AMD just launched the RX 7600 XT at CES 2024. It’s a graphics card that makes sense, and one that AMD fans have been waiting on ever since the launch of the original RX 7600. It might not do enough in the hotly contested market of graphics cards around $300, however.
Between the RX 7600 and the RX 7600 XT, not much has changed. These two graphics cards are based on the same GPU, and they come with the same number of cores. The XT model, however, boosts the clock speed by up to 10%, and it comes with a higher power draw at up to 190 watts.
The big difference is 16GB of GDDR6 memory, however. It seems AMD took a plan from Nvidia’s playbook here, bumping up the memory capacity without major changes to the other specs (much in the style of the RTX 4060 Ti). The big problem here is that the memory is still squeezed across a 128-bit bus, just like on the original RX 7600.
That could become a problem. Higher memory capacity is great, but with such a thin bus width, the RX 7600 XT will likely be starved for bandwidth. It’s not a dissimilar situation to what we saw with the RTX 4060 Ti, in fact, where last-gen’s RTX 3060 Ti offered better performance in some titles due to having a larger bus size, not more memory capacity.
AMD is claiming higher performance for the RX 7600 XT over the base model, though. The biggest improvement from the data shared comes in Forza Horizon 5, where the XT model showed a 40% improvement at 1080p and a 45% improvement at 1440p. Other titles show much smaller improvements, however. In Starfield and The Last of Us Part I, for example, the XT model offers closer to a 17% jump.
It’s important to point out that all of the above games showed this level of a performance improvement with FidelityFX Super Resolution 2. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, the sole game AMD tested without FSR 2 at 1080p, the XT model was just 7% faster than the non-XT.
It’ll be interesting to see how the card holds up against a suite of games once it’s here. With such variable results between games, it’s hard to say now how meaningful the performance improvements will be over the base model. It’s possible, as we saw with the RTX 4060 Ti, that the extra VRAM capacity only shines in certain titles.
Price is the important factor here. The recommended price of the RX 7600 XT is $330, putting it $30 ahead of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and $60 ahead of the RX 7600. The RTX 4060 and RX 7600 trade blows well, with AMD’s card coming out slightly ahead due to its lower price. We’ll have to wait until we’ve had a chance to test the XT card to see if it justifies its premium.
The RX 7600 XT launches on January 24, and it’s only available from board partners. AMD won’t be producing a Made By AMD (MBA) model.
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