The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is the first budget-level graphics card we’ve seen in two years, in the midst of one of the biggest GPU shortages in history.
The AMD Radeon RX 6600 arrives in a weird time for graphics cards. Both AMD and Nvidia have released some of their best products in a decade, but with a global silicon shortage it’s almost impossible to get your hands on anything at a reasonable markup – let alone the price that the manufacturer actually intended. It’s left us wanting for a budget-level graphics card that more people can actually afford and get into their systems, especially folks that have older cards like the GTX 1060 – which is still the most popular GPU in the world. But until AMD actually launches the card, we won’t know how stock levels are going to hold up, and how long it’ll be before more than, like, five people can get the graphics card at its $329 (around £250/AU$450) MSRP. At that price, the AMD Radeon RX 6600 could be genuinely worth it, though, especially for anyone that’s still playing games at 1080p, and doubly so if you’re going to be playing games that support AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution technology – which is already helping to improve the performance of huge games like Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village just months after AMD has introduced it. We are in 2021 though, when nothing stays in stock long, and as soon as this graphics card crosses the $500 mark – and it probably will – the value will absolutely start to crumble, especially if it comes between the RX 6600 XT and the RTX 3060, as Nvidia’s lowest-end card handily beats this new AMD graphics card in pretty much every test we’ve run. The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is available from October 13, starting at $329 (around £250/AU$450) – with prices obviously going up from there, depending on which aftermarket GPU manufacturer you go with. And, just like AMD’s last graphics card, the Radeon RX 6600 XT, there won’t be a reference design available to buy, which means you are going to have to get the GPU through third-party manufacturers like MSI, Gigabyte, XFX or others. The version of the graphics card we’re looking at now is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle 8G, which will retail for $419 (around £310/AU$570). That’s obviously higher than AMD’s minimum pricing, but that’s unfortunately just where the graphics card market it. However, this is a pretty basic version of the GPU – more on that later – and there will probably be much more expensive versions of the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT with fancy features like RGB lighting, improved power delivery, factory overclocks and more. Make sure you check to see that you’re getting the features that are right for your build, especially if you are going to end up paying hundreds of dollars or pounds more for it. Like any other graphics card in the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, the RX 6600 is based on the RDNA 2 architecture, and it’s technically a cut-down version of the same GPU found in the Radeon RX 6600 XT. In this version, you’re getting 28 Compute Units, down from 32 in the 6600 XT. That means you get a total amount of 1,792 Stream Processors and 28 Ray Accelerators, too. You get the same 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 128-bit bus as the 6600 XT, though it’s just a bit slower, with a peak bandwidth of 224GB/s, which is still more than enough for the 1080p resolution this card is aimed at. So, this is not a graphics card that AMD is pitching as a high-end showstopper, but one that is pitched towards just playing the latest games at 1080p – which makes sense, as it’s still the most popular resolution. Luckily, even at this price point, you’re getting Ray Accelerators. They’re still the first-generation version of AMD’s version of the tech, which means they’re not quite as good as what you’ll find in something like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, but they’ll still get the job done.
