It’s already late in the year and most companies have started planning their hardware releases and plans for next year, but not AMD. The company has just launched a new graphics card to the market to compete in the budget segment where people are clamoring for better performance at lower prices. Enter the AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU, a lower-powered version of the earlier released RX 6600 XT.
Aimed at gamers who want to play at high frame rates at 1080p, the RX 6600 delivers on that promise and more from what I’ve experienced. If you’re looking for a card that can play e-sports titles at more than 100FPS and also allows you to play AAA games at frame rates higher than 70 at 1080P then this card is for you. Though I also tried it at 1440p while fiddling with game settings and the results were great as well.
The RX 6600 doesn’t have an official branded version of the card, I tested out a PowerColor Fighter AMD Radeon RX 6600, a dual-fan factory overclocked model that may appeal to minimalist builders out there. It doesn’t have any fancy bells and whistles like RGB or a backplate, but it gets the job done. It took up two slots on my PC case but it’s small enough to fit in most PC cases out there. It’s also powered by a single 8-pin connector, so most people won’t have any problems running the card. With 8GB GDDR6 of RAM, the card will handle most of your AAA games at 1080P, which is what AMD was going for at this price point.
Table of Contents
Performance and Benchmarks
Let’s talk about games. All the games here were tested using a PC with a Ryzen 5 5600X paired with 16GB of RAM and a 165Hz gaming monitor. I tried a couple of AAA games with my time with the card. First, I had a first look at Far Cry 6. Generally, the Far Cry series can be very demanding when it comes to graphic cards as the open-world maps of the series certainly can push cards to their limits. At 1080p I averaged a solid 80-90FPS while playing at high settings. This was a very smooth experience for me to say the least. It was very impressive, as this is a newly released game, but the card just handled it easily.
I cranked up the settings to 1440p with high settings as well and the game surprisingly ran at around 68-74FPS for most of the time. The difference in image quality was apparent with the higher resolution and the card impressed me at how it handled this.
Let’s move on to something a bit more competitive. I tested the game playing Call of Duty: Warzone. At 1080P using a mix of high and low settings for competitive gameplay, I was averaging about 120FPS or even more. So if you’re into something like Warzone where high refresh rates matter because of the gameplay then this card is perfect for you at 1080p. At 1440p, with a little bit more tweaking of the settings, I managed to snag 104FPS out of the card which was impressive, to say the least!
Moving onto another recently released game, I tried Amazon’s New World with the RX 6600. At 1080p the card ran the game smoothly at 80-90FPS at max settings. This is impressive as the game is one of the more graphically demanding MMORPGs out there. At 1440p though the card struggled at high settings and I was just getting around 50-55FPS at any given moment in the game.
Another AAA game I tested was Watch Dogs: Legion. At 1080p with high settings, I was getting around 120-125FPS, which was hugely impressive for a game like this. Pushing the settings up to 1440p and I was still getting a solid 80-90FPS in the game with a lot of objects on the screen. This surprised me as Watch Dogs: Legion can be a very graphically demanding title for graphic cards.
Other general benchmarks that I ran were 3D Mark Time Spy where the RX 6600 got a score of 8,456 and on Ultra it got 5,386. The results were in line with team green’s offering at the same level while both outperforming each other in certain tests.
Software and Features
Being an AMD Radeon card, you will have access to an entire suite of settings using AMD’s Radeon Software. It allows you to tweak a lot of settings and active performance features such as Radeon Boost, Radeon Anti-Lag, Radeon Image Sharpening, and Smart Access Memory.
Radeon Boost renders select scene elements at a lower resolution for higher frame rates. Radeon Anti Lag lowers your overall latency. Smart Access Memory uses the GPU’s VRAM and utilizes the bandwidth of your PCI Express lane to increase your overall performance.
Conclusion
The PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6600 lives up to its promise of solid gaming performance at 1080p. It can even push it even further to 1440p, given that you will have to tweak your settings to get the most FPS out of the card. By no means this card is a slouch when comparing it to its direct competitors out there. Especially in this segment where people are budget conscious, the RX 6600 is a welcome addition to the market.
The card has an SRP of USD 329 and is available in the market starting now, the RX 6600 offers solid value and performance for anyone out there looking for a great gaming experience at a very reachable price point.
