MB or 128MB.
- AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT
| GPU Cores | 2048 |
| Infinity Cache | 32MB |
| Ray Accelerators | 32 |
| Base Clock Speed | 1968 MHz |
| Boost Clock Speed | Up to 2589 MHz |
| VRAM | 8GB |
| ROPs | 64 |
| TMUs | 128 |
| Bandwidth | 256GBps |
| TDP | 160W |
| Launch Date | August 11, 2021 |
| Price | $379 |
AMD also decided to limit the PCIe bus width with the RX 6600 XT to Gen 4 x8 instead of the Gen 4 x16 connection used on the current RX 6000-series GPUs.
AMD has said that “it does not expect workloads to demand more PCIe bandwidth than is available on the 6600 XT”. A PCIe 4.0 x8 connection offers pretty much the same bandwidth as a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, so it’s not much of a trade-off.
With regards to ray-tracing, AMD is featuring a total of 32 Ray Accelerators, dedicated ray-tracing cores that will offload a portion of the ray-tracing workload so the cores can work on other processes.
These specialized cores should offer low to medium ray tracing settings in compatible games today. While they have performed well, NVIDIA’s RT Core is a more performant solution.
AMD has called this card a “1080p beast”, as it claims this card will more than match NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 12GB at 1080p. The company has also released a graph showing the frames per second between the two in some of today’s top games.
AMD has even stated that that the RX 6600 XT outperforms the RTX 3060 by “up to 15%.” This comes from the ten-game average that incorporates titles like Valhalla and Battlefield 5.
While it is still early to judge the card and whether it’s better or worse, it seems like the RX 6600 XT edges the lead in some major games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Battlefield 5 but loses out in Horizon Zero Dawn.
August is right around the corner, and the mid-range graphics card market will have a heated competition between Team Red and Team Green. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get our hands on the cards before they get sold out.
About Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
AMD develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.
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