The ONLY Good Value GPU? | RX 6600

cheap good current graphics cards now there's a phrase I haven't heard in a long time it's one of those P two situations where you can get cheap and good but not current cheap and current but not good and current and good but not cheap if you're willing to trade off having the latest and greatest to get good value for your money the list of candidates under £200 is pretty short if you want great performance in games both old and new and enough vram for 2023 is most demanding titles I'd argue it's a list of one the radon RX 6600 is available to buy brand new but it's not a new card it just marked it second birthday and was superseded by the rdna 3 based RX 7600 a few months ago nevertheless it's still in stock pretty much everywhere and occupies a very attractive price point AMD have gone on the record to say that the RX 7000 series is now complete so we shouldn't hold our breaths for an RX 7500 XT to fill in the lower price bracket unless AMD discontinues production and forgets about that market segment all together I guess the RX 6600 is here to stay being rdna 2 this GPU isn't quite at The Cutting Edge of the radon feature set there's no av1 accelerator for streamers and video editors and AMD claims rdna A3 has better Ai and RT processing though I don't have any RX 7000 cards to verify those claims it does have realtime rate tracing and 8 GB of vram the latter of which is a must have in 2023 while the former is still kind of trying to escape its status as a gimmick that that 8 GB of vram is clocked at 1750 MHz and operates on a 128bit bus which is quite a downgrade from the previous generation of rdna but is offset by a 32 megab level three cache AKA Infinity cache when I tested the RX 6500 XT last year another card with a very limited memory bus I found that it had some streaming issues with Halo infinite and control so before anything else the first thing I did on installing the RX 6600 was to run the opening scene from control to see if the problem was repeated thankfully it wasn't though arguably texture resolution is still a little lower than ideal and pop in on the character portraits means they don't reach full quality until the camera is extremely close this isn't at all unique to the RX 6600 though as I've seen similar behavior from many other Graphics cars in this game whether Halo infinite still has its impressionist trees however remains to be seen the test setup is my usual budget gaming rig the moderately priced gaming PC featuring a ryzen 55600 x and 32 gigs of DDR 43600 crucially it is running in pcie Gen 4 with smart Access Memory enabled the RX 6600 has only an eight Lane PCI interface so if you have an older PC running gen 3 or earlier that may cause a bottleneck smart access memory is also technically only supported on newer platforms but if you have an Intel 10th gen AMD 2000 or older have a quick Google for your motherboard and resizable bar to see how to enable it it's not a huge deal and isn't a guaranteed performance increase in all games anyway but the option should be there if you want to try it for yourself as a new entry to the series and a followup to one of the most most well optimized games of the last few years you could be forgiven for expecting more of the same from Forts and Motorsports that's not quite the case it's not only dramatically more uh demanding than Horizon 5 it's also quirky not in a fun way but a frustrating one the game has lots of dynamic settings in the menu that to a benchmark like myself serve only to obscure what's actually being applied and the game needs to be completely restarted each time settings are changed to make sure they have in fact taken hold it has a frame rate cap even when uncapped is selected and it's limited to your displays refresh rate which for me as I'm using a capture card happens to be 60 FPS the RX 6600 can produce a mostly 60 FPS experience at 1080p high with ultra falling to the low 50s and medium being the quality setting of choice if you want to guarantee 60 in my time racing so far I found that sub 60 frame rates can be quite jarring even with vsync enabled as recommended by digital Foundry so while high looks pretty good it can potentially make you feel a bit ill while racing also regardless of the quality setting the rather ineffective antialising means I can't quite shake the feeling that it's not really rendering at 1080p on a more positive note however the Collision sounds from this game make doometernal sound like soft rock I imagine the intent is to make you less inclined to Ram other drivers but I think some people will have the exact opposite reaction after a somewhat fraud launch The Last of Us on PC is now behaving a little more like it should have from day one that or we' all become so acclimated to shoddy PC ports that it doesn't seem quite so bad anymore still 8 GB is very much the minimum for enjoying this title at a decent level of visual quality and I'm glad to have it on the RX 6600 and at 1080 High the vram isn't exceeded and performance is okay it almost hits the 60 FPS average though for large parts of the Benchmark scene it is running in the low to mid-50s turning up to 1440 looks far better on my monitor even with settings at a mix of medium and high to stay under that 8 GB limit but the average FPS is now down to just [Music] 40 likewise if you're careful with your settings you can have a great time in the remake of Resident Evil 4 the max quality preset will far exceed the RX 6600 both in