The battle for entry-level graphics cards targeting the 1080p gaming sweet spot is picking up pace in some competitively quick fashion. Mere days after Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX 4060 series of GPUs, AMD now has an answer of its own with the Radeon RX 7600 desktop-class graphics cards. Based on the in-house RDNA-3 architecture, the latest AMD offering promises perks such as “redesigned compute units with unified raytracing and AI accelerators” and assurance of playing the latest titles at 1080p resolution and over 60fps frame rate.
Compared to the Radeon RX 6600, AMD is touting a 29% jump in raw performance at full-HD gaming generation-over-generation and a 34% improvement over Nvidia’s previous-gen GeForce RTX 3060 GPU at titles such as “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,” “Metro Exodus,” “Cyberpunk 2077,” and “Red Dead Redemption 2,” among others. AMD also claims that the Radeon RX 7600 GPU can deliver “100+ FPS on average in today’s top 10 PC esports titles.”
But do remember that most of these “top esports” titles are years old and not particularly demanding on a gaming system, either, lacking fancy goodies like next-gen raytracing and DLSS enhancements. But it’s still reassuring to see AMD touting numbers like 178FPS in “Apex Legends,” 108FPS in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” and 215FPS in Overwatch 2 at high settings. It will go on sale from AMD’s official website and partners such as Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI starting May 25, carrying a price tag of $269 a pop.
AMD wins the price war
AMD has fitted 32 compute units inside the Radeon RX 7600, ticking at a peak frequency of 2.6 GHz, alongside 32 ray-tracing acceleration units and 64 AI processing units. AMD touts 21.75 TFLOPs of peak single-precision compute performance, and the shaders on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 Ti can deliver 22 TFLOPs. You get 32MB of AMD’s second-generation Infinity Cache, and there’s 8GB of VRAM inside, the same as the base model of Nvidia’s aforementioned GPU.
The memory bandwidth on this one peaks at 288 GB/s, and it also serves the usual set of AMD tech such as FidelityFX Super Resolution, Smart Access Memory, and Readeon Boost. On the creative side of things, AMD says the Radeon RX 7600 GPU offers up to 32% in certain scenarios like video encoding. AV1 encoding and decoding is also part of the package, while AI-based tasks also get a sizeable boost in performance.
Based on raw capabilities, it looks like the Radeon RX 7600 is a repackaged Radeon 6600 XT, but it’s disappointing that the VRAM is capped at 8GB. It’s surprising that AMD has not only managed to fit respectable hardware inside the Radeon RX 7600 but has also dropped its price significantly vis-a-vis its predecessor. AMD charges $269 for its latest entry-level GPU, while the Radeon RX 6600 hit the shelves priced at $329. AMD is also undercutting Nvidia, which is putting the GeForce RTX 4060 series on the market starting at $299.
