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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. 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. We're not particularly concerned with the comparisons against older GPUs like the GTX 1060 6GB, even though that remains the most popular GPU on the planet according to the Steam Hardware Survey. Instead, let's focus on the RTX 3060, RX 5600 XT, and RX 5700 comparisons. We'll start with the Nvidia card, since that's the direct competition. However, I do feel AMD managed to make the 6600 XT even worse than anticipated by gimping the PCI Express interface and heavily reducing the Infinity Cache capacity, making this GPU weaker than expected, particularly for 1440p gaming. Next we have Call of Duty Warzone, where the 6600 XT was quite a bit faster than the RTX 3060, delivering 21% more frames at 1080p and 16% more at 1440p. A strong win for the Radeon GPU, though keep in mind it was also meant to cost 15% more based on the original MSRP.
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. 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. 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.Metro Exodus Enhanced requires hardware-accelerated ray tracing support and without it you'll have to play the original version of the game, which frankly isn't a big deal, but since both of these GPUs support ray tracing it makes sense to benchmark with the 'Enhanced' version. Again, performance is fairly similar at all three tested resolutions, the RTX 3060 was just 4% faster at 1080p which we saw identical performance at 1440p. At that price this is a hard pass. Specially knowing it'll be higher than MSRP pretty much everywhere. With the RX 6600 XT, however, Infinity Cache ought to be arguably more important. AMD said, when it introduced the new RDNA 2 design, that cache hits are most likely at 1080p, though at that resolution you're less likely to run into issues with memory bandwidth on higher-spec card. The RX 6600 XT, however, is already pretty restricted in terms of bandwidth, and so the regularity of cache hits at its target resolution should mean the extra effective bandwidth boost of Infinity Cache will be a true boon for its limited 128-bit bus. This is what we expect to see in future memory-demanding titles. The key here is that both the 6600 XT and 3060 Ti use 8GB of VRAM, yet the GeForce GPU is 55% faster, so how can that be? We believe this has more to do with memory bandwidth and the RTX 3060 Ti just has a lot more of it – 75% more, thanks to the wider 256-bit memory bus.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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Enabling DLSS reduced the performance hit to just 29%. But even without it, the 3060 Ti was 150% faster than the 6600 XT with ray tracing enabled, so we're not sure the word 'brutal' really conveys just how much of a smashing that really is. We won't go over the data for all 50 games individually as that would take all day, instead we're going to take a close look at the results for about a dozen of them and then we'll take a look at how these two GPUs compare head-to-head across all games tested in a single graph. Benchmarks Performance was also similar when testing with Apex Legends. In short, the 6600 XT was slightly faster at 1080p and then slightly slower at 1440p. Both GPUs proved plenty powerful for this title though, delivering over 100 fps at 1440p using the highest in-game quality settings. 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.
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 Summary 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 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. Starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the 6600 XT gets off to a flyer, beating the RTX 3060 Ti by a convincing 13% margin and the standard 3060 by a massive 31%. We're looking at RTX 3070 Ti-like performance in this game, while still lagging behind the 6700 XT.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. Starting with the 1080p data, we see that the 6600 XT was 3% faster on average, meaning they're basically identical overall across a wide range of games as we deem anything within 5% a draw. That means for 20 of the 50 games tested performance was near enough to "identical" with margins 4% or less. As for pricing and availability, that's where the Radeon RX 6600 XT appears to offer the biggest advantage of all. To best illustrate that, here's a few cost per frame graphs. They utilise 8GB of GDDR6 memory, with 32MB AMD’s infinity cache. What brands manufacture this graphics card?
That feels like a niche audience when your new generation's most affordable GPU is traditionally meant to be the one which targets the broadest range of PC gamers possible. Next up we have Red Dead Redemption 2. We're using "high" quality settings which have to be set manually as this game doesn't have fixed presets which is super annoying. Anyway, at 1080p the 6600 XT was 9% faster than the RTX 3060, so a decent little win there, but at 1440p performance is much the same, and then exactly the same at 4K. 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.Introducing the AMD Radeon™ RX 6600 XT graphics card, featuring the breakthrough AMD RDNA™ 2 architecture, engineered to deliver the ultimate 1080p gaming experience. Of course, availability . . but, hopefully the smaller Navi 23 chip can be produced in greater quantity. Bottom line, the Radeon RX 6600 XT currently offers gamers significantly more value than the GeForce RTX 3060, and therefore should be the go-to option for those looking this level of performance. Unless you play specific games that are favored by DLSS/RT enhancements, that's our clear recommendation.
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