terms of vram and processing power but just turning the texture setting down to 2 gb and disabling RT actually makes for an insanely playable experience at 1080p that means for an average of 70 FPS with 1% lows still just above 60 whereas time has been kind to some of this year's jankier ports the same isn't true for Jedi Survivor maybe if you hold a better CPU like a ryzen 7600 X or I5 13400 you might get better frame times than this but averages are still lower than one would hope at 1080 High we're stuck at just a couple of frames above 50 FPS meaning you'd either want to drop settings or add FSR if you're aiming for 60 of course this style of game might not demand a constant 60 FPS and you might prefer to trade in a few frames for some more detail and well the average at 1440 high is above 30 FPS but the frame time graph is still pretty spiky and lows are below [Music] 30 not all console ports really lend themselves to sub 60 FPS and one game I believe belongs at higher frame rates is Ratchet and Clank Rift apart 1080 high is just a little short of the 60 average though again lows are pretty damn low crowds and explosions can cause some decent size drops in frames and dropping to medium doesn't help all that much at 1080 the average climbs to 75 FPS but lows remain at about half that the most similar GPU I've tested in this game is the Vega 64 which scored lower averages but higher 1% lows that might imply that memory bandwidth is an issue as the Vega has hbm on a 2048 bit bus but I think vram quantity is the biggest issue when using hbcc to effectively give the Vega 16 GB of vram the average and 1% lows both climb [Music] dramatically I might not have picked the most representative area to Benchmark for Starfield this scripted scene from early in the game is less CPU intensive than outside in new Atlantis or Aila it's using higher quality assets for close-ups and it's highly repeatable all good things to look for if you want to really test the GPU the RX 6600 renders it pretty well being close to 60 FPS at 1080 high with upscaling and vrs turned off in fact much of the game is going to run faster than this but unfortunately sometimes you do have to go out into the City and that will see frame rates drop thankfully it's only into the high 30s and low 40s so it doesn't become unplayable and still looks decent [Music] enough while Motorsport is gleefully burning the series reputation for being well optimized across a range of different Hardware forsa Horizon 5 still exists there's plenty of room to adjust quality at 1080p at the ultra preset the built-in Benchmark cruises at close to 100 FPS and while in my opinion the extreme preset doesn't have much to offer visually it can still run at above 60 FPS most of the time so the point is fairly moot for anyone on a nonh refresh monitor at 1440p you might want to stick to the ultra preset as the 76 FPS average and 67 1% lows are very playable and increasing settings further will certainly not beat while testing Halo infinite I had my eye open for any drops in LOD especially in the trees this was the big issue I had with the RX 6500 XT last year and thankfully it wasn't a problem here for single player experiences in the open world sections of the game playing at the high preset should be a perfectly acceptable balance of quality and performance with the average hitting 87 at 1080 and 1% lows above 70 pushing up to 1440p is still pretty decent averages are still above 60 though lows drop as far as 50 if you still stubbornly refuse to accept pal as the superior standard you might want to use DRS or drop to medium to stabilize the frame rate especially if you're playing big Team [Applause] battles despite not being a 2023 release play tail requium is still pretty demanding and the RX 6600 struggles to deliver 60 FPS s at 1080 high in my Benchmark scene the average is only 55 with lows of 42 I prefer not to drop quality settings in this type of game if I can avoid it and I'd probably be happy with that sub 60 average though the tools are there to help you get to 60 if you absolutely have to at 1440 you're aiming at a 30 FPS Target and the 6600 can actually hit it pretty well averages are 36 with 1% lows of about 29 [Music] when I tested the next car down in the rdna2 lineup last year it struggled to hit 30 FPS in cyberpunk at 1080 medium with that in mind the 6600 does fantastically well at the high preset with FSR disabled the card can push over 60 FPS on average with 1% lows of 50 it can even deliver a 30 plus experience at 1440 High though I'd probably suggest a dropped a medium or some quality FSI as I don't consider cyber Punk a good candidate for 30fps [Music] gameplay I'm actually phasing out some of the older Sony titles from my Benchmark lineup as Ratchet and Clank and The Last of Us seem more relevant today than Uncharted or God of War I'm holding on to Spider-Man for a little while longer though as it's a reminder of how good crossplatform titles used to perform the average frame rate hits 100 FPS at 10 80 very high the game's Max rasterized quality preset lows are just 58 partly as a result of some of the more intensive cityscape moments and partly because swinging down Broadway always causes a bit of a spike in the graph at 1440 you don't really need to drop quality either as averages remain at about 70 FPS if you're at all competitive in fortnite you'll probably be playing in performance mode whereby the RX 6600 is mostly Overkill with the ryzen 5600 x in this build it can push 