The Radeon RX 6600 XT is AMD’s midrange RDNA 2 graphics card aimed at high frame rate 1080p and 1440p gaming. It features 32 Compute Units (2,048 shaders) and 8GB of GDDR6 16 Gbps memory paired with a 128-bit bus and 32MB Infinity “L3” cache. With an MSRP of $349 and a starting market price of $465, it goes up against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 ($329) and RTX 3060 Ti ($399) graphics cards.
In this post, we look at the gaming performance of the Radeon RX 6600 XT in traditional rasterized and ray-traced titles and compare it against the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the RX 6700 XT.
Build Info
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- Cooler: NZXT Kraken X73
- Motherboard: MSI MAG B550M Mortar
- Memory: 8GB x2 @ 3600 MT/s CL16
- All the benchmarks were conducted using CapFrameX.
AMD RX 6600 XT vs NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti vs RX 6700 XT Benchmarks
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has a clear advantage over the Radeon RX 6600 XT, doubly so in ray-traced games. The former is over 20% faster in “The Division 2” at 1080p and around 10% in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. In Metro Exodus (with RT Ultra), the RX 6600 XT nets just 50 FPS on average at FHD while the RTX 3060 Ti manages a respectable 71 FPS. Similarly, in Godfall, the Radeon averages 71 FPS with 0.2% lows of 36 while the GeForce pushes 100 FPS on average with 50 frame lows.
Things only get worse for the 6600 XT at 1440p. The budget RDNA 2 part plummets to an average of just 26 FPS in Godfall with ray-tracing set to very high with 1%-tiles of 19.5. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 Ti stays above the 70 FPS mark with lows of 51. In Metro Exodus, the RX 6600 XT averages 35.8 FPS which is barely above the RTX 3060 Ti’s 1%-tiles of 34. Its only noteworthy showing is in Assassins’ Creed Valhalla where it averages 88 FPS at 1080p and 63 FPS at 1440p, beating the Ti in both cases.
Compared to the Radeon RX 6700 XT, the 6600 XT is somewhere between 15-30% slower. Ashes Escalation seems to scale extremely well with the RDNA 2 graphics microarchitecture but certain titles like AC: Valhalla see a nominal gain.
Conclusion
Through the course of the graphics card shortages, NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series offerings have been going for considerably higher prices due to their efficiency in Ethermining. However, as mining subsides and supply improves, GPU prices have started returning to normal. At the moment, NVIDIA and AMD cards are selling at roughly the same rates. The RTX 3060 Ti and the RX 6600 XT are both going for $499, and going by the performance charts above, the former is a no-brainer.
