For all its promise, the launch of AMD’s new Radeon RX 6600 XT GPU, and our tester card, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming OC Pro 8G, ends up representing 2021’s sad state of affairs in graphics cards. (Cards go on sale August 11.) Basic reference designs of RX 6600 XT cards are supposed to start at $379, while at $499 MSRP, Gigabyte’s entry finds itself competing with the base list price of five-star, Editors’ Choice-winning cards like the $499 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition. And in that face-off, it falls well behind expectations. Meanwhile, models of the RX 6600 XT actually listing for $379 (not the one we tested, though) would lie more in league with the also-impressive $399 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition. The RX 6600 XT is simply boxed in by great Nvidia options.
The GPU is positioned on the boundary of high-performance 1080p and midrange 1440p play in AMD’s stack, at least in terms of power, but pricing is another issue entirely. Of course, 2021 and its GPU shortages have made a mockery of card list prices. The problem is, in our testing, our Gigabyte model fell behind in some critical benchmarks, even getting beat at times by lower-tier cards like the $329-list EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming 12G. Of course, performance doesn’t matter as much as “price out the door” these days, and if you can find the Gigabyte card on launch day (or any day in the next six months) near MSRP, and an RTX 3070 or RTX 3060 Ti card isn’t available, and your main squeeze isn’t games based on DirectX 11, the Gigabyte is, technically, worth its price. Otherwise? Hunt the elusive Nvidia cards, especially if the Gaming OC Pro 8G is selling for the same multiplication factor of list price that most cards are these days.
Specs Compared: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming OC Pro 8G vs. the World
The Gigabyte card we have in hand is based on AMD’s new Radeon RX 6600 XT GPU. That chip is based on the company’s RDNA 2 architecture, and it features TSMC’s 7nm lithography on a 237mm2 “Navi 23 XT” GPU die.
The Radeon RX 6600 XT model we tested in the Gigabyte line features 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, which looks pretty standard compared across the aisle with Nvidia’s GeForce 3060 Ti Founders Edition, the RX 6600 XT’s closest competition when comparing reference MSRPs. However, once you dig a bit deeper into the specs, you’ll see where things get a bit more complicated for Gigabyte…
Though AMD has published a reference spec for the RX 6600 XT and a suggested starting MSRP of $379, the company won’t be producing any reference models itself. Instead that duty is deferred to third-party manufacturers like Gigabyte, who in the case of the specific Gaming OC Pro 8G model we tested for this review, only added a slight overclock to the card (from what we can tell in the specs), up to 2,607MHz from 2,589MHz in the reference version.
The price for that not-exactly-scorching overclock, applied off the factory floor? $499.99. That’s the same list price as a GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition, and $20 more than an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card, for an overclock profile that amounts to 18 extra megahertz added on top of the stock boost clock. AMD’s Radeon Software would apply a more aggressive push in its “Automatic OC” profile, let alone what we were able to achieve on our own once we flipped the manual toggle on in OC testing down below. So the extra thermal hardware on the card itself is nice, to be sure. But $120 is a lot of dosh over the base price.
It’s also a whopping $220 more than the reference version of the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, launched in January of last year. Though video-card pricing norms have been trashed during this unprecedented shortage, that’s an increase we may never get our heads around, no matter who’s making the card.
The dual-slot, triple-fan Gigabyte RX 6600 XT Gaming OC Pro 8G is 11.1 inches long, which is larger than many 1080p gamers might be willing or able to go, depending on the size and layout of their cases. AMD has partnered with many different manufacturers for the RX 6600 XT, though, and if this Gigabyte isn’t your size, expect a healthy selection of smaller dual-fan alternatives that will still fly the RX 6600 XT badge come launch tomorrow morning.
The 160-watt power requirement is within expectations for the midrange 1080p set these days, as is the single-power-connector layout found on top of the card. (You’ll need an eight-pin connector from your PSU.) AMD recommends at least a 500-watt power supply with the card.
The backplane of our RX 6600 XT model contains what’s quickly become the standard lineup in the industry these days: three DisplayPort 1.4b outputs, one HDMI 2.1 port, and no VirtualLink to be found.
Let’s Get Testing: AMD’s Driver-Based Achilles’ Heel
PC Labs ran the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard. All cards below were tested on this rig. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2021 to cut the CPU out of the equation for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the card with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our standard benchmark regimen, which tests a card’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and you’re worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but some of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling integrated directly into the game. This can mean boosts of up to 40% more performance on top, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other two resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our list of AAA titles includes a mix of recent AAA titles, as well as some older-but-still-reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL’s circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme test, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. We also run 3DMark’s Port Royal, until recently run only on GeForce RTX cards, measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. (Thus the absent bars there for most of the AMD Radeon cards.) Also here are a pair of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark, LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link.
Despite having a new driver pushed to us last minute that was supposed to fix lagging DXR performance, we only saw a marginal difference between the two patches in our 3DMark Port Royal run, amounting to less than a few percentage points of gain. This wasn’t enough to make up for the results gap between the RX 6600 XT and cost-comparative entries from Nvidia like the RTX 3060 Ti, which was just a little less than 50% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti in this ray-tracing benchmark.
As for the Unigine Superposition test, its marks in our 1080p Extreme run were equally ho-hum for the RX 6600 XT versus the 3060 Ti, with the Ti performing just over 20% faster in that test. Overall, not a swimming start for the RX 6600 XT; let’s see if it can regain some ground in AAA games.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games
Now, on to the real-world game stuff. The following benchmarks are games that you can play. We typically used in each case (for the AAA games) the highest in-game preset and, if available, DirectX 12.
