For nearly six months, Nvidia’s $329/£299 RTX 3060 has stood alone as the only next-gen graphics card targeting 1080p gaming – the most popular monitor resolution and one that accounts for 67 percent of displays, if the Steam hardware survey is to be believed. Now, AMD has a next-gen 1080p card of its own in the form of the RX 6600 XT, a $379/£329 option that costs $100/£90 less than the previous most affordable RDNA 2 graphics card, the RX 6700 XT.
With a $50/£30 price premium over the RTX 3060, Team Red will be looking to offer demonstrably better performance in most titles, while narrowing the gap in games that use hardware-accelerated ray tracing – a weakness for AMD this generation. The $399/£369 RTX 3060 Ti is also dangerously close to AMD’s new GPU, so we’ll have to see how these two graphics cards compare as well.
Looking to pick up a new GPU? We’ve rounded up where to buy the RX 6600 XT in the US and UK here.
Of course, whether the RX 6600 XT will actually make it to market at $379/£329 remains an open question. AMD’s own reference cards tend to sell out in a matter of seconds, and custom cards often come at much higher prices. AMD isn’t making a reference model RX 6600 XT – we’re testing a PowerColor Red Devil card that’s $429 – so it will be fascinating to see if regular people that aren’t plugged into stock availability Discord servers and Twitter accounts will be able to actually buy one on launch day at MSRP. Regardless of the ground truth, for now we’ll assume that the card will be available at $379 – as we need some basis by which to make comparisons!
Looking at the specs, the RX 6600 XT could be quite a contender. It has 32 compute units, compared to 40 on the RX 6700 XT, with similar boost clocks as well. The memory subsystem has been tweaked downwards slightly, to 8GB of GDDR6 augmented with a 32MB Infinity Cache and operating on a 128-bit interface. The Infinity Cache is quite a bit smaller than on other Big Navi cards – the RX 6700 XT has a 96MB cache and the higher cards all come with 128MB – so it’ll be interesting to see how the newcomer compares in memory-heavy titles and at higher resolutions. The RX 5600 XT from last generation used a larger 192-bit interface, so AMD must be quite confident in IC performance. Elsewhere, the RX 6600 XT uses only 160W of power, putting it between the RX 5600 XT (150W) and RX 5700 (180W). That’s 70W less than the RX 6700 XT, which is itself only 70W below the flagship RX 6900 XT, so it’ll be fascinating to see how RDNA2 operates in a much tighter power envelope.