16GB seems to help in a number of games.
Makes Spiderman + RT possible at 1440p with over 60 fps. A shame there does not seem to be any min fps for the games tested with RT.
A much smoother experience in FC6 at 1440p with RT on and I suspect if min FPS was available the XT would be > 60 and the standard would be sub 60.
Ratchet and Clank shows that more VRAM takes decompression load off of the GPU. I would not be surprised if more PS5 exclusive ports have this kind of behaviour going forward. Look at those minimums as well, if you want a locked 60 fps 1080p experience in R&C the XT can deliver and the 7600 fails miserably.
Helps in TLOU as well.
This is sub 60 fps but it shows it beating far faster cards with less VRAM like the 3070 and 4060Ti. 41 fps min with 45 average is a very stable frame rate. With tuning I bet you could get a 60 fps 1440p experience in this title but there is no way the 7600 is getting that and even more powerful cards like the 3060Ti look like they might struggle with it.
I do wish we had atleast 1 outlet doing the [H]ardOCP maximum playable settings type comparison so the IQ difference between the 7600 and 7600XT was actually visible.
Another issue which HUB showed is that not all games suffer performance penalties with low VRAM, they just use crap textures instead like Halo Infinite, that makes the FPS chart useless because the IQ in those cases is not actually fixed and as such you are not comparing like for like. Assuming this suite is not automated there needs to be massive asterisks next to cards that display typical FPS but have much worse IQ due to texture swapping even when the settings are equal.
One thing I notice about these titles is that they are PS5 ports which has 10GB or more of ram available for the GPU and a fast texture decompression engine to offload that task when streaming assets. I would not be at all surprised if more and more PS5 exclusive titles that get ported to the PC have far worse performance on weaker 8GB GPUs because they are using some of the compute to decompress assets where as those cards with 12GB or more can have them sitting in VRAM already decompressed so all the compute can be used to render the image. This will buck the conventional wisdom that weak GPUs don't need that much VRAM and would actually make it more important than slightly higher tier GPUs like the 6700XT or the 7700XT which have an excess of compute so can actually do both.
As I said in another thread. For those who keep hardware for 4/5 years this is a pretty okay GPU, the 6700XT is better if you are in a region where that is cheap so go for that but otherwise this is probably the next best. In my region the price difference between the 4060 and the pulse is £20 which is about 7% more and you can't get cheap 6700XTs or 6750XTs. I would not be surprised if this has legs like the RX480 8GB did over the 4GB version. At the time the advice was go for the 4GB because nothing uses more yet, then we came out of the PS4 cross gen phase and into the 8th gen only phase and 4GB was left behind. We are starting to see the signs of that happening again with 8GB GPUs and the 9th Gen only phase. If you intend to upgrade again within the next 2 years then you would probably be fine with the 8GB parts but if not you are going to need to make more IQ compromises to retain playable frame rates in upcoming AAA titles.
Good day
@W1zzard, good day tpu.
First post here, would like to say a few things about this launch and why I do not think it is a good idea to buy this card.
16 GB is definitely an overkill for the card. Smart engineering and architecture/design would have led to less VRAM - 12 GB or 14 GB would have served the corresponding performance tier much better, and the cost would be more balanced.
It is still built using the older 7nm+ class TSMC process, first launched back in 2019 with Navi 10.
This is two process generations behind - behind the newer 5nm and behind the state-of-the-art 3nm.
This card is too slow for the price bracket it is launched at.
Mindfactory in Germany which is heavily pro-AMD oriented retailer reported only 30 pieces sold on the launch day.
This is a failure, no matter how you look at it.
@W1zzard It is really a good idea to move away from the FPS centric reviews and begin to include image quality comparisons. You can't compare an nvidia 8 GB card to an AMD 16 GB in certain games because it is all well known that the nvidia driver cheats and reduces the textures quality settings in order to work okeyish with the corresponding low VRAM amounts.
You also have to pay crazy more for games. For one console game you can basically buy 10 for PC from key resellers.