Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Like the rest of the Radeon RX 6600 graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is based on AMD's 7nm RDNA 2 graphics architecture. AMD's main focus here was to optimize RDNA, working in new features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and boosting power efficiency. AMD also included Infinity Cache with RDNA 2 graphics cards, which massively improves memory bandwidth.
Unlike the other graphics cards in the RDNA 2 lineup, AMD is not launching its own version of the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Instead, it's exclusively available through third party card partners like MSI and XFX. The version of the card we were sent for review was the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X. In this matchup, the RTX 3060 was 9% faster at 1080p and 14% faster at 1440p which is a significant margin, though the 1% lows are basically identical.As expected the margins continue to head in the wrong direction for the 6600 XT when increasing the resolution. At 1440p it's now 18% slower than the 3060 Ti and 24% slower than the 6700 XT.
On top of that, you get DLSS which is widely supported by many new AAA titles and it works really well at 1440p and beyond, and that's resolutions where the RTX 3060 could do with a performance boost. Another interesting point is the RX 6600 XT performance on the AMD Ryzen 5900X PC (remember, our standard configuration uses the 9900K). Overall performance improved by 3.6%, with Dirt 5, Final Fantasy XIV and Forza Horizon 4 showing the biggest gains. Most of the other games show a minor 1–3% improvement. We didn't test whether the improvement was due to the faster CPU, or the PCIe Gen4 interface — or both. We also don't have current benchmarks for all of the other GPUs on the Ryzen 5900X, but mostly we wanted to show that AMD's high-end CPU did provide a minor improvement compared to the three years old (has it really been that long?) Core i9-9900K.
Days Gone, like Warhammer, is another example where the 6600 XT ends up trailing the RTX 3060, and although the margin isn't huge, we saw very few examples of this in the day-one review. Here we're looking at 5% less performance for the Radeon GPU at 1080p, and 8% less at 1440p. 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. Watch Dogs: Legion is another game where the 6600 XT proves its essentially a 5700 XT in terms of performance. With 72 fps on average, it found itself situated between the RTX 3060 Ti and 3060 at 1080p, but that meant it was 18% slower than the 6700 XT, which isn't a bad result. 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. Overall the Radeon RX 6600 XT is the faster GPU, which we already knew from previous testing, but the margin is slimmer than first thought. The delta between the two GPUs will always depend on the games used for testing – or in your case, the games you actually care about. Ray tracing performance seems fairly even in the few titles we tested, though we'd say the RTX 3060 has better support right now overall.
We also found a 5% reduction in performance when testing with Death Stranding and this saw the 6600 XT go from slightly leading the 3060 Ti to trailing it by a small margin. The last set of results we're going to look at are for Cyberpunk 2077 and here the 6600 XT was 9% faster using the high quality settings at 1080p. Both GPUs are best suited to 1080p gaming in this title as the slightly dialed down quality settings saw just 44 fps rendered on average at 1440p. Performance SummaryToday 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. When looking at our 50 game sample – and that's a substantial number of games to test – it's fair to conclude that in most instances there will be less than a 10% difference between these two GPUs. These are good questions, though the most important question will be how many GPUs AMD can manufacture and get to the market. There's plenty of evidence that Nvidia currently outsells AMD by a ratio of at least 10-to-1 (based on the latest Steam Hardware Survey, as well as our GPU pricing index data), and that could boil down to production capacity. RX 6600 XT performance won't matter much if gamers can't go out and buy the card. 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. As we've seen before, Doom Eternal is very memory intensive when using the Ultra Nightmare setting, and while we could simply tune the settings for better results, I'd rather take a look at how these graphics cards perform when saturated as it should provide some insight into future performance.
Great Deal 
New Comment