AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Review: Diminishing Returns

What a joke, this card should be $250 tops. I get that there is shortage and stuff but you can't ask that much for this gimped GPU without DLSS(much better than FSR @1080p), poor RT performance and overall performance. Can't wait for Intel to launch their GPUs. If they will have a decent price, I'll also buy an Alder lake CPU from them as a bonus.
 
Is it me or did AMD release another GTX-1080ti?

RTX-2080 more or less the performance of a GTX-1080ti
Radeon 7 more or less the performance of a GTX-1080ti
RTX-2070S more or less the performance of a GTX-1080ti
Radeon RX-5700xt is slightly behind the GTX-1080ti
RTX-3060 is slightly behind the GTX-1080ti
Mobile version of the RTX-3080 more or less the performance of a GTX-1080ti
Radeon 6600xt more or less the performance of a GTX-1080ti

if you ask me, Nvidia and AMD should just release more GTX-1080ti's and stop wasting time with these new wannabe clones!
 
Hmmmm...6600XT will probably be around 175% over MSRP for most AIB that hit retail, meaning they're going to price out around $650. Sure, some folks might get lucky and snag some up closer to the $500 range, but that will be few.

Then again, maybe they'll just sit around like the 6700XT cards are doing because they're still priced around $900 retail. I mean, there's nothing better than going to buy a GPU and you see some are available! Awesome!

Walking into a local Micro Center store to buy a GPU.....
6700XT cards at $900.....WTF?
Then you see a few 3070 cards priced around $700 (these won't last long)
Then you see a few 3060Ti cards at around $500-600 (these won't last long)
Then you see some 3060 cards at around $450 (a solid 1080p card, but still over priced)
But what's that? A 3060 equivalent from AMD - the 6600XT! But it's priced at the 3060Ti level or higher.

I'm waiting for a 3060Ti coming my way, only cost around $460. Even if a 6600XT was only $400, I wouldn't touch it. Just a slightly more expensive 3060 card that performs slightly faster at 1080p.
 
I'm thankful to see this information on the hardware specs before I got my hopes up and wasted money. Seeing the bandwidth and other cheaping out that AMD did on the specs (x8) and the major reduction on cache. I guess my next card will be another Nvidia instead of the hoped for Radeon with great performance.
 
Why only 60/100? No, pricing is no explanation based on previous reviews. Even that is pretty much on line with other "options".

And because AMD specifically markets this card as 1080p card, it should be considered as 1080p card, not 1440p or 4K card. It's much cooler than 3060 and faster using 1080p resolution. For 3060-class cards RT is useless and DLSS is only supported in handful of games.

Not as good release as many hoped but still better than 60/100.
 
That's the thing about eye candy. Higher resolutions, better textures, antialiasing, anisotropic filtering and all such graphical innovations are not strictly necessary for gameplay either. Yet the industry keeps pushing them on. I do find that exciting in its own right.
Oh I agree that it is exciting, but most improvements don't really make a difference overall. It's like trying to remember the difference in graphics between a PS2 and a PS3. Sure, the PS3 was better (it was 720p while the PS2 was SD) but beyond that it wasn't a huge difference. The game-changer was tessellation because it made for almost infinitely-small polygons that were all triangles. That made it possible for an object or shape to be properly rounded and incredibly detailed even without anti-aliasing. Tessellation was transformative because it affected shapes and textures of everything. Things like that I find VERY exciting.
But your brain did. You don't have to have a conscious awareness of it for it to improve immersion.
I don't really find that to be true. I say this because from an immersion standpoint, the gameplay and story are far more important. For example, I have NEVER played a game that was more immersive than Silent Hill 2 and that game was released 20 years ago. Compared to today, the graphics were rather crude but the immersion was 100% for the player.

Reaching 100% immersion has also been accomplished by:

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2
Skyrim
Far Cry 3, 4 & 5
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
Crysis
Crysis Warhead
The Wolfenstein Series
The Doom Series
The Witcher 2 & 3

(There are more I'm sure but these are games the I've played)

So far I've only listed locally-played games. Consider the immersion-level in successful online titles like Star Wars: Galaxies, Star Trek Online, World of Warcraft and Second Life. I refuse to try WoW because some people have developed issues separating it from the real world. That makes a game dangerous because it's TOO immersive. However, no online game has incredible graphics because it would limit the number of people who could play and enjoy it.

And then of course, there are the incredibly immersive e-sports games like PUBG, Fortnite, R6S and CS:GO that use the lowest possible graphics settings to maximise frame rates.

Speaking only for myself, I don't believe that eye candy makes me more immersed in a game. Others may be different but I didn't find Skyrim to be more immersive than Silent Hill 2 despite the fact that there was literally ten years between them and the graphics weren't even close to being comparable with each other.

I suppose that, as with anything, YMMV.
 