Beginning with the $329 EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Edition outperforming the $379 Radeon RX 6600 XT in every resolution except 4K in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the results only get more mixed from there. The RX 6600 XT is faster than the RTX 3060 we tested in most cases, but behind the RTX 3060 Ti by a margin that outstrips their price difference every time.
Also, like in every recent AMD Radeon graphics card review over the past few driver sets, we were unable to launch our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. While the game itself was playable, the game would crash anytime we attempted to enter the Graphics menu while using an AMD card. (This behavior was consistent across multiple models.) Switch back to Nvidia in the same system, and we can benchmark that game, no problem.
AMD’s driver implementation, even two years post-launch of the RDNA architecture, continues to show the occasional wobble versus the solid foundation laid by Nvidia’s team. That will be more acute once we test some legacy DirectX 11 titles, but first a foray into the world of multiplayer gaming…
Testing Results: Multiplayer Games
Though most of PC Labs’ game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we’ve kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Final Fantasy 14 tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep frame rates for 1080p games above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s a coveted target for highly competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 120Hz or 144Hz (or faster) gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz monitors, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips under 60fps, is fine.
The RX 6600 XT is a midrange GPU focused on 1080p performance, so perhaps one of the largest segments AMD hopes to sell the RX 6600 XT to is multiplayer gamers. In CS:GO, there was some serious falling-behind the rest of the competition. The card recovered slightly in the Rainbow Six: Siege run, but not by enough to wash the taste of losing to the RTX 3060 in Final Fantasy out of our mouths. On the whole, the card in these tests looks inconsistent in esports-friendly resolutions like 1080p and 1440p versus competing Nvidia options. Will there be any let-up in testing with older games?
Testing Results: Legacy AAA Titles
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Tomb Raider (2013), Sleeping Dogs, and Bioshock: Infinite.
There’s only so many ways we can discuss the same fundamental problems with AMD’s RDNA driver set, first seen in RDNA 1 and continued now in RDNA 2, before it gets rote. According to some of the performance numbers we saw during our AAA testing, there’s nothing to suggest that the RX 6600 XT is lacking in the power department in a way that these legacy AAA results would suggest. But it’s just no match for the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition in these three tests at all resolutions.
The culprit? Just like other cards in the Radeon RX 5000, and now RX 6000 Series, it appears AMD’s drivers continue to struggle in optimizing for some DirectX 11 titles. There is a possibility that all these numbers could tick up with one new software patch, but it’s been two years that we’ve seen the same pattern, and in multiple statements regarding the issue, AMD hasn’t made any promises to shore up these gaps in its driver coverage anytime soon.
For its price point, the RX 6600 XT rests right on the line of where many gamers like to buy to play both older and newer titles (perhaps the older titles at higher resolutions like 1440p or 4K), and until AMD can solve this problem, for those buyers, Nvidia is the better way to go in 2021.
Overclocking and Thermals: Keeping It Cool at 1080p
Onward to temperature-testing and overclocking the card. We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the Radeon RX 6600 XT, and the card peaked at a temperature of 59 degrees C.
This is impressive for a third-party design, especially from Gigabyte, however for a card this size and in this power category, it’s about par for the course over at Nvidia. (The more powerful RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition peaked just one point higher, at 60 degrees C.)
When it came time to overclock the card using AMD’s Radeon Software utility, I achieved a small, but stable, boost of 175MHz on the boost clock and 250MHz on the memory clock. Alas, this didn’t end up translating to a noticeable performance uplift, with only fractions of a percentage point of difference showing up when we ran through both Far Cry 5 and 3DMark at the higher clocks.
The Verdict: MSRP Is the Way to Be
At a theoretical $379 for base Radeon RX 6600 XT cards, it’s obvious that AMD’s intent with the Radeon RX 6600 XT, at least in terms of list price for its reference card, is to snipe Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti by about $20. In that regard, the Gigabyte Gaming OC Pro 8G shows that the RX 6600 XT line can maintain itself, in most instances, as a solid choice for 1080p gamers, albeit one that still struggles with certain DirectX 11 titles. The problem with this specific model of RX 6600 XT: It doesn’t follow any of that MSRP logic AMD set for itself, instead opting to tack $120 onto the list price for a tri-fan design and 18 extra megahertz added to the peak boost clock.
Now, this may well just be Gigabyte being realistic, knowing what these cards will sell for in today’s white-hot, short-supplied market and building some of that pricing reality into the list price. In essence, though, that creates a new floor for cards in its range, and seals more of the revenue into Gigabyte’s “official” pricing versus scalper pricing.
The worst part is while that pricing may seem extreme, it almost starts to make sense if you consider Gigabyte’s position in this whole thing. Ultimately—whether the cards are purchased en masse by a scalping organization or found on shelves by a determined shopper who camped outside a Best Buy—Gigabyte ends up getting paid whatever it asks for. So if we were living in a world where MSRP mattered, the $499 price tag on the Gigabyte RX 6600 XT Gaming OC Pro 8G would be a ludicrous ask versus Nvidia’s competing cards’ MSRPs.
However, because today no price is seemingly too high, the rules are different. If you can manage to get this card at its launch price of $499, it’s a steal compared to the roughly $750 to $900 you’d spend at the moment buying an RTX 3060 Ti off someone from eBay or from a price-gouging third-party seller on Amazon or Newegg. As soon as this review goes live, you’ll have 24 hours until the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 XT and other RX 6600 XT cards hit virtual shelves. If you can successfully use one of our many strategies to snag the Gaming OC Pro 8G model at $499, hit that checkout button and enjoy your new card, thanking the lucky stars that you managed to get one at all.
Otherwise? If the ultimate, inflated cost is close to that of an RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070, pass over this specific model for an RTX 3070 Founders Edition (if you can find one), a $399 AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (ditto), or just a different version of the RX 6600 XT that skews closer to AMD’s recommended pricing instead.
