The AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT arrives in the middle of a GPU generation that's notorious for incredibly high prices, without performance necessarily justifying that price increase. The 7600 XT, however, is an extremely affordable graphics card, starting at $329, just a bit more expensive than the $269 RX 7600 that AMD launched in 2024.
However, because it's so far from the Radeon RX 7700 XT in performance and cost, it's hard to imagine exactly who this graphics card is for.
Extra Memory
The AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT is strapped with 16GB of VRAM, up from the 8GB of VRAM of the RX 7600, which means the increased price you're paying is pretty much all going to the extra memory. But do you even need 16GB of VRAM on this card? Well, it depends.
While 8GB has been the sweet spot for VRAM for some time now, there are games that are demanding more memory, even at 1080p. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 already chew through 8GB of RAM like its nothing, and that trend is probably going to continue as new AAA PC games come out.
For the most part that's a future problem, though. If you just want to play existing esports titles at 1080p, you don't really need to pay for an extra 8GB of RAM, the RX 7600 will get the job done nearly as well as this new RX 7600 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT – Design and Specs
Unