Like Nvidia’s “Ampere” family (killer graphics cards, made largely of unobtanium), AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 line has been a top-down affair, with its high-end models released before more affordable ones. In keeping with that trend, the Radeon RX 6600 debuts today, with a host of third-party cards based on the GPU. We looked at the XFX Speedster SWFT 210 ($329), which makes its entrance in a more supply-strained graphics-card market than ever. It decloaks at the same introductory list price that the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming 12G, the first RTX 3060 card we tested, did earlier this year. In our benchmark runs, the new AMD entry traded enough gaming wins and losses with that GeForce RTX 3060 to warrant its matching price. But the RX 6600, like all RDNA-based GPUs we’ve tested in the past few years, comes up a little short in consistency. In today’s market, though, the best card is often simply any card you can buy without getting price-gouged, so it’s an able enough pick for strong gaming at 1080p (1,920 by 1,080) resolution.
If you want a GPU that can more easily make the jump from high-detail 1080p to 1440p play, cards based on AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti make better financial sense (mind you, in a time when there’s little of that to be found in the third-party card market). That said, if you’re fond of older game titles, AMD’s drivers remain a core shortfall for the RX 6600 and its XT-badged bigger sibling. Gamers who play a lot of legacy titles that use older versions of Microsoft DirectX should consider competing Nvidia options instead…if they can find them.
Taking on 1080p Play With RDNA 2
Looking at current-generation GPUs, the Radeon RX 6600’s key competitor is clearly the GeForce RTX 3060. Each has its own strengths. Between the two, the Radeon RX 6600 wins outright when it comes to power draw. As a result, those on the hunt for a lower-power, smaller-footprint card won’t be disappointed in what the XFX card seen here has to offer.
The XFX Speedster SWFT 210 card we have in hand is one of a host of third-party designs based on AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 GPU; AMD is not offering an official reference version or house-brand card as Nvidia often does. Like other RX 6000 series GPUs, the Radeon RX 6600 is built on the company’s RDNA 2 architecture and features TSMC’s 7nm lithography on a 237-square-millimeter “Navi 23 XT” die.
The XFX model we tested features 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, which looks dead-on when stacked against Nvidia’s $329-MSRP GeForce RTX 3060. Let’s see how everything else shakes out between these GPUs:
The Navi 23 XT die under the hood of the RX 6600 is, predictably, a ticked-down version of the same GPU we saw in the RX 6600 XT. It succeeds the $279 AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT as the new baseline for discrete-card RDNA buyers (the RX 5600 was OEM-only) and adds a not-small “GPU prices these days” tax of $50 to the MSRP. This represents a 17% bump from just a year and a half ago, a difficult pill to swallow for 1080p gamers on a budget.
The dual-slot, dual-fan XFX Speedster SWFT RX 6600 is 10.1 inches long, which is larger than many 1080p gamers might like. However, our test card is just one of many different styles (including single-fan options) that will be available when the RX 6600 goes on sale today.
AMD has published a reference spec for this card, which the 8GB XFX Speedster SWFT 210 matches exactly, though as mentioned the chipmaker won’t be producing any cards of its own on this run. To pick up the slack, most of the regular third-party vendors have announced incoming versions, though what available stock will look like at launch we’ll have to see.
The RX 6600 sports a boost clock a little less than 100MHz below the RX 6600 XT’s and slightly fewer active stream processors, but other than that (and the oddly specific power requirements) the two cards share specs up and down the line.
Speaking of that 132-watt power requirement, it’s quite a bit lower than Nvidia’s 170-watt baseline for the GeForce RTX 3060—22% lower, to be exact. This is a considerable margin, and for users trying to build a low-power, small-form-factor 1080p gaming machine (a popular build type for many gamers) arguably gives the Radeon RX 6600 its strongest advantage over Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060.
As for ports, the back of our XFX card contains the same standard lineup we’ve seen on most GPUs lining (or, rather, widely spaced on) the shelves these days: three DisplayPort 1.4b outputs, one HDMI 2.1 port, and no VirtualLink.
Testing the Radeon RX 6600: Newer Games Get the Nod
PC Labs ran the XFX Speedster SWFT 210 through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our test rig, used for all cards in the charts below, is based on an Intel Core i9-10900K processor and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard (an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi). It’s equipped with 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory and a solid-state boot drive. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this platform is the best reasonable configuration at the moment to take 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 Speedster’s esports aspect 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 GPU’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.
Almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible visual quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and are worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with 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 yield performance boosts of up to 40%, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with. (See our guide to these technologies, Sharpen & Speed Up Your PC Games: Testing AMD’s FSR, Nvidia’s DLSS 2.2 & More, for more.)
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down the results below to a specific resolution (i.e., the resolution of the monitor you plan to use), 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 games as well as some older but still reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. In UL’s 3DMark, the circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to 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’s performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. 3DMark’s Port Royal, until recently run only on GeForce RTX cards, measures how well a GPU handles ray-tracing tasks (thus the absent bars for most of the AMD Radeon cards). Also here are a pair of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark and LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link above.
The Radeon RX 6600 is far too low on the power totem pole to be considered for any serious rendering or production tasks, and its 3DMark and Superposition results offered up a merely okay relative start for the card otherwise.
The GeForce RTX 3060 beat the RX 6600 in four out of five of these synthetic runs, with the AMD card pulling slightly ahead only in Fire Strike Ultra. Let’s see if that narrative changes as we move to actual AAA games.
