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We're big fans of it, and while it's not as snazzy a solution as DLSS, it will still deliver more performance and look pretty great while doing so. That's a definite win for a mid-range card such as the RX 6600 XT. 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 Hitman 2 results are typical of what we've seen in the majority of titles and that means the 6600 XT performs closer to the RTX 3060 rather than the 3060 Ti, despite being priced closer to the latter. At 1080p, it was 14% slower than the 3060 Ti and just 4% faster than the 3060. As we've seen time and time again, the margins extend slightly in Nvidia's favor at 1440p. At any other time there would be some last-gen cards still floating around in retail, and if there were any RX 5700 XTs still out there priced normally the RX 6600 XT would have a very different launch price. But, in this darkest timeline, there aren't. 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.
Yuka said:I would buy that argument if it wasn't for the fact both AMD and nVidia are reeking in the cash like fishermen on a school of a million fish. 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. Those are just excuses to screw people. I was definitely giving them the benefit of the doubt at the start, but not so much anymore. Their earn reports are the damning evidence they are just taking advantage of the situation and their excuses are just that: excuses. They can lower prices, period. Another potential issue is that AMD has gimped the PCI Express interface and although it still uses PCIe 4.0, the bandwidth has been reduced to x8. When installed in a PCIe 4.0 system this is a non-issue, but performance related problems could arise when installed in a system that only supports PCIe 3.0, which right now is most systems. 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.Those of you playing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p probably don't require the 6600 XT, but in case you do, here are the results. The new Radeon GPU was good for around 300 fps on average and that's the same level of performance you'll receive from the old 5700 XT or 2070 Super, or the newer and cheaper RTX 3060. So not a particularly impressive showing given it was 25% slower than the 6700 XT. Next up we have Cyberpunk 2077, where the 6600 XT was good for 75 fps on average at 1080p, making it comparable to the 5700 XT, RTX 2070 and RTX 3060. Disappointingly though, it was 14% slower than the 3060 Ti and 20% slower than the 6700 XT. The Rainbow Six Extraction performance was comparable with both GPUs delivering over 130 fps at 1080p. The RTX 3060 did edge ahead by a 7% margin at 1440p, but overall performance was very similar. 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.
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. F1 2021 is the latest title to be added to the huge list of games we benchmark with, and this one enables ray tracing by default on supported hardware when using the ultra high quality preset. That being the case we left it enabled. The 6600 XT does surprisingly well relative to the RTX 3060 as both GPUs delivered comparable performance at all 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. For the most part the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X has virtually the same aesthetic as the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X, though it's just a bit smaller. Unlike the 6700 XT, the Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X is just a dual-slot card, rather than a 2.5 slot design. This should make it fit better in smaller cases, and allow for easier installation of other expansion cards – like a capture card or a sound card (yes, those do still exist). Finally, let's talk about generational performance comparisons. The RX 6600 XT ended up edging past the RX 5700 XT by 5% — not a huge improvement, but a win nonetheless. A few games were basically tied in performance, and the 5700 XT even came out (barely) ahead in a few cases, but at least at 1080p, Navi 23 beat Navi 10. That shows the Infinity Cache still helps a lot, even with only 32MB, because otherwise the drop in memory bandwidth would be far more noticeable.The Radeon RX 6600 XT is a performance-segment graphics card by AMD, launched on July 30th, 2021. Built on the 7 nm process, and based on the Navi 23 graphics processor, in its Navi 23 XT variant, the card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate. This ensures that all modern games will run on Radeon RX 6600 XT. Additionally, the DirectX 12 Ultimate capability guarantees support for hardware-raytracing, variable-rate shading and more, in upcoming video games. The Navi 23 graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 237 mm² and 11,060 million transistors. It features 2048 shading units, 128 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPs. The card also has 32 raytracing acceleration cores. AMD has paired 8 GB GDDR6 memory with the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which are connected using a 128-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 1968 MHz, which can be boosted up to 2589 MHz, memory is running at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective). Let's start our analysis by looking at cost per frame using the MSRP, which has become a suggested price that's no longer remotely accurate. Even if demand dried up overnight which isn't possible, but let's say it did, would we see a return to MSRP pricing then? We probably would for future releases, but I doubt that would be the case for current generation products. For a bottle of water, you usually pay less than a Dollar. Now, in the desert, with the next station being 500 miles away, you would pay even 10 Dollars (or 100?) for a bottle of water if you are thirsty.
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. 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.
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The 6600 XT blasts ahead in Forza Horizon 4, delivering 17% better performance at 1080p with an incredible 180 fps. The margin was ever so slightly reduced at 1440p. Resident Evil 3 has the 6600 XT good for 166 fps on average at 1080p. That's 7% faster than the 3060, while lagging behind the Ti version by 14%.
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.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. 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.
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