Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse: RTX 3060 is no match in Full HD

Conclusion

Radeons RX 6600 XT are the most powerful graphics cards with the small AMD Navi 23 core. The Navi 22 in the RX 6700 XT is naturally better, but it still humbles the GeForce RTX 3060 with ease. However, in making this bold claim, it should be clarified that this dominance only works perfectly under certain circumstances – at lower resolutions without ray-tracing. This graphics card, in short, begs for high-speed monitor gamers with FHD resolutions.

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At Full HD resolution, Radeon RX 6600 XT is like a fish in water. At higher resolutions, the charm fades compared to the competition. But that doesn’t matter too much, as even the GeForce RTX 3060’s performance at higher resolutions (from QHD upwards) isn’t properly up to scratch. At FHD, the RX 6600 XT Pulse has an average 4% edge compared to the RTX 3060 Eagle.It’s not a staggering difference, but when you factor in the roughly 10% lower power consumption of the Radeon, the GeForce is only interesting in a gaming PC perhaps because of its DLSS support.

RX 6600 XT in higher resolutions is a bit slowed down by the rather small Infinity Cache with only 32 MB (it is twice as big in the RX 6700 XT). There, those ratios against the RTX 3060 are already worse. Low power consumption does remain, but performance already drops more steeply than on a GeForce with significantly higher memory bandwidth. At QHD, the RX 6600 XT loses around 5% in terms of average performance to the RTX 3060, then as much as 9% at UHD. At this highest test resolution, even the gameplay of the undemanding Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is less smooth already . More important than that, though, is that at the target resolution (Full HD) in the vast majority of games, the RX 6600 XT has the edge over the RTX 3060. And in some games, it’s quite substantial. In Borderlands up to 29 %, IN Battlefield V up to +26 % (tam Radeon only loses to GeForce when DXR is on), In F1 2020 it’s 19 %, In FIFA 21 it’s 14 %, Next is Forza Horizon 4 with 10 % a Metre Exodus with 9 %. Red Dead redemption 2 with Direct X 12 in 13% better on the RX 6600 XT (with Vulkan the results are equal).

The Radeon falls behind the GeForce in Full HD in for example Total War Saga: Troy (-12 %), Control (-9 %) and also in CS:GO (-21 %). For completeness, it should be added that the mentioned comparisons are without active Resizable BAR, we don’t have the RTX 3600 measured with it yet. With the Radeon RX 6600 XT, however, ir does add up to 6% of performance to this card on average, with the power increase always being less than the performance increase. Thus, it can be said that this technology works quite efficiently on Radeons, but it is still far from perfect. It is still being debugged and has some shortcomings. While it doesn’t significantly reduce performance in games, for some cases SAM (as AMD ReBAR tends to refer to it) is quite unoptimized. Even within Radeon Pro’s own renderer. Enabling ReBAR knocks performance down to a quarter, and with the presence of this technology we’ve seen significant drops even under OpenCL in LuxMark. This is also why we cannot drop measurements with ReBAR turned off and will continue to monitor how performance changes over time. Hopefully it will settle down one day and will not disadvantage graphics cards in any way.

ReBAR additionally increases power consumption under low loads, such as typically video playback, web work or “complete” idleness on the desktop. While it won’t break the bank on electricity, it’s also one example of the technology’s lack of tuning. There’s also the consumption with two higher-resolution monitors to consider at lower loads. As you know, the latter has gone up significantly compared with only one monitor connected and continues to do so, at least with the RX 6600 XT. This is despite the fact that there was anecdotal information a long time ago that it no longer increases like this with a second monitor, and recently AMD confirmed this officially in the framework to the new drivers. But unfortunately, for the RX 6600 XT this is not the case. Maybe this card doesn’t have enough power for 2× UHD and everything is already fine with more powerful Radeons. But we won’t find out right now.

Either way, the Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse is a very decent card. We’ve already discussed the excellent performance per watt, but there’s still the cooler. This is as far from quiet as it is noisy, but it’s definitely above average in this class of graphics card. Remember the noisy RTX 3060 Eagle… RX 6600 XT is four times more quiet during heavy loads while reaching lower GPU temperatures. What’s also average is the coil whine. The highest clock speeds exceed 2600 MHz, but this is at relatively lower load (rendering), in games it’s between 2476–2577 MHz, which is still well above the claimed values for Game Clock. Aside from the current market situation around graphics cards overall, there’s not much to fault the Sapphire RX 6600 XT for, and the “Smart buy!” award is probably well deserved. Do you agree?

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš

Games for testing are from Jama levova

• Contents
• Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse in detail
• Specifications table
• Methodology: performance tests
• Methodology: how we measure power draw
• Methodology: noise and sound measurement
• Methodology: temperature tests
• Test rig
• 3DMark
• Age of Empires II: DE
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Battlefield V
• Battlefield V s DXR
• Borderlands 3
• Control
• Control with DXR
• Counter-Strike: GO
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Cyberpunk 2077 with FidelityFX CAS
• Cyberpunk 2077 with DXR
• DOOM Eternal
• F1 2020
• FIFA 21
• Forza Horizon 4
• Mafia: DE
• Metro Exodus
• Metro Exodus with DXR
• Microsoft Flight Simulator
• Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 (Dx12)
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider s DXR
• Total War Saga: Troy
• Wasteland 3
• Overall game performance and performance per euro
• CompuBench (OpenCL)
• SPECviewperf 2020 and SPECworkstation 3
• FLOPS, IOPS and memory speed tests
• 3D rendering 1/2 (LuxMark and Blender@Cycles)
• 3D rendering 2/2 (Blender@Radeon ProRender a Eevee)
• Photo editing (Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo)
• Broadcasting (OBS a Xsplit)
• Password cracking
• GPU clock speed
• GPU temperatures
• Net graphics power draw and performance per watt
• Analysis of 12 V subcircuit power supply (higher load)
• Analysis of 12 V subcircuit power supply (lower load)
• Analysis of 3.3 V subcircuit power supply
• Noise level
• Frequency response of sound
• Conclusion