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In terms of performance, the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is equivalent to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. How much cache and memory does the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT have? The 5700 XT also enjoys 75% more memory bandwidth though it was only 19% faster, which is still a massive margin and the only reason it's not larger is because shader performance is limited. This is an interesting look at how poorly the 6600 XT performs relative to competing parts in memory-intensive games. 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.
Of the 12 games tested, we found that the 6600 XT was just 3% faster using PCIe 4.0 on average, or 5% faster if we include the Doom Eternal result. For the most part those with PCIe 3.0 systems should receive fairly similar performance to what's shown using PCIe 4.0, but in extreme cases the margin can be more significant and this is possibly something we could see more of over the next few years, so I can't say I'm particularly impressed with AMD's decision to potentially gimp the performance of the 6600 XT in this way. Cost Per Frame Which almost makes talk about the actual specifications of a particular chip, or even its real-world performance, feel kind of pointless. Yes, there is a certain malaise setting in for us humble GPU reviewers these days, and I am certainly not immune. If all the current generation RTX 30-series and RX 6000-series GPUs were actually available starting at their official MSRPs, the RTX 3060 might end up as the better option. Nvidia generally has better ray tracing performance, and DLSS 2.0 is still a benefit in the more than 30 games that use the technology. We also like that Nvidia put 12GB of VRAM on the RTX 3060, even if it makes the 8GB on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 look stingy. It also makes the RX 6600 XT look worse, but then for 1080p gaming, 8GB shouldn't be much of a problem for the next few years. The positioning and pricing of the RX 6600 XT seems out of touch with the rest of the GPU market. But that's when we're talking about relative MSRP's, which, in the current silicon-starved state of the industry, are almost utterly irrelevant.Though that's tempered by the fact there is only a rather paltry 32MB of this performance-salving cache available to the latest AMD card, however. Performance in Apex Legends is very competitive, but this title isn't CPU limited, at least not with these GPUs using the maximum in-game quality settings. Both GPUs allowed for solid 144 Hz gaming at 1080p and even at 1440p you're still looking at a high refresh rate experience. The cooler here is frankly overkill for this GPU. Through all of our testing, the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X topped out at just 67°C, which is extremely cool for a graphics card with a 160W TGP. Previously we saw that the 6600 XT was 9% slower than the 3060 Ti at 1080p, then 16% slower at 1440p and here at 4K it's 26% slower. Power Consumption
CS:GO really is a CPU benchmark at this point, with any half-decent GPU resulting in heavily CPU-bound testing, but it's always hotly requested, so we feel compelled to include it, and don't mind doing so when there are so many other games to balance out the results. As expected, we're looking at similar performance between these two GPUs at the three tested resolutions. With 8GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 arrayed across an aggregate 128-bit bus you'd normally expect the GPU to be starved of memory bandwidth, and while it's certainly lower than either the 448GB/s of the RX 5700 XT or the 288GB/s of the RX 5600 XT, its 256GB/s figure doesn't look too bad.The GeForce RTX 3060 also benefits from DLSS support, which is far more widespread than FSR, and in our opinion works much better at lower resolutions such as 1080p. And it's not as if certain workloads, which despite everything many of these will no doubt find themselves partaking in, is really all that demanding of VRAM or PCIe bandwidth at all. Typically, Radeon GPUs perform well in the F1 series, but F1 2021 enables ray tracing by default at the highest presets and therefore we tested with the feature enabled. This hands the RTX 3060 a performance advantage, affording it a 6% performance advantage at 1080p and 10% at 1440p. Disabling ray tracing does favor the 6600 XT, but we feel we might as well test using the default configuration as that's how we normally test, and we're still looking at around 60 fps at 1440p. So sure, you can defend free market and their behaviour all you want, but why? are you looking after their own well being? are you a stakeholder? do you have a vested interest in their market value? are you getting paid to defend their scummy behaviour towards consumers? do you want to pay more and more each generation for no performance increases per tier? do you want to pay a cars worth for a video card at some point? maybe a house's worth?
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