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The Radeon RX 6600 XT is AMD's premium 1080p gaming card, but it can also handle moderately demanding games at 1440p. This GPU competes directly against the RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia.
Gamers who are looking to put together a mid-range gaming rig should consider the 6600 XT since it has been massively discounted in recent months. AMD is currently giving two free games with every 6600 XT purchase as well. However, gamers should keep a few points in mind before making the purchase. Although it is impressive in many aspects, the 6600 XT has a few drawbacks.
The RX 6600 XT is promising, but the competition is pulling up fast
The 6600 XT is powered by the 237 mm² Navi 23 GPU. It comes with 2,048 shading units, 128 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 64 Render Output Units (ROPs), 32 Compute Units (CUs), and 32 RT cores.
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The graphics card packs 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory that is based on a 128-bit bus.
On paper, the RX 6600 XT does not look like a very impressive card. However, the specs translate very well to video games, in which it beats the last-gen RTX 2070 Super by a solid margin and gets very close to the RTX 2080.
In almost every video game, users can max out the settings at 1080p while getting playable framerates. At 1440p, the card stacks up pretty well when compared to the competition and the last-gen equivalents.
If users are willing to make some compromises in visual fidelity, the card can even run moderately demanding video games at 4K resolution.
The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT can currently be picked up for less than $300, and the three cheapest listings on Newegg cost around $295. In comparison, the cheapest RTX 3060 Ti models cost around $430. You can buy the card here in the US and here globally.
The RX 6600 XT is a great option for those on a budget. However, the GPU has a few caveats that need to be mentioned.
RDNA 2 cards have some disadvantages compared to Nvidia Ampere
AMD's RDNA architecture has brought the company back into the spotlight. RDNA 2, a refined version of the original architecture from 2018, pushes boundaries with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and temporal upscaling formulas. This architecture also powers the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
However, it is worth noting that AMD's technology is not as refined as that of Nvidia. AMD's OpenCL technology has historically been much slower than Nvidia's equivalent, CUDA. Thus, the 6600 XT loses to the RTX 3060 Ti in rendering and 3D modeling workloads.
Since RDNA 2 marks AMD's first generation of ray tracing, it is not as sophisticated as that of Nvidia cards. The RX 6600 XT trails behind the RTX 3060 Ti in almost every game that has heavy ray tracing.
AMD's FSR, although impressive, is not as polished as Nvidia's DLSS. The image output is always inferior to the results from Nvidia's temporal upscaling technology. However, the framerate gains can be higher with FSR.
