It lowers mining performance without affecting gaming performance, and can't be undone like Nvidia's software-based solution. One of the keys to the latest architectural design is the way AMD's engineers have been able to push its efficient silicon faster than any GPUs we've seen before. Gaming at 1440p is still absolutely possible, but you won't be pushing a 144Hz display in most games, and you might need to drop a few settings down a notch or two to get above 60 fps.

But we're also at a point in history where pretty much every GPU that can be manufactured is guaranteed to be sold, and sold for well above its market value. Things get rough for the Radeon RX 6600 XT when you compare it to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, though. In Dirt 5, the RX 6600 XT is 16% faster than the RTX 3060, and in the original Metro Exodus, it has a 15% lead at 1080p. Which almost makes talk about the actual specifications of a particular chip, or even its real-world performance, feel kind of pointless. It will also feature a 128-bit memory interface with 8GB of GDDR6 16Gbps memory, good for 256GBps of bandwidth, augmented by 32MB of Infinity Cache.Another great software feature here is Radeon Boost, especially if you play a lot of fast-paced competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Apex Legends. AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT will officially launch on August 11, 2021, putting to rest the past couple of months of speculation and leaks.

The efficient GPU at the heart of the RX 6600 XT, coupled with the impressive triple fan cooler offered by XFX's Merc 308 edition, means that this review card remains super chill even under sustained load.Nvidia's RTX 3060 only leads in one game, Horizon Zero Dawn, and was relatively close in Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding. The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is meant to power next-generation games at 1080p, taking the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 head-on, especially when it comes to traditional rasterization without shiny ray tracing effects. That's generally been the case for AMD's cards compared to their Nvidia competition this time around. With only 8GB of VRAM, the GPU can only work on one ETH DAG at a time anyway, so narrowing the bus to 128bits shouldn't hurt too much. Smart Access Memory is a big one, and will let you squeeze out a bit of performance out of the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

As for the RAM speed, this just may make these cards less desirable for miners, as the Infinity Cache won't help for these humongous hash machines, while properly tailored games should rock it. A good chunk of the reason why 12GB GPUs have a significant hash rate advantage is because they can work on two DAGs at a time while 16GB ones can do three and extra memory channels help with that concurrency. For most of this GPU generation, and for a significant part of the last, the regular refrain has been that raw performance numbers are one thing, but Nvidia has a serious edge in terms of the extra features. With 8GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 arrayed across an aggregate 128-bit bus you'd normally expect the GPU to be starved of memory bandwidth, and while it's certainly lower than either the 448GB/s of the RX 5700 XT or the 288GB/s of the RX 5600 XT, its 256GB/s figure doesn't look too bad.Experience the next gen of gaming performance with AMD Smart Access Memory technology1 when you pair an AMD Radeon™ RX 6600 XT graphics card with an AMD Ryzen™ 5000 Series desktop processor. AMD pitches the Radeon RX 6600 XT primarily as a 1080p gaming solution, partly thanks to the 8GB VRAM and 32MB Infinity Cache, but mostly based on the level of performance it provides. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck. To be fair, it's not like RTX 3060 Ti with its Founders Edition shroud is particularly toasty, but even when cranking up the clock speed of the RX 6600 XT it never broke the 70°C mark, which is supremely impressive.