oklahoma : If you ’ ra reading these words, I ’ m assuming you ’ ve immediately secured either a new GPU or a venereal disease of disappointment. great ! now let ’ s discourse why you might actually want this television calling card, based on my late brief with AMD .
*all of these prices are made up by AMD and Nvidia and you ’ ll rarely ever see them
If you ’ ve read my colleague Tom Warren ’ s recent AMD RX 6600 XT review, you know we already considered that $ 379* batting order a solid entry-level GPU. It was able of playing most of the latest games at 1080p and utmost settings, but not all, not with ray-tracing, and was decidedly a ample step beneath the $ 400* Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti that costs just $ 20 more*. It ’ s precisely the kind of bang-for-the-buck GPU that I used to buy myself, though.
well, the new RX 6600 is the accurate same Navi 23 bit, but with four fewer calculate units ( 28 alternatively of 32 ), slightly slower clockspeeds, and a shrink sum dining table baron pulmonary tuberculosis of equitable 132 watts ( vs. 160 watt ) so you can easily fit it into a system with a 450-watt world power supply. That ’ s lower than the 500 watt AMD recommends for the 6600 XT, let alone the 550-watt that even Nvidia ’ s submission level $ 329* GeForce RTX 3060 asks buyers to bring to the postpone .
In practice, AMD says you ’ rhenium looking at a 10 to 15-percent operation opening between the 6600 and 6600 crosstalk, but the company would rather you look at its 23-percent uplift over Nvidia ’ s RTX 2060 rather — assuming you ’ re taking advantage of Smart Access Memory aka Resizable BAR with a compatible CPU and game, anyhow. If so, AMD says you can expect to average 91 FPS in Far Cry 6, 85 FPS in Deathloop at maximal levels of detail, and that the poster averages 100 FPS across the company ’ s examination cortege, compared to 120 FPS average for the 6600 crosstalk .
The company besides says its Nvidia DLSS rival, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution ( FSR ) is potent enough in games like Far Cry 6 that you can step up to 1440p plus raytracing and still average 60 FPS ( assuming you ’ rhenium pairing it with a Ryzen 5 5600X central processing unit and DDR4 3600MHz RAM or better ) .
unfortunately, this morning ’ south reviews suggest that the RX 6600 doesn ’ thymine compare as favorably against Nvidia ’ s RTX 3060 as you ’ five hundred expect, with reviewers like Tom ’ sulfur Hardware concluding that it ’ second “ generally slower, ” Digital Foundry calling it a “ hard deal ” with worse upscaling and poor raytracing performance vs. Nvidia, and extensive lists of benchmarks like the ones at Guru3D suggesting it offers closer to RTX 2060 and AMD RX 5700 levels of performance. If you ’ ve presently got a two-year-old 2060 Super or 5700 XT ( each of which retailed for $ 399 at the meter ), this batting order would likely not be an upgrade for you at all. once again, it looks like Nvidia wins this round.
But as with any graphics card during the pandemic, actual retail handiness at a reasonable price matters far more than comparative performance, since you broadly can ’ t find anything close to its MSRP — and that goes bivalent for AMD, whose handiness has been notably worse. here ’ s AMD ’ s statement to The Verge on issue this meter around :
AMD is working closely with board partners, OEMs, SIs and etail/retail partners to ensure as many graphics cards are available to gamers as possible, and we expect that a healthy supply of AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics cards will be available at launch .
“ Healthy ” is a very difficult word to pin down, but we ’ ll go steady. belated last calendar month, AMD CEO Lisa Su suggested bit supplies would probably be “ tight ” until the second half of 2022.
It ’ south besides worth noting that most of AMD ’ s GPU circuit board partners don ’ triiodothyronine seem to be taking full advantage of the RX 6600 ’ mho reduced office consumption yet. While ASRock does have a single-fan design and Sapphire ’ s dual-fan looks fairly slender, every circuit board takes up at least two entire slots in a case and they all still require 8-pin PCIe exponent connection — and the PowerColor card still quotes a 500W office provision recommendation, not 450. still, like the Nvidia RTX 3060, the reduced size and ability requirements could make it popular for smaller builds .
Update, 12:37PM ET: Added that Newegg is merely selling the cards today through its Newegg Shuffle raffle, which suggests express store as usual. several cards are listed at an MSRP of $ 329.99, but all of them are out of stock for normal sales. B & H has one card listed at $ 329.99 equally well, besides out of breed as of this write .
Update, 1:43PM ET: Added some early reappraisal conclusions .