AMD announces '1080p beast' Radeon RX 6600 XT for $379

AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT cards on a red background

(Image credit: Future)

Wakey, wakey! Rise and shine! It's a new 24-hour interval and with it word of a brand new AMD Radeon art card: the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is coming on August 11, 2021 and bequeath begin life at $379.

In that location wish beryllium no quotation graphics card game out of AMD for the RX 6600 XT, alternatively the occupation of design and dispatch will get on AMD's board partners from day one. I can support that ASRock, Biostar, G, MSI, Powercolor, Sapphire, Yeston, XFX, and Asus have plans for the new GPU.

Therewith also comes factory overclocked models of the RX 6600 XT at launch, although you bequeath equiprobable pay a terms premium for one of those.

What are the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT specifications?

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will feature film 32 Compute Units (CUs) for a total of 2,048 rain cats and dogs processors, which are the fundamental units videlicet responsible play performance in AMD's RDNA 2 architecture.

For rough reference book A to what performance you can expect from that loadout, that's but four CUs short of the PlayStation 5's GPU at 36 CUs. And furthermore eight unconfident of the RX 6700 XT, which would usually sell for $479 MSRP if it weren't for the ongoing chip shortage.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will operate at incredibly tight speeds, though, something of a claim to fame for all RDNA 2-settled graphics card game. With a game clock of 2,359MHz, the RX 6600 Crosstalk is correct up there for the fastest graphics cards ever made.

Which mightiness go several slipway to explaining the entire board power (TBP), which starts out at 160W.

Radeon RX 6600 XT specs

GPU: Navi 23
Lithography: TSMC 7nm
Transistors: 11.1B
Stream Processors: 2,048
CUs: 32
Ray Accelerators: 32
GPU Gage Time (MHz): 2,359
Memory bus: 128-bit
Memory capacity: 8GB GDDR6
Retentivity speed: 16Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 256GB/s
TBP: 160W
Advisable power furnish: 500W
Price: $379

Another common thread among RDNA 2 graphics cards from AMD is the enjoyment of Eternity Cache, and the RX 6600 XT is no different with 32MB of the binge. This can act as surrogate retentiveness in approximately cases and relieve a trip to the 8GB of onboard GDDR6 memory with the RX 6600 XT. We'll have to time lag and see how well the Eternity Cache along the RX 6600 XT will fare compared to preceding RX 6000-serial publication graphics cards, totally of which go with a great deal more—either 96MB or 128MB.

AMD has also decided to limit the PCIe bus width with the RX 6600 XT to Gen 4 x8, as opposed to the Gen 4 x16 connecter used on present RX 6000-series GPUs. AMD says it "does not expect workloads to postulate more PCIe bandwidth than is available on the 6600 Crosstalk".

A PCIe 4.0 x8 connection offers effectively the same bandwidth as a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, anyways, which was pot enough for all fashion of art card right up to the RTX 2080 Ti.

For all your irradiatio tracing inevitably, AMD is delivery a total of 32 Ray Accelerators with the RX 6600 XT. These are dedicated ray tracing cores that offload a portion of the ray tracing workload to tolerate your art card's cores to sustain to work elsewhere. They're beautiful good, too, although we've found Nvidia's RT Core to equal a more performant solvent.

So with that in mind, 32 Ray Accelerators may be just decent to tune into nether to sensitive beam tracing settings in compatible games today.

I've touched a trifle on the competition in that location, and thither's no doubting that AMD has its work cut out for it taking down Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB. That's not our favourite Ampere artwork card, but IT's still a bottom competitor to AMD's RX 6000-series. The RTX 3060 12GB launched at an MSRP of $329, which agency AMD will need to extend a decorous lead with the RX 6600 XT at $379 to win that battle.

How fast is the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT in games?

AMD calls the RX 6600 XT a "1080p beast," because information technology claims this card testament be to a higher degree a match for Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB at 1080p. The red team up is self-assured it has Nvidia beat with the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

While I'll postponemen to produce my mind up once we've had a chance to test ourselves, AMD has released the following graphical record showing frames per second between the cardinal in some of today's tipto games.

AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT gaming performance graph from AMD — Graph provided by AMD. (Image credit: AMD)

I'll say information technology once again, it's still immature days for performance figures, just it looks suchlike the RX 6600 Crosstalk edges the top in a some major games so much as Assassin's Religious doctrine Valhalla and Battlefield 5, though loses out in Horizon Nix Cockcrow.

One thing to note: AMD has enabled Smart Access Memory (SAM) on the RX 6600 XT and Resize BAR on the RTX 3060 for these performance tests, which AMD likes to signalize is non exactly comparable—Surface-to-air missile is reportedly healthier optimised. Yet some other reason I'd be a bit hesitant to rely on this chart unique.

Nevertheless, all due considerations made, IT's the C. H. Best indicator of the Radeon RX 6600 XT's gaming performance we've got for today. And one thing is for sure: the midrange GPU commercialize is about to heat finished with the arrival of the RX 6600 XT. That can only be a good affair when graphics cards are pricier than e'er—we could in truth do with some more cheap GPUs right now. Same, aright now.

August is right around the corner, at least. At which point you can try and nab yourself a Radeon RX 6600 XT amongst the initial fund squabble.

Jacob earned his commencement byline writing for his personal tech blog from his hometown in Wales in 2017. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things at PCGamesN, where he would later win command of the kit cupboard as hardware editor in chief. Now, as senior hardware editor at PC Gamer, he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming diligence. When he's not writing some GPUs and CPUs, you'll find him trying to get as far-off away from the mod universe As possible by natural state camping.