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Put differently, the Radeon 6600 XT is 21% cheaper than the 6700 XT and on paper it appears it's going to be at least 20% slower. Even if we ignore the Ampere competition, the 6600 XT is still underwhelming when compared to AMD's previous efforts, such as the 5700 XT. For basically the same price, you're getting basically the same performance years later.
At 1080p we see that the margin has decreased from 10% in favor of the Radeon GPU to just 6%, not a massive change but it's certainly less favorable for AMD. The decline is largely due to the inclusion of titles such as PUBG, Days Gone, Flight Simulator 2020, Warhammer II, Biomutant, and F1 2021. Having said that, once you take the full picture into account, it's hard not to argue that the GeForce RTX 3060 is the better buy and is even worth a premium. This is because when you start to look at what each product offers beyond rasterization performance, there's not much to talk about when it comes to the 6600 XT. That margin was extended at 1440p where the 6600 XT trailed the 6700 XT by 19%, rendering 60 fps on average, which is a solid result. Though if I just say the fifth tier of this latest generation of AMD graphics cards effectively matches the frame rate performance of the best of the previous generation, then things look pretty rosy. But when you consider they're both the same price that doesn't really feel like a lot of mainstream progress to me. With that super high frequency in mind, the efficiency of the RDNA 2 architecture should be clear when you compare the total board power (TBP) of the RX 6600 XT at 160W vs. that of the RX 5700 XT at 225W.In a nutshell: the RTX 3060 offers similar rasterization performance, superior ray tracing, DLSS support, a bigger VRAM buffer, and a full PCIe 4.0 x16 connection, making it a better product – and if available at the same price, the obvious option. Testing done by AMD performance labs February 13 2023, on systems configured with Radeon RX 6650 XT and RX 6600 graphics cards (Driver 23.2.1), Ryzen 5 7600X processor, AM5 motherboard, 32GB DDR5-6000 memory, and Windows 11 Pro vs. a similarly configured test system with GeForce RTX 3060 8GB graphics card (Driver 528.24), in the following games and settings at 1080p: Assassin's Creed Valhalla (Ultra High), The Callisto Protocol (Ultra), Control (High), Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra), Dying Light 2 (High), Red Dead Redemption 2 (DX12, Ultra), Watch Dogs Legion (Ultra), Metro Exodus (Extreme), God of War (Ultra), Spiderman Remastered (Maxed), Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (Badass), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Extreme), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest), F1 22 (Ultra High), Death Stranding (Very High), Sniper Elite 5 (Ultra). System manufacturers may vary configurations, yielding different results. Performance per dollar calculated using lowest Newegg USD pricing for individual AMD and NVIDIA GPUs as of March 15 and May 16, 2023, over the average FPS scores in the titles above. RX-886. Starting with Dying Light 2, this recently released game uses a proprietary 3D game engine developed by Techland known as Chrome Engine 6, and it's the only game in our test suite to use it. As we've seen a number of times now, the margins increase at 1440p and not the way a potential 6600 XT owner would want them to. Here it was 29% slower than the 6700 XT while losing out to the old 5700 XT and the new and cheaper RTX 3060.