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Later to the market than the competition, lacking features-wise, and only available in homeopathic quantities.

If that is 'nailed it', I wouldn't want to see what a failure looks like.
Buying a 2060 for ray tracing ?

Why only 60/100? No, pricing is no explanation based on previous reviews. Even that is pretty much on line with other "options".

Especially since the 3060 got 75/100. I find both equally underwhelming for the price and what they offer over their predecessors. Even if I were to believe the 3060‘s msrp were realistic.

And it received 75/100 with this summary

Put the VRAM factor aside and you can see the RTX 3060 has very little going for it. For RTX 2060 owners it’s a very small upgrade, and it’s almost a side grade for 2060 Super owners, while it’s a downgrade for anyone with a 5700 XT.
 
Buying a 2060 for ray tracing ?



Especially since the 3060 got 75/100. I find both equally underwhelming for the price and what they offer over their predecessors. Even if I were to believe the 3060‘s msrp were realistic.

And it received 75/100 with this summary
But the 3060 has DLSS dontcha know......Just sayin'
 
Not at all a disaster. 2060 was and still is a fine card, and it set a decent entry level for RT. 2 and a half years on it can still pretty much run everything out there if you’re realistic with your settings.
Exactly, It's been demonstrated you can get a great RT-on experience at 1080p with an RTX2060 with clever settings choice and DLSS. Though I doubt many bought it *just* for RTX. Of course, when someone has something negative to say about an AMD card, a superfan has to chime in and make sure Nvidia cops some heat too...

Hot damn this card is underwhelming. Whaddaya doing AMD.
 
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Here is a suggestion for this new MAD - AMD overlords : a BIOS update that ads support for PCIe 4.0 to B450 and X470. like asus and Gigabyte did? (until u fukers nuked that) maybe then some desperate users might consider this crap
 
Here is a suggestion for this new MAD - AMD overlords : a BIOS update that ads support for PCIe 4.0 to B450 and X470. like asus and Gigabyte did? (until u fukers nuked that) maybe then some desperate users might consider this crap
400 series has PCIe 4 support with BIOS and Zen 2 CPU.....
 
Why only 60/100? No, pricing is no explanation based on previous reviews. Even that is pretty much on line with other "options".

And because AMD specifically markets this card as 1080p card, it should be considered as 1080p card, not 1440p or 4K card. It's much cooler than 3060 and faster using 1080p resolution. For 3060-class cards RT is useless and DLSS is only supported in handful of games.

Not as good release as many hoped but still better than 60/100.
I am not against AMD as I am also a RX 6800 XT user. But if I reviewed this card, I would have given it a lower score than 60/100. As mentioned earlier, starting from the 6700 XT to this 6600XT, AMD cut too much on the specs. From a full fat Navi 21 to 22, it lost 50% of the CUs on top of the lost in memory bus and cache. While the lost of CU is less of a problem from Navi 22 to 23, the significant lost in cache, memory bus and even the PCI-E lane support is a show stopper for me. Even a cheap GTX 1650 supports x16 lanes, so I am not sure why they even decided to limit it to x8. So desperate to cut cost? This is supposed to be a lower end GPU which will benefit budget gamers which may probably still be using a system that is limited to PCI-E 3.0. So I feel its a bad decision.
 
Here is a suggestion for this new MAD - AMD overlords : a BIOS update that ads support for PCIe 4.0 to B450 and X470. like asus and Gigabyte did? (until u fukers nuked that) maybe then some desperate users might consider this crap
This will only solve the issue for a fraction of budget gamers. Most people are still using Intel based system with PCI-E 3.0 support, which are going to lose some performance. It is not a big performance loss, but to know that I can't run the card at full speed just annoys me. And it is not exactly a cheap card.
 
A couple of takes from my point of view.

Over and over, the 6600xt its called garbage because its only %5 faster than a card that was released at a higher tier (5700xt). Yes, the point of the price between the 2 is valid, the 6600xt should be cheaper, but these days that means nothing.

AMD says this is a 1080p card, period. So anything that the gpu is doing “better” at anything higher than 1080p is a freebie.

As far as I could read, it is faster than the gpu it replaced (5600xt), so not sure why thats a bad thing.

I dont have a gpu (well, my 6900xt is still in the box, waiting for other parts) that shows me the magical benefits of DLSS, but from other forums, many owners of RTX gpus have expressed that they dont use it because of shimmering and other issues and they dont use RT because (like I feel) its not worth the performance hit for the weak eye candy provided, so how come this particular review and specially Steve (who I think is an excellent reviewer) suddenly place so much effort on both techs as something that is suddenly a must have?

Now, one thing that it’s concerning, AMD is raising prices a bit too fast, then again, we are in year 2 of this crazy pandemic and everything its simply way overpriced.

Anyways, its my observation and could be absolutely wrong.
 
