Our review coverage of the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT includes three cards: ASRock Radeon RX 7600 XT Steel Legend, Sapphire RX 7600 XT Pulse and XFX Radeon RX 7600 XT Qick 309.

AMD launched the Radeon RX 7600 non-XT a few months ago, in May 2023. Team Red's new card is designed to cover the highly popular entry-level segment, to provide gamers with graphics hardware than can run all titles at 1080p Full HD at maximized settings. In our review coverage we were slightly surprised by the naming scheme, which lacks "XT," especially considering that AMD is using the full Navi 33 GPU on those designs. We were left wondering how a more powerful "XT" design could be accomplished, if enabling more GPU cores was not an option, so we assumed that there wouldn't be an XT ever. Of course we were wrong and AMD presented their Radeon RX 7600 XT at CES Las Vegas earlier this month.

While the Radeon RX 7600 XT uses the same number of GPU cores as the non-XT, the former is clocked considerably higher, at 2539 MHz, vs 2250 MHz on the non-XT, or +12.8%. That alone will result in a nice performance boost. On top of that you're getting twice the VRAM with 16 GB instead of 8 GB. The memory type is still GDDR6, using a 128-bit memory interface ticking at 18 Gbps. Releasing the new SKU makes a lot of sense for AMD, because NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 is offering higher performance than the non-XT, with pricing that's just $30 higher ($270 vs $300). With no option to attack the RTX 4060 with higher core counts, AMD is going for the card's biggest weakness—at least if you believe people on various communities, who have declared 8 GB VRAM on a graphics card as "unusable."

Averaged over our 25-game strong new 2024 graphics card test suite, we find the Radeon RX 7600 XT 10% faster than the Radeon RX 7600 non-XT. Compared to last-generations RX 6600 XT, the gen-over-gen performance uplift is 16%—not bad. Probably the most important win for the RX 7600 XT is that it can beat NVIDIA's RTX 4060 with 8%, no matter the resolution. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is still around 20% faster. Last-generation's Radeon RX 6700 XT is being sold off at attractive prices, and it's 12-14% faster, despite its smaller 12 GB framebuffer.

These performance improvements are pretty decent, but they have little to do with the bigger VRAM, and are mostly due to the higher clock speeds—a wise strategic move by AMD. Actually, there is a single title that shows a significant performance increase with the XT, and that's Ratchet and Clank. With +40%, the gains are pretty spectacular, too. However, when taking a closer look, it does seem that RX 7600 non-XT is just underperforming in that title, for no apparent reason. It can't be a VRAM issue, because RX 6600 XT 8 GB works much better, RTX 4060 8 GB, too. I did retest the RX 7600 with today's AMD press drivers and the FPS numbers check out. This looks like some sort of driver bug specific to the 7600 non-XT. I also noticed that Elden Ring runs a bit slower across the board with the XT, despite the higher clocks. I've also retested this on both cards with the press drivers—no change.

Looking at 1440p, we do start seeing some cases where 8 GB VRAM on the RX 7600 non-XT isn't enough, and the XT can definitely make a difference. Confirmation of these results comes from the RX 6700 XT 12 GB, which offers a VRAM bump over the 8 GB cards, too, and performs better as well. The move from 12 GB (6700 XT) to 16 GB (7600 XT) doesn't provide much in terms of additional FPS. Once you go 4K, this changes, and the 16 GB on the RX 7600 XT help beat the RX 6700 XT in The Last of Us.

Still, it's important to realize that the RX 7600 series is fundamentally designed for 1080p. While you might be able to run 1440p in some older titles, and even 4K in light games, these have accordingly lower VRAM requirements, so the extra memory on the XT doesn't really help. Also, when using FSR upscaling, the render resolution is lowered, which brings to VRAM usage as well. Just like the RX 7600 non-XT, the RX 7600 XT is a good choice for gaming at 1080p Full HD at maximized settings. Compared to the plain RX 7600 you get a performance boost that helps reach 60 FPS in some more demanding games. As mentioned before, if you are willing to dial down details and/or use upscaling, then 1440p is definitely playable, too.

As expected, ray tracing performance of the RX 7600 XT is slow, very slow. The underlying reason is that AMD executes RT instructions on their shader cores, while NVIDIA can offload them to dedicated circuitry inside the chip. NVIDIA's offerings are considerably faster here, especially the RTX 4060 Ti can make a big difference in RT, at a higher price though. I'm not sure if ray tracing really matters in this segment. The technology comes with such a big performance hit that I find difficult to justify, especially when you're already fighting to stay above 60 FPS in heated battles.

What does matter more in this segment is support for upscaling technologies. While NVIDIA has DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 Frame Generation, AMD's new card offers the same set of technologies as the RX 6000 series, which even work on NVIDIA, too, because AMD was kind enough to open up their code, to make it universally usable on all GPU architectures. Still, this means that with an NVIDIA card you'll end up having more choice in terms of upscaling. With GeForce 40, NVIDIA has introduced DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which is a completely novel way to create additional frames, without actually upscaling the pixels. Rather an additional frame is generated "between" two frames coming out of the graphics card. This approach is even able to increase your FPS in CPU-limited situations. AMD has released their competing FSR 3 frame generation technology not long ago, but it's only available in very few games—hopefully the situation improves this year.