265 frames at 1080p without breaking a sweat in dx12 however with some of the nicer visual settings it's possible to tax this card quite heavily at 1080 competitive settings it still comes pretty close to 240 FPS but turning up to high minus the nanite and Lumen functions that drops to just 130 it still looks excellent and plays pretty well too barring the standard ue5 Shader stutters however turning everything up to Epic is devastating even without Hardware RT enabled the averag is now in the low 30s and the 1% low is just 11 FPS from other recent testing I found that Call of Duty war zone can be CPU limited by the ryzen 5600 X at about the 140 FPS Mark and at the basic preset the RX 6600 can probably do it I wanted to keep the GPU as the limiting factor in this test so I benchmarked at 1080 balanced and 1080 Ultra at balanced it's not far off the CPU limit with an impressive 124 FPS average and lows of almost 90 you don't even pay much of a penalty for pushing up to ultra either as the average drops only as far as 100 FPS and lows are still above 70 with the main bench marks out the way I wanted to quickly try a few games with rt enabled to see if the 6600 can actually showcase that feature at all there's not a whole lot of Point enabling RT if you're going to drop other settings to keep the frame rate from falling in the toilet so this is kind of a pass fail situation although rate racing isn't very demanding in re 4r it's a step too far at the max presets even dropping textures to 1 GB can't help smooth out performance even from one outdoor section to another and textures occasionally fail to stream properly the RT presets sadly makes Leon's hair look a bit greasy but if you can tolerate that you'll be able to enjoy almost unchanged performance from Max quality without RT so re4 gets a pass even if it's raate Trace Reflections aren't exactly a big deal Jedi Survivor has both RT Reflections and lighting and that makes an already demanding game even more so the 52 FPS average at 1080 High Drops to 35 with rt turned on and lows drop into the 20s I wouldn't play like this not without dropping resolution scaling or quality settings so I'm calling it a [Music] fail I know I said compromising on quality for the sake of RT was pointless and well it's true but I did it anyway at 1080 medium with high RT Ratchet and Clank has a persistent stutter causing frame time spikes throughout I tried increasing the card's power limit to see if that helped but alas I think we're hitting a vram limit the 32 FPS average was marred by 1% low of just 10 even without those spikes there are enough drops into the 20s to make this hard to play fail every time I mention fors Horizon 5's RT people like to correct me in the comments that it only works in Fort Serv Vista or photo mode well it was added to gameplay in November 2022 with the addition of the ultra and extreme RT settings which In fairness aren't applied automatically at their respective presets and do have to be manually dialed in at 1080 the impact of performance is negligible going from 96 to 89 FPS even at extreme it remains playable enough for most although lows do drop low 60 even 1440 Ultra with ultra RT is still smooth so I'm giving this one a pass RT Shadows bring plil requim to its knees in this one at 1080 High the game collapses from 55 fps to 25 with load in the middle teens big fail radon gpus aren't really up to the task of handling cyberpunk RT the RX 6600 can barely give a 30 FPS average at RT medium and that preset doesn't even include Reflections it's still more RT functionality than a console which will only offer local Shadows but the performance isn't what I'd call playable without making more compromises fail finally Spider-Man's RT Reflections are still fairly demanding on the GPU but we are starting from a fairly strong position without RT in the first place meaning for a 60 FPS average at 1080 very high lows aren't exactly comfortable however lingering in the mid-30s this is arguably a pass though I'm not sure everyone will agree the radon RX 6600 might not be a 1440 P Powerhouse or a showcase for Hardware rate racing but for the average gamer with a 1080p monitor it is a pretty good deal it's similarly priced to the RTX 2060 on the used market and it beats that GeForce in a majority of tests however like the 2060 the 6600 falls short of amd's old RX 5700 XT in almost every test and if you're shopping on the used market and don't think you'll miss rate tracing that first gen rdna card remains a better buy than either in my opinion on the new market however the only real competition comes from the half decade old GTX 1660s and the brand new Intel Ark a580 which at least in the UK is currently vaporware in my opinion then the RX 6600 really has no competition at all thanks for watching kindly do the usual YouTube things if you feel so inclined and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Iceberg Tech

Views: 68,003

Keywords: iceberg, RX 6600 8GB in 2023, RX 6600 8GB vs 2023, RX 6600 still good, can RX 6600 play games, is RX 6600 worth it, RX 6600 resident evil 4, RX 6600 spider-man remastered, RX 6600 forza horizon 5, RX 6600 cyberpunk, RX 6600 the last of us, RX 6600 jedi survivor, RX 6600 8GB, RX 6600 Star Wars Jedi Survivor, RX 6600 Survivor, RX 6600 Forza Motorsport, RX 6600 Plague Tale Requiem, £200 graphics card, $200 graphics card, 200 gpu, 200 graphics card for gaming, 200 gaming gpu

Id: STN5pYDfZx0

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023