Two months ago, AMD launched the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, the first card to use the Navi 23 GPU. Today, AMD is following its first truly mainstream-priced RX 6000 series card, the Radeon RX 6600. Take the same GPU but with four of the CUs (computing units) disabled, clock it a bit lower and you won’t get the RX 6600-XT.
Will it be one of the best graphics cards, or will it be a little short? Much of that will depend on retail pricing and availability, such as: GPU Pricing remain bloated, but the offerings were a bit better on the RX 6600 XT than on other RDNA2 graphics cards, so hopefully for gamers AMD can provide a decent number of GPUs for this launch.
I was talking about the lack of a vanilla RX 6700 ahead of the launch of Navi 23, and that previously widespread rumor map remains MIA. Presumably that’s because any Navi 22 chips that aren’t fully functional can be sold as one of several RX 6000M series mobile solutions† AMD isn’t taking the same approach with Navi 23, though, and along with cutting off some of the performance, the RX 6600 reduces the power requirement to just 132W and also cuts the official starting price to $329 – the same price as Nvidia RTX 3060, admittedly. with ‘only’ 8GB of VRAM. That’s basically mainstream pricing in today’s market — actually, it’s less than you’ll pay for most genuine mainstream GPUs — although we suspect AMD’s partners and the various stores will drive the price up as long as GPUs remain scarce.
In addition to reducing the number of CUs and reducing GPU clocks — by a relatively large 315 MHz if you look at the game clock — AMD also reduced the GDDR6 speed from 16 Gbps to 14 Gbps. Note that the ‘maximum’ boost clock of 2491MHz (technically the GPU can even exceed the boost clock) is quite a bit higher than the game clock, so we’ll have to see how it all plays out in the benchmarks. But overall, we expect the RX 6600 to be 10-25 percent slower than the RX 6600 XT, depending on whether a game needs more GPU power (up to 25% slower in theory) or more memory bandwidth (about 12.5 % slower) . Here’s the rundown of AMD’s latest RX 6000 series GPUs and their specs.
| Graphics Card | RX 6600 | RX 6800 XT | RX 6800 | RX 6700 XT | RX 6600 XT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| architecture | Navi 23 | Navi 21 | Navi 21 | Navi 22 | Navi 23 |
| Process technology | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 | TSMC N7 |
| Transistors (billion) | 11.1 | 26.8 | 26.8 | 17.2 | 11.1 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 237 | 519 | 519 | 336 | 237 |
| CUs | 28 | 72 | 60 | 40 | 32 |
| GPU cores | 1792 | 4608 | 3840 | 2560 | 2048 |
| jet accelerators | 28 | 72 | 60 | 40 | 32 |
| Infinite cache (MB) | 32 | 128 | 96 | 128 | 32 |
| Game Clock (MHz) | 2044 | 2250 | 2105 | 2424 | 2359 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 14 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| VRAM (GB) | 8 | 16 | 16 | 12 | 8 |
| VRAM bus width | 128 | 256 | 256 | 192 | 128 |
| ROPs | 64 | 128 | 96 | 64 | 64 |
| TMUs | 112 | 288 | 240 | 160 | 128 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) | 7.3 | 20.7 | 16.2 | 12.4 | 9.7 |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 224 | 512 | 512 | 384 | 256 |
| PCIe slot interface | x8 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x16 Gen4 | x8 Gen4 |
| TBP (watts) | 132 | 300 | 250 | 230 | 160 |
| Launch date | Oct-21 | Nov-20 | Nov-20 | 21 March | Aug-21 |
| introductory price | $329 | $649 | $579 | $479 | $379 |
Paper specs don’t always match real-world performance, so we’ll have to see how the RX 6600 stacks up against its main competition – which includes not only the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 XT, but also previous-generation cards. . , such as the RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super and RX 5600 XT. Since this card replaces the previous-generation RX 5600 XT, it’s a shame that generation prices have gone up quite a bit, but there’s no point in expecting AMD to launch at a price few people will ever see. Again, we hope there will be a pretty decent supply of RX 6600 cards, both for the initial launch and for the future.
We’ve already mentioned the issue with AMD’s game clocks versus boost clocks, and we’ve used AMD’s game clocks for the TFLOPS numbers above. Given the way things have changed with boost clocks on RDNA2 (ie RDNA2 GPUs often reach and exceed boost clocks during gameplay), it might be better to compare performance to boost clocks rather than game clocks. If we do that, the RX 6600 can deliver about 8.9 TFOPS of computing power, while the RX 6600 XT delivers 10.6 TFLOPS of computing power. That’s a much lower 16% drop in theoretical performance, and it better reflects the reduced memory bandwidth.
The Navi 23 architecture uses the same general formula as the others Big Navi and RDNA2 GPUs. It supports DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and implements the full list of DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including Variable Rate Shading (VRS), mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. The smaller 32MB Infinity Cache on Navi 23 represents a compromise that usually favors 1080p and maybe 1440p, but regular GPUs generally aren’t used at higher resolutions, so that should be fine.