AMD's new Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card will be released in mid-August with decent performance specs and a $379 price tag, putting it in direct competition with Nvidia's $329 GeForce RTX 3060.
AMD made the announcement this week at ChinaJoy, confirming long-circulating rumors that the company would launch the Radeon RX 6600 XT in August. The final $379 recommended price for this mid-tier GPU is a bit lower than the rumored $399 price, but with the ongoing chip shortage and volatile GPU market it's hard to know how easy it will be to find an RX 6600 XT at that price.
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The Radeon RX 6600 XT's price tag makes it a direct competitor to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which Nvidia prices at $329 and $399, respectively — though again, it can be hard to find them at that price (or at all) right now. To help answer the question of whether the newest addition to AMD's Radeon 6000 series is worth the asking price, let's dig into the numbers.
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT price
AMD has given the Radeon RX 6600 XT a starting price of $379 US, making it the new low end of the Radeon 6000 series of GPUs behind the Radeon RX 6700 XT ($479) and Radeon RX 6800 XT ($649).
The $379 price tag makes the Radeon RX 6600 XT about $50 more expensive than than Nvidia's mid-tier GeForce RTX 3060, though its hard to know where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 without paying ridiculously inflated prices right now.
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT release date
AMD says Radeon RX 6600 XT cards from manufacturers like Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI should begin hitting the market on August 11th.
Around then we should also begin seeing the RX 6600 XT appearing in laptop and desktop PCs from brands like Alienware, HP, MSI and Lenovo.
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT specs and performance
The Radeon RX 6600 XT is a (comparatively) affordable card with reasonable specs, one AMD says is squarely targeted at folks who want great performance playing games at 1080p. If you care about getting the best performance at 1440p or 4K, the remarkably performant (and beastly expensive) Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT are still the AMD cards to buy — if you can find them.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | AMD Radeon™ RX 6600 XT | AMD Radeon™ RX 6700 XT | AMD Radeon™ RX 6800 XT | AMD Radeon™ RX 6900 XT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $379 | $479 | $649 | $999 |
| Compute units | 32 | 40 | 72 | 80 |
| GDDR6 RAM | 8GB | 12GB | 16GB | 16GB |
| Game Clock | 2,359 MHz | 2,424 MHz | 2,015 MHz | 2,015 MHz |
| Infinity Cache | 32MB | 96MB | 128MB | 128MB |
As you can see from the table above, the RX 6600 XT has decent specs that nevertheless relegate it to the low end of the Radeon 6000 XT series. It should still be plenty capable enough to run most games very well at 1080p, of course, and with GPUs so hard to come by these days any new card is a welcome addition to the market.
The 6600 XT supports all key features of the Radeon 6000 series, including DirectX Raytracing support, which allows for immersive real-time lighting, shadows and reflection and makes these Radeon GPUs competitive with Nvidia's RTX cards. Developers can also tap into AMD FidelityFX for balancing fidelity and framerate, and Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which dynamically adjusts in-game shading to boost performance without sacrificing too much in terms of visual quality.
While we can't say for sure how well this new RX 6600 XT card performs compared to the Nvidia GeForce 3060 and 3060 Ti — at least, not until we see some third-party performance benchmarks — the testing data AMD provided to press shows a system with the 6600 XT outperforming (in terms of raw framerate) the same system with a GeForce 3060 in a number of games.
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT outlook
AMD says the Radeon RX 6600 XT is squarely focused on delivering great performance at 1080p, and that's borne out in its modest specs and price.
Given how crazy the GPU market is right now, it's exciting to see any new cards entering the market. But it remains to be seen whether the RX 6600 XT will offer significant value to those desperate for a new graphics card. At this point, we expect this to the last big 6000 series card release from AMD before the company embarks on launching a new family of GPUs in 2022 (likely branded the 700 series) built on its next-gen RDNA 3 architecture.
