With the Radeon RX 6600 XT, AMD wants to offer gamers with full HD monitors an upgrade option and alternative to the GeForce RTX 3060 from Nvidia. The PCI Express 4.0 graphics card will be available for around 380 euros from August 11th from manufacturers such as Asrock, Asus, Biostart, Gigabyte, MSI, Powercolor, Sapphire, XFX and the company Yeston, which is mainly active in Asia, an AMD – There will be no reference design.
It remains to be seen whether the card will actually be available in sufficient numbers so that street prices do not go through the roof again immediately. In any case, AMD states that the card is not very attractive for crypto miners because it has a comparatively narrow memory interface, which reduces the mining performance.
The coolers of the cards shown so far occupy at least two slots, and many protrude well beyond the length of the card itself. At most, this is really necessary for particularly quiet cooling, because the card consumes around 160 watts according to the AMD starting specification and uses an 8-pin connector from the power supply unit. Only Asrock has already shown a short model with just a single fan. A second Asrock model, Gigabyte and XFX use three axial fans, the other manufacturers use two.
The card usually connects up to four screens to its DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 outputs. A maximum of four times 4K (3840 × 2160 pixels) at 120 Hertz or 5K (5120 × 2888 pixels) is possible, alternatively an 8K monitor with 60 Hz is also allowed – this is also what the Radeon Pro W6600 does. The GPU itself has five display engines.
The video encoders and decoders correspond to those of the other RX-6000 cards and relieve the processor when playing and creating videos in H.265 format, for example. The modern AV1 codec is processed for playback on the graphics card.
The heart of the Navi23
The Radeon RX 6600 XT is home to the new Navi-23 chip, which AMD has presented with the mobile offshoot RX 6600M and the Pro W6600. On the RX 6600 XT, however, it is used in full configuration with all 32 compute units. The typical game clock is 2359 MHz and so the card achieves a computing power of 9.66 trillion single-precision computing steps per second (TFlops) – that is the level of the Radeon RX 5700 XT from the previous generation.
The RX 6600 XT has 8 GB of graphics memory – AMD does not currently allow other configurations for its partners. The GDDR6 memory is connected to the GPU with 128 parallel data lines and transmits 256 GByte / s. That is 43 percent less than the similarly powerful RX 5700 XT. As in the RX-6000 sister models, AMD uses a large buffer memory on the chip in the RX 6600 XT so that the card can still bring its performance to the road.
This so-called Infinity Cache has a capacity of 32 MB, but including the narrower memory interface per bit, it is only half as large as that of the RX 6700 XT (96 MB with 192 bits) and RX 6800/6900 (128 MB with 256 bits). At around 990 GB / s, it is almost four times as fast as the graphics memory.
Like the Radeon Pro W6600 and its mobile sister, the RX 6600 XT only communicates with the processor in the PC via eight PCI Express 4.0 lanes, which should not be a disadvantage in this performance class, but also for competitive esports games .
graphic card |
Radeon RX 6600 XT |
Radeon RX 6700 XT |
Radeon RX 6800 |
Radeon RX 6800 XT |
Graphics chip |
Navi 23 |
Navi 22 |
Navi 21 |
Navi 21 |
Chip size / transistors |
237 mm² / 11,06 Mrd. |
336 mm² / 17,2 Mrd. |
520 mm² / 26,8 Mrd. |
520 mm² / 26,8 Mrd. |
Compute Units / Shader-Kerne |
32 / 2048 |
40 / 2560 |
60 / 3840 |
72 / 4608 |
Type. Boost clock in games |
2359 MHz |
2424 MHz |
1815 MHz |
2015 MHz |
Computing power (FP32) |
9,66 TFlops |
12,41 TFlops |
13,94 TFlops |
18,57 TFlops |
Texture Units / RT Accelerators |
128 / 32 |
160 / 40 |
240 / 60 |
288 / 72 |
Raster output stages |
32 |
64 |
96 |
128 |
Typical TDP |
160 Watt |
230 Watt |
250 Watt |
300 Watt |
Storage |
8 GByte GDDR6 |
12 GByte GDDR6 |
16 GByte GDDR6 |
16 GByte GDDR6 |
Memory interface |
128 Bit (256 GByte/s) |
192 Bit (384 GByte/s) |
256 Bit (512 GByte/s) |
256 Bit (512 GByte/s) |
Infinity Cache |
32 MByte (993 GByte/s) |
96 MByte (1490 GByte/s) |
128 MByte (1987 GByte/s) |
128 MByte (1987 GByte/s) |
Price RRP / street |
379 Euro / n. v. |
479 Euro / 790 Euro |
549 Euro / 1050 Euro |
649 Euro / 1170 Euro |
According to AMD, twice as fast as a GTX 1060
In order to present the map, no own performance measurements may yet be published. AMD shows its own benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which are used in games such as “Forza Horizon 4”, “Cyberpunk 2077”, “Red Dead Redemption 2” and “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” in full HD resolution between 2.2 and 2, It should be 5 times as fast as the still very popular GeForce GTX 1060.
Compared to its main competitor, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 with 12 GByte graphics memory, AMD sees the RX 6600 XT ahead of 10 current games by around 15 percent in full HD resolution; Both cards achieve frame rates of almost 70 to well over 100 frames per second.
AMD also provides comparative values for its own competition. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is outbid by 40 to 70 percent – the latter in “Doom Eternal”, the former in “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla”, “Forza Horizon 4” and “Borderlands 3”.
(csp)