Today we're comparing the new Radeon RX 6600 XT head-to-head against the GeForce RTX 3060 in 30 games. This will give us a good idea of how these two GPUs compare, and also give us a second chance to sort of re-review the 6600 XT using real retail pricing, which is kind of nice considering the day-one review was based on assumptions made a week before the 6600 XT hit shelves, so pricing and availability were largely unknown. The Radeon RX 6600 XT specs have been widely leaked and guessed at, and it looks like many of those were fairly accurate. It will use a new Navi 23 GPU, which supports up to 32 CUs—and the RX 6600 XT will feature the fully enabled chip. That means 2048 streaming processors (aka, GPU cores), 32 ray accelerators, and 9.7 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. It will also feature a 128-bit memory interface with 8GB of GDDR6 16Gbps memory, good for 256GBps of bandwidth, augmented by 32MB of Infinity Cache. AMD also provided details on the die size, transistor count, and number of ROPs, which as expected are all quite a bit lower than on Navi 22. The TDP for the RX 6600 XT comes in at just 160W, requiring a single 8-pin power connector. The 1440pp data is worse and you can see the 6600 XT suffering due to the more limited memory bandwidth, especially when compared to the 6700 XT which it now trails by a 24% margin. The 6600 XT was only able to match the cheaper RTX 3060 and we're looking at 5700 XT-like performance which is disappointing given the price point.Now let's move on to some ray tracing testing and we'll start with Cyberpunk 2077, and please note due to limited time with these cards we've only compared the 6600 XT against the most relevant part, the RTX 3060 Ti. Standard rasterization performance saw the 6600 XT trail the 3060 Ti by a 14% margin at 1080p, and with both using ray traced reflections that margin blows out to a 44% deficit. The Radeon RX 6600 XT is as close as it gets to an RX 5700 XT in terms of pricing and performance, with the addition of ray tracing and DirectX 12 Ultimate support. It's an underwhelming release at a time when we weren't expecting to be wowed.
Doom Eternal is even more brutal for the 6600 XT, dropping from 228 fps on average to just 60 fps with ray tracing. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 Ti dropped from 288 fps to 150 fps and while that's an extreme 92% performance hit, the frame rate at 1080p was still far more than what most gamers would require at 150 fps on average. Looking at the individual games, only one ( Forza Horizon 4) averaged more than 60 fps, and Strange Brigade came close at 59.9 fps. Dropping the settings would obviously help, but in general, we don't recommend buying an RX 6600 XT for 4K gaming — at least, not unless you want the console experience of 4K at closer to 30 fps, perhaps with FSR or some other form of upscaling to smooth out the dips.
The XFX RX 6600 XT Merc 308 is our first taste of the Navi 23 GPU, and of AMD's most affordable RDNA 2 card. But it still ain't cheap.
We're still more concerned with the 128-bit memory interface, though. That gives the RX 6600 XT exactly half the bandwidth and memory of the RX 6800 XT, with a quarter of the L3 cache. Will that mean half the performance as well? And what does that look like against competing GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD — and not just current generation cards, but also the previous generation?
Here's a breakdown of the 1080p benchmarks from our 12-game sample. As you can see, the Radeon 6600 XT came out 9% slower than the 3060 Ti which is weak and won't position it well in terms of cost per frame, at least based on the mythical MSRP, but we'll get to that soon... This is because when using PCIe 4.0, the Radeon 6600 XT connects to the CPU using a 16GB/s link which is sufficient for modern graphics cards as that's what you get with PCIe 3.0 x16. However, when limited to an x8 interface the bandwidth for a PCIe 3.0 system is reduced to just 8 GB/s, and we've found in the past this can heavily limit performance, especially when fetching data from system memory. We'll look at PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0 performance a little later on. The new GPU is more efficient, with significantly lower power consumption, and definitely a more technically elegant solution, though that doesn't make a huge difference in terms of actual temperatures or performance. I can absolutely say the RDNA 2 architecture is certainly a better technology than its RDNA 1 forebear, but the in-game results in this case are barely any different. Dying Light 2 plays well with Radeon GPUs and here the 6600 XT is 11% faster at 1080p and 8% faster at 1440p. Perhaps more impressive is that both GPUs rendered well over 60 fps at 1080p using the highest quality settings, with the exception of ray tracing, which isn't enabled by default. Without the aid of DLSS, the RTX 3060 Ti can deliver playable performance whereas the 6600 XT simply cannot. Worse still, there's no way to boost the performance of the Radeon GPU outside of lowering other quality settings.
Graphics Features
AMD also took some time to discuss other benefits of its graphics cards, including Smart Memory Access, Radeon Boost, Radeon Anti-Lag, and AMD FSR. This is the standard features discussion we usually see, and there's not too much more to say other than that these things exist and can be beneficial in some games. Nvidia has similar features, like Resizeable BAR support, Reflex, and DLSS, so we won't worry about getting bogged down in the details here.
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