AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT review: memory compromise

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AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is a product of the times, providing reasonable performance, but considering the price, specifications and performance are somewhat lacklustre. This is the most expensive “mainstream” part we have seen so far, although this discussion is basically meaningless in the context of continued GPU shortages.Look at our GPU price index, Obviously, anything worthy of being included in our list Best graphics card It will eventually be sold out, and then it will be scalped in places such as eBay. MSRP or SEP (Suggested Retail Price) will only affect a small number of people-those who are lucky enough to buy cards directly from AMD or Nvidia. Most graphics cards will eventually be sold at any price specified by the market. Sadly, this means much higher than the AMD RX 6600 XT’s nominal $379 release price.
The Navi 23 GPU that powers the RX 6600 XT has also made some interesting compromises.Normally, we would like to see part of the Navi 22 cut at this time in the life cycle, but either the output is so high that AMD does not have enough chips to launch a product similar to the previous rumors. Radeon RX 6700, Or it is saving those harvested GPUs as something else (laptop). The maximum configuration of Navi 22 is 40 CUs, 12GB GDDR6 on a 192-bit memory bus, and 96MB Infinity Cache. Navi 23 still has 32 CUs, the reduction is relatively small, but the maximum is 8GB GDDR6 on the 128-bit bus, and only 32MB Infinity Cache-AMD even cut the PCIe interface to x8 Gen4, which is technically the same as x16 Gen3, But if you are using a Gen3 board, you will get half of the interface bandwidth. Compared with the 335mm^2 on the Navi 22, this resulted in a significantly smaller die size of 237mm^2-a reduction of 29%.
Graphics card | RX 6600 XT | RX 6800 XT | RX 6800 | RX 6700 XT | RX 5700 XT |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
architecture | Navigation 23 | Navigation 21 | Navigation 21 | Navigation 22 | Navigation 10 |
Process technology | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 |
Transistors (billions) | 11.1 | 26.8 | 26.8 | 17.2 | 10.3 |
Mold size (mm^2) | 237 | 519 | 519 | 336 | 251 |
CU | 32 | 72 | 60 | 40 | 40 |
GPU core | 2048 | 4608 | 3840 | 2560 | 2560 |
Ray accelerator | 32 | 72 | 60 | 40 | Not applicable |
Unlimited cache (MB) | 32 | 128 | 96 | 128 | Not applicable |
Game clock (MHz) | 2359 | 2250 | 2105 | 2424 | 1755 |
Video memory speed (Gbps) | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 14 |
Video memory (GB) | 8 | 16 | 16 | 12 | 8 |
Video memory bus width | 128 | 256 | 256 | 192 | 256 |
ROP | 64 | 128 | 96 | 64 | 64 |
TMU | 128 | 288 | 240 | 160 | 160 |
TFLOPS FP32 (boost) | 9.7 | 20.7 | 16.2 | 12.4 | 9 |
Bandwidth (GBps) | 256 | 512 | 512 | 384 | 448 |
PCIe slot interface | x8 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 |
TBP (Watts) | 160 | 300 | 250 | 230 | 225 |
Launch date | August 2021 | November 2020 | November 2020 | March 2021 | July 2019 |
Launch price | USD 379 | 649 USD | 579 USD | USD 479 | 399 USD |
The problem is that all trimming of fat will inevitably affect the flavor of the steak. In addition, although the computing performance of the RX 6600 XT looks good-only about 20% lower than that of the RX 6700 XT-the reduction in memory bandwidth and capacity, as well as the L3 cache, will also degrade performance. We will see later, but the RX 5700 XT will be an interesting point of comparison because it has significantly more bandwidth but runs on the original RDNA architecture.
It was AMD’s own fault to promote VRAM capacity in the earlier RX 6000 series release. When Nvidia launched the RTX 3080 equipped with 10GB of VRAM and then kept the RTX 3070 Ti, 3070 and 3060 Ti at 8GB, AMD effectively issued a statement on the RX 6700 XT, RX 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT that 8GB was enough. Of course, this is not entirely correct, but there must be some games and settings that will now have problems on GPUs with “only” 8GB of RAM-games promoted by AMD, which is not surprising.
We think 8GB is still reasonable for our mainstream options GPU benchmark Hierarchical structure, but then we encountered the second problem: AMD’s price for RX 6600 XT can be said to be more suitable for the bottom of the high-end market rather than mainstream GPUs.The closest competitor is Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12GB RX 6600 XT offers more than 50% memory and a theoretical price reduction of 13%, which may be a reasonable choice, but it is not a clear winner anyway.
In terms of architecture, Navi 23 insists on using the same general formula as others Big Navi and RDNA2 GPU. It supports DirectX ray tracing (DXR) and implements a complete list of DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including variable rate shading (VRS), grid colorizer, and sampler feedback. However, AMD stated that the 32MB Infinity Cache was specifically selected for the target 1080p gaming audience. We have seen in the past that higher resolutions often benefit from more L3 cache. This means that although the RX 6600 XT should certainly perform well at 1080p, it may not scale well to higher resolutions such as 1440p and 4K.
However, we still care more about the 128-bit memory interface. This makes the bandwidth and memory of the RX 6600 XT exactly half of the RX 6800 XT, and a quarter of the L3 cache. Does this also mean that performance is halved? Compared to competing GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, what does this look like-not only the current generation of graphics cards, but also the previous generation of graphics cards? These are all good questions, but the most important question is how many GPUs AMD can make and put on the market.There is a lot of evidence that Nvidia currently surpasses AMD by at least 10 to 1 (based on the latest Steam hardware survey, And our GPU pricing index data), this may be attributed to production capacity. If the player can’t go out and buy a card, the performance of the RX 6600 XT is meaningless.
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