A couple of takes from my point of view.

Over and over, the 6600xt its called garbage because its only %5 faster than a card that was released at a higher tier (5700xt). Yes, the point of the price between the 2 is valid, the 6600xt should be cheaper, but these days that means nothing.

AMD says this is a 1080p card, period. So anything that the gpu is doing “better” at anything higher than 1080p is a freebie.

As far as I could read, it is faster than the gpu it replaced (5600xt), so not sure why thats a bad thing.

I dont have a gpu (well, my 6900xt is still in the box, waiting for other parts) that shows me the magical benefits of DLSS, but from other forums, many owners of RTX gpus have expressed that they dont use it because of shimmering and other issues and they dont use RT because (like I feel) its not worth the performance hit for the weak eye candy provided, so how come this particular review and specially Steve (who I think is an excellent reviewer) suddenly place so much effort on both techs as something that is suddenly a must have?

Now, one thing that it’s concerning, AMD is raising prices a bit too fast, then again, we are in year 2 of this crazy pandemic and everything its simply way overpriced.

Anyways, its my observation and could be absolutely wrong.
The issue is the bad pricing in my opinion. While it is true that almost all GPUs are overpriced at this point, but it is possible to say get a RTX 3060 at MSRP from the likes of EVGA, though you will need to queue up/ wait. The RTX 3060 is slower in most cases, but at least from the results here, not by that much.
 
I feel like all the focus on MSRP is misleading when few to no cards are actually selling at that price. The only reason MSRPs for existing cards are as low as they are is because most of them were released before the prices spiked, and the barrier for raising the MSRP to more realistic level is very high. For new products, there's no reason not to give them MSRP something closer to what you can actually expect to see them at retail, especially since with GPUs lowering the MSRP later is a common practice.
 
This will only solve the issue for a fraction of budget gamers. Most people are still using Intel based system with PCI-E 3.0 support, which are going to lose some performance. It is not a big performance loss, but to know that I can't run the card at full speed just annoys me. And it is not exactly a cheap card.
This - besides the price - is imho the 6600XT‘s biggest drawback. Not sure what AMD were thinking.

Users with older / weaker CPU don‘t really have many upgrade options this gen:

Get an Ampere card and lose performance / not see any gains due to the CPU overhead caused by its software scheduler or get a cheaper RDNA2 card and lose performance due to the x8 PCIe 3 connection.

That‘s a missed opportunity for AMD to at least get sales from the many users not rocking the latest and greatest, but then again most are probably not aware of the CPU overhead issue as this is not pointed out in reviews that use top of the line CPU for their lower end GPU reviews where this does not really matter.

So even if a 6600XT sold for 5600XT prices, it really does not seem like an upgrade option for my B450 system.
 
AMD says this is a 1080p card, period. So anything that the gpu is doing “better” at anything higher than 1080p is a freebie.

Cart before the horse. The situation kinda forced them to say that, doesn't it? With the way this card's performance implodes at 1440p and above.
Can't call it a freebie when competing cards - even less expensive ones - don't share this disadvantage.
 
Oh dear. Poor performance and no dlss. My 3060ti at msrp from scan (£430) looks better every day.those Valhalla numbers though. Oof
 
Cart before the horse. The situation kinda forced them to say that, doesn't it? With the way this card's performance implodes at 1440p and above.
Can't call it a freebie when competing cards - even less expensive ones - don't share this disadvantage.
Yes and no.

It is still faster than the 3060 at 1440p on average, losing at 4k but then again neither of the two are useable at that resolution.

One issue appear to be memory intensive games like Doom at 1440p.

In the end it comes down to street price vs its nearest competitors but AMD has oddly heavily optimized performance for 1080p for the 6600XT, which at this price point is not a good thing. And if it‘s not noticeably cheaper than a 3060Ti, it‘s not worth getting vs the former.

Honestly, it feels like Navi 23 was designed with 1080p laptops in mind, desktop just being an afterthought.
 
The MSRP is disgusting. MSRP has been disgusting for past couple years. This card has a more disgusting MSRP than other cards.

Wake me when you can find 1 (one) model available at MSRP. Until then, I'll use the prices I can find on ebay to determine price/performance.

I don't blame TS for using MSRP. It works as a unified standard.

Still, I don't understand the outrage being directed at the MSRP.

So far, I can't find a single 6600XT for sale (ebay, newegg, amazon). If this card can be found consistently for less than a 3060: Awesome. If it is found consistently for more: Ouch.

(But man is that dumb MSRP...)
 
6600 XT sales started in Germany. Mindfactory has them in stock at prices at or near MSRP and consideraby cheaper than the 3060 which starts at €549, I.e. at least €170 more expensive.

It's also interesting that the ordering limit per Customer is three cards.

Note that this is just one specific market, so your experience will most likely differ.

Wish I could attach local images.

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