AMD does know that their game adoption rate is lower than NVIDIA's, so they are working on AFMF (AMD Fluid Motion Frames), which is a game-independent method of generating additional frames. The new technology just came out of beta yesterday and is available on all RX 6000 and 7000 cards, supporting all DX11 and DX12 games. However, due to the lack of game-specific support, the algorithm is lacking a lot of additional information and will always deliver worse results than a native solution. For example, framegen gets applied to HUD elements, too, which affects rendered text as well. Generally you should expect more rendering artifacts, but I'm still positive for the technology, because it might turn a game from unplayable to playable, with a minimal investment in graphics hardware. I'm sure gamers on a budget will be willing to accept some compromises in image quality, if it means they can enjoy a game without spending $1000 on a graphics card.

With our new 2024 test suite, we are adding a section focused on testing GPU Compute, which is becoming more and more important every day. Emerging AI Technologies like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and others are transforming the world. While the use of compute on the consumer desktop is limited today, it will grow considerably. For our first round of testing we've picked three real-life workloads that allow us to get a feel what to expect. Here, NVIDIA is the clear leader with a substantial advantage over both AMD and Intel. It's not only about performance, but also about the software ecosystem, which is much more advanced on the NV side, but the other players are working hard to catch up, I'm sure. Specifically for the RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT I noticed that they would just crash in the Blender GPU compute test, even with the newest drivers. AMD is praising 16 GB VRAM, especially for compute, because it means you can tackle more complex problems. While I agree, I feel like this is more of an edge case these days, especially with the compute horsepower of the RX 7600 XT. On the other hand, if you need to solve a specific problem and the RX 7600 XT 16 GB works well after in-house evaluation, then it'll be a good alternative to NVIDIA's offerings, even though I wouldn't buy any Radeon as a general compute card yet.

Sapphire's Pulse family of graphics cards has always offered good price/performance at close-to-reference PCB designs with optimized coolers. The RX 7600 XT Pulse comes with a compact dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution, which ensures it will fit into all cases, even older OEM computers. Noise levels are "quiet" with 31 dBA, but the card is definitely a bit louder than the other triple-slot cards tested today, which are $20 more expensive at the same time. Our apples-to-apples noise-normalized cooler comparison test confirms that the Pulse thermal solution is the weakest of the three cards tested today. Temperatures are fine, noise levels are good, even with the dual-slot design. No complaints from me. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2024, the fans will stop spinning when not gaming, for the perfect noise-free experience.

While RX 7600 non-XT was highly energy efficient, this is no longer the case for the XT. The added VRAM does consume a bit of extra power, but what's an even bigger factor is that AMD has clocked the Navi 33 GPU much higher, which requires more voltage, resulting in lower energy efficiency. The RX 7600 was happy with 150-160 W, the RX 7600 XT needs 200 W. While that isn't a big issue for PSU planning or energy cost, it's still a slightly surprising result, especially when RTX 4060 makes do with just 130 W, and RTX 4060 Ti offers much higher performance with 165 W.

Overclocking on the RX 7600 XT worked well, we've gained over 11% in real-life performance. Overclocking is just a bit more complicated on Navi 3x, but people are getting used to it—you'll have to increase the power limit and undervolt the GPU, or you'll not see any meaningful performance gains. While AMD has improved the slider length of the GPU OC slider, and it's not a limiting factor anymore, the VRAM slider is still too short, shorted than what the hardware is capable of doing. At least the power limit slider is more generous with +20%.

AMD has set a base MSRP of $330 for the Radeon RX 7600 XT, which is a $60 increase over the $270 RX 7600 non-XT, or +22%. While the higher performance does offset that a bit, the card is still much too expensive for what it offers—unless you have a specific scenario that benefits from 16 GB VRAM. Strong competition comes from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, which currently sells for $300 with support for DLSS 3. While that card has better RT performance, too, I don't think this is important in this segment, as mentioned before. Another alternative is the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which is much faster, but quite a bit more expensive too at $390. Still, I'm sure some gamers will be tempted by it. Last but not least, the aging RX 6700 XT 12 GB offers additional VRAM, too, and costs only $300, yet offers better performance in virtually all scenarios. For the RX 7600 XT this means that AMD has to bring its price much closer to $300, or it won't achieve any significant market share.

I really like that Sapphire is pricing the Pulse at MSRP, which helps with price/performance, given the already high base price. In this segment a few dollars matters for many, which makes the Pulse the best choice of the three cards launched today. On the other hand, for $20 more, which isn't much money in absolute terms, the other cards offer better noise levels and lower temperatures, thanks to their bigger coolers.