 Do you like 1080p? Got too much money lying around? Think the world needs a little more e-waste? Well, has AMD got an offer for you? Starting today, you can get your very own Radeon RX 6600, a brand new piece of 1080p graphics card hardware at a price you won't believe. But hold up, can it compete with the RTX 3060? And if it can, why isn't AMD talking about it? I mean, I'll gladly talk about our sponsor, Crucial. Thanks to Crucial for sponsoring this video. Get more done with Crucial's P5 Plus NVMe SSD. With up to 6600 MBPS sequential reads and a 5-year warranty, Crucial makes tech to last. Get yours today at the link below. Intro Whenever any GPU from AMD or Nvidia is released, there's at least some kind of reveal and anticipation leading up to it. Heck, even the RTX 3060 had an announcement a little over a month ahead of time back at CES 2021. So, um, why the radio silence on this one? It might have something to do with the ongoing supply issues that have been plaguing the entire industry for some time now. AMD might simply not see a good way to launch these cards without stirring up controversy over yet another thing that people can't buy, particularly since this is using the same GPU, physically speaking, as the RX 6600 XT, right down to the 8GB of GDDR6 and 32 MB of Infinity Cache. The difference, of course, is that these are binned down parts, where even the memory is running at a reduced bandwidth. So the RX 6600 could actually be good for supply if these parts were otherwise sitting on shelves collecting dust. And yet, this review might be the first you've heard about it outside of leaks. Is there something AMD's trying to hide here? This press deck that we saw sure looks good, but we need to do some more digging to find out for ourselves, and the best way to do that is through benchmarks. We'll be sticking to Windows 10 for our GPU bench until Windows 11 gaming performance is better understood, but we've got a total of five GPUs to test today from both teams over this generation and the previous one. Well, right off the bat in F1 2021, AMD is looking pretty good with a lead over Nvidia's RTX 3060 with ray tracing off, but that predictably changes when you turn ray tracing on. The XT variants, four additional compute units that the non-XT lacks, really do matter for tracing those rays, and ray accelerators that AMD has included aren't as mature as Nvidia's. Forza Horizon 4 picks back up with a commanding lead for the 6600, coming within spitting distance of its bigger brother actually, and the just released Far Cry 6 isn't too shabby for the new GPU either, although it is trailing team green by a few FPS here. With ray tracing on, however, you could say AMD is a Far Cry from Nvidia's performance. I can't believe I wrote that. As an aside, it's worth mentioning that Fidelity FX Super Resolution is supported by that title and F1 2021, so you can squeeze a bit more performance out of it at the cost of some visual clarity. FSR has really come into its own as a better-than-your-monitor kind of traditional scaler, but while it's good at that, it's not going to try and recreate missing details like Nvidia's deep learning supersampling will, so you can only expect it to do so much. Back to gaming, Hitman 3 puts up some good numbers for the 6600 that are just a hair off of what the RTX 3060 shows, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla makes up about as much of a significant lead as team green has in CSGO, although the latter title's already high framerate makes this less of a win. The number of times the RX 6600 dipped below 60 FPS in all of these tests is 3 to the 3060's 1, so while imperfect, it's not a bad showing by any means. What's more, while it's faster for traditional rendering, in most cases, if you average all of our gaming results, the RX 6600 and the RTX 3060 traded blows so precisely that it is 100.00% the same performance, which is just mathematically impressive. Just not objectively impressive, like the array of colors available for lanyards on LTTstore.com. 10 bucks a pop and nigh indestructible too, unlike the RX 6600's productivity performance. Oh yeah, this is a card that is low on the ladder, so it's not going to be purchased with this in mind, but it's becoming more of a thing thanks to work from home, so here it is. DaVinci Resolve turns in some less than ideal numbers, even failing to match the last gen 5600 XT thanks to that card's greater compute unit count. The same story, more or less, persists throughout Puget Bench or Creative Cloud, where only Premiere is even close. It's not even a contest with Luxmark or IndigoRenderer either, where even the more expensive XT model is thoroughly stomped. Man, remember when AMD had productivity on lockdown? Power consumption does bring good news for AMD though, as the RX 6600 draws a peak of about 188 watts throughout all the testing and comes in comfortably below the power draw of the RTX 3060. For similar gaming performance, that ain't bad. It's worth keeping in mind that neither Nvidia nor AMD have first-party cards for these GPUs, so thermal performance should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly given the overbuilt cooler on our ASUS RTX 3060. Still, in a closed test bench, our dual-fan XFX 6600 doesn't do too bad, comfortably sitting around the 65 degree mark where, like the other cards, it maintains its peak core frequency pretty well throughout the run. That brings up an interesting question. If this is the same physical silicon as the RTX 6600 XT, can we push the power limit and core clocks to close the gap? Well, we can match the core clocks, but with fewer compute units, we'd have to push it much further in order to come close to matching the XT's performance. There does seem to be a lot of headroom baked into these cards, largely thanks to their aggressively low power target and low wattage requirements. That suggests that AMD is targeting system integrators and other power-conscious folks by leveraging RDNA2's impressive performance scaling. Of course, your mileage may vary greatly depending on the card you get. Still, is the RX 6600 even remotely worth it for yet another 1080p max settings graphics card? Only if you thought the RTX 3060 was worth it, which is probably a big fat no. At 329, the RX 6600 is steadfastly keeping with the pattern of matching the RTX 3060, for better or worse. We'll have affiliate links for these cards below in case you actually want to buy them, but realistically you probably won't until prices come back down to earth. If, however, we assume that we don't live in the real world and consider it solely based on the MSRP, you have to ask yourself some questions. Do you want better ray tracing performance? Do you want better productivity performance? Then maybe you should look at Nvidia. But if you just want to play games, then the RX 6600 is a good fit for AMD fans or say Linux gamers who enjoy an open source driver compared to Nvidia's proprietary blob. Get subscribed by the way, because Linus and Luke are doing a Linux challenge where they actually run it on their home PCs, and you don't want to miss that. I know I don't. Of course, these MSRP's are well above the $200 price point this level of hardware commanded a few short years ago. We've already discussed at length why this is happening, so I won't repeat myself here other than to say, yeah, it sucks. Were it me buying a GPU in the real world today? I would go with a used higher end previous gen card. You can actually find RTX 2080s going for as much as 3060s on the street, which is probably what the RX 6600 will go for once it sells through. Even better, if you don't care about ray tracing or productivity, GTX 1080 Ti's are sometimes going for even less than that. Neither is actually a good deal in an objective sense, but you've got to take what you can get in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a chip shortage that we found ourselves in. But you don't have to settle for bad segues to sponsors like MSI. Thanks to MSI for sponsoring today's video. MSI's Spatium M470 NVMe SSD has a sequential read of up to 5,000 megabytes per second and write speeds of up to 4,400 megabytes per second. You can do that up to 3,300 terabytes of written data. They run on a four lane PCI Express Gen 4 interface with built-in data security and error correction capabilities. You can get them in one terabyte or two terabyte capacities in the M.2 2280 form factor, and they've got a five year warranty. Learn more today at the link below. Thanks for watching guys. If you're feeling particularly frugal, go check out our recent video on whether four cores is still enough in 2021. Maybe we should do one for older GPUs too. Let us know in the comments below actually. I think we did one recently, but it's kind of changing now that Windows 11 is out.