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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.
Moving on to Shadow of the Tomb Raider and we've got to say, these results look less favorable for the new mid-range Radeon GPU. Here at 1080p the 6600 XT was 19% slower than the 6700 XT and 17% slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, while it was just 2.5% faster than the 3060 and 4% faster than the old 5700 XT. Still, there's merit to comparing it to the GTX 1060. As mentioned, it's "the most popular GPU on the planet according to the Steam Hardware Survey. " So, for that very significant number of people still using a GTX 1060, it's a "here's what you'll get if you upgrade to the 6600XT" pitch. 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 Like most Radeon GPUs, the 6600 XT performs well in Death Stranding, delivering 158 fps on average at 1080p, allowing it to match the 3060 Ti which frankly should be the minimum level of performance offered by this product.I like the decision to lower memory bus width to 128 bits. It lowers mining performance without affecting gaming performance, and can't be undone like Nvidia's software-based solution.
Radeon FreeSync™ 2 HDR pushes the boundaries further, combining fluid gameplay and plug-and-play HDR gaming at low latency, without needing to tweak your settings. No stuttering, no tearing, just gaming. In terms of power, too, the RDNA 2 architecture shows its class. Despite regularly outshining the RTX 3060 in terms of raw gaming performance it also does so with both a significantly lower average power draw and lower peak too. In Outriders we're looking at very similar performance using either GPU again. The RX 6600 XT was a smidge faster at 1080p, while we're looking at identical performance at 1440p. We'll have our own independent testing and analysis of the RX 6600 XT later, but the card looks promising. Again, we can't stress enough the importance of getting enough cards to market—something neither AMD nor Nvidia have been able to do since last summer. We don't expect that to change, but AMD does seem to have more RX 6700 XT cards for sale than it has RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT combined. Hopefully, that means it will have even more RX 6600 XT cards—it should, since Navi 23 should be a smaller chip that costs less to produce. 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.This sounds pretty crazy, but I have been told by retailers, that there will be 6600 XT models available on Aug 11 selling at the MSRP. If that's the case, then the 6600 XT could be significantly cheaper than both the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti, and if so it'll be worth buying and a highly successful release. But everything hinges on pricing and availability. If what we're hearing is true then the 6600 XT might actually end up being a sought-after GPU, despite its various shortcomings. Shopping Shortcuts: 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.
Apparently, they accomplished that task. Whether or not the MSRP will have to be adapted: we will see,but I guess not as long as the global GPU shortage lasts. It's AMD's own fault for pushing VRAM capacities with earlier RX 6000 series launches. When Nvidia launched the RTX 3080 with 10GB VRAM and then kept the RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti at 8GB, AMD effectively made a statement with the RX 6700 XT, RX 6800, 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT that 8GB simply wasn't sufficient. Of course, that's not entirely true, but there are certainly games and settings that will now have issues on GPUs that 'only' have 8GB of memory — games promoted by AMD, not surprisingly. 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.
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Today we'll be taking real-world pricing data and comparing it across a much larger 30 game sample to see which GPU offers gamers the most value. We'll also take a look at ray tracing performance in the new F1 2021, along with Metro Exodus Enhanced which is a follow-on from the Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, Resident Evil Village, and Watch Dogs Legion results which were featured in the original review. 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 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). AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT will officially launch on August 11, 2021, putting to rest the past couple of months of speculation and leaks. Will it manage to compete with the best graphics cards, and where will it fall in terms of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy—and more importantly, will more than a handful of people be able to buy the cards at something close to MSRP? These are good questions, and while the answer to that last question is almost certainly, "Sorry, not gonna happen," it should still bring some needed competition to the more moderately priced GPU segment. Though FSR looks a little underrepresented when it comes to game support, AMD's promise that it's easy for devs to implement has been born out by earnest modders dropping FSR the feature into different games, such as GTA V and Skyrim VR, themselves. Some have even created apps that allow you to add it into practically any Windows or Vulkan game.
The performance hit running Assassin's Creed Valhalla at 1080p is fairly minimal, though we are looking at a 5% reduction in performance and that does bring the 6600 XT closer to the 3060 Ti in a title where previously it had quite a large performance advantage. Not expecting much out of this one.Given no graphics cards are restricted by the PCI-E 3 x16 bandwidth, PCI-E 4 support offers no advantage. In our day-one review of the Radeon RX 6600 XT the new AMD GPU was ~10% faster than the RTX 3060 at 1080p and just 5% faster at 1440p. So it will be interesting to see how those margins compare to what we find when testing with 30 games, so let's find out... Select this driver if you are a content creator engaged in workflows like Computer Aided Design (CAD), video editing, animation, and graphic design. Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise is tested against over 100 professional applications. 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.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. Things get rough for the Radeon RX 6600 XT when you compare it to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, though. At 1080p, the RTX 3060 Ti is typically around 15% faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT, despite costing just 5% more. And, in Metro Exodus, the Radeon RX 6600 XT lags a whopping 38% behind Nvidia's card, which is a huge difference.
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