Results: Recent AAA Games
For the following real-world games, we typically benchmark using the highest-quality preset and, if available, DirectX 12.
True to form, AMD’s drivers threw a couple curveballs into our results. Though the overall trend of the Radeon RX 6600 being just a tad slower than Nvidia’s RTX 3060 persisted, there were exceptions such as Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, where the XFX RX 6600 outpaced both the RTX 3060 and the RX 6600 XT.
We haven’t retested the Radeon RX 6600 XT since its launch, but given AMD’s track record with RDNA 2 driver stability, we’ll assume the win for the weaker card could be chalked up to a driver tweak since the RX 6600 XT debuted. While its AAA gaming more or less matched our expectations of the RX 6600 falling just slightly behind the RTX 3060, both cards are still overshadowed by the price/performance ratio of the stellar $399 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.
Results: Multiplayer Games
Though we max out the eye candy in most of PC Labs’ game tests to push 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 optimal combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for instance), while still trying to keep 1080p frame rates above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s a coveted target for competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 120Hz or 144Hz (or faster) gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz displays, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips below 60fps, is fine.
Though it may seem as if the baseline of what we should expect to spend on a 1080p or 1440p gaming engine has risen sharply over the past two years (and it has), in many instances that’s because GPUs made for multiplayer gamers have had to keep performance pace with a similarly sharp rise in monitor refresh rates. Currently, the fastest monitor you can buy is the Editors’ Choice award-winning Acer Nitro XV252Q F, which costs $499.99 and tops out at an eye-widening 390Hz at 1080p. To make the most of this display, a card needs to be able to power popular titles like CS:GO and Rainbow Six Siege at at least 390fps to maximize the investment.
So if you were to combine that refresh rate with the Radeon RX 6600, would you have a card that could hang in there? As always, that depends on the game and the settings. In Counter-Strike you’ll find just enough clearance, but Rainbow Six might need more than a few detail settings dialed down to reach that lofty goal.
As for Final Fantasy XIV, despite multiple restarts and a second driver wipe for sanity, we couldn’t get that benchmark to run at any resolution on the Radeon RX 6600. Other AMD and Nvidia cards booted the benchmark fine, but the current driver set invariably crashed to the desktop on initialization. MMO players be wary!
Results: Legacy AAA Titles
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer an enjoyable AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Tomb Raider (2013), Sleeping Dogs, and Bioshock: Infinite.
If you’ve been keeping up with our AMD coverage since the launch of RDNA 1 back in 2019, nothing about these results should surprise you. Well, it’s surprising that there still hasn’t been an improvement released all this time later, but regardless, AMD’s track record for uneven results with older games like these remains consistent. All three games we test that use older APIs like DirectX 11 continue to be thorns in AMD’s side, showing considerably slower results (in some cases less than half as fast) as competing Nvidia cards at the same price.
We’ve tested more legacy games on an array of cards and found the problem is persistent throughout the RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 stack and has yet to be solved as of October 2021. If your main PC-game squeezes are older DirectX 11 games, be warned that the Radeon RX 6600 likely won’t provide price-competitive performance until AMD addresses older games.
Overclocking and Thermals: Hot Under the Collar
Onward to temperature-testing and overclocking the card. We subjected the XFX Speedster SWFT 210 to a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal, and the card peaked at a temperature of 67 degrees C.
This is high for a card at this power tier, especially considering the Gigabyte-branded RX 6600 XT’s result of just 59 degrees C in the same test.
Most of this heat was collected and dumped into the middle of the backplate, according to what we saw through a FLIR One Pro thermal imaging camera aimed at our testbed during the stress test.
When it came time to overclock the card using AMD’s Radeon Software utility, I wasn’t able to achieve any sort of stable overclock profile that produced useful results. The card was quite crash-prone during this testing, and it took a bit more tuning than usual just to get it off the overclocking starting line. From there, we were able to add a few dozen megahertz to the maximum boost and memory clocks, but anything that could have added a noticeable real-world performance lift would crash the card outright.
The Verdict: More Food in a Famine
The breadth of available GPUs to choose from in this price tier is simultaneously becoming broader yet more granular than ever. As a 1080p engine that can also dip its toes comfortably into powering many AAA and multiplayer games at 1440p, the XFX Speedster SWFT 210 is a respectable outing that shows weakness with older games, like other recent AMD Radeon efforts.
In our testing, we found that the the 132-watt AMD Radeon RX 6600 regularly trades off wins and losses with the 170-watt Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, depending on the title and resolution. Given the matching MSRPs, the main feature selling points for the Nvidia GPU are its Tensor cores and growing library of DLSS-exclusive games.
Well…and its GeForce drivers, of course. AMD’s drivers proved more uneven in our legacy game testing, with a whole new bug this time around that prevented any testing in Final Fantasy XIV entirely.
As a straight competitor to the RX 6600 XT, the RX 6600’s value proposition muddies a bit. Despite only being 15% less expensive than the RX 6600 XT at list price, the RX 6600 was roughly 25% slower in many 1080p and 1440p AAA and multiplayer games, and the same rang true against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (a card that had no problem running every version of DirectX we threw its way at full power).
Until AMD pushes a more competitive driver set, we can’t outright recommend the Radeon RX 6600 over the RTX 3060. However, we also know what the GPU stock situation is like out there. As long as you don’t plan on spending most of your PC-gaming time with older titles, the RX 6600 will do the job in its price zone. Plus, it may be more readily available at or close to actual MSRP when RX 6600 cards launch. Keep those fingers crossed…and poised over your Buy buttons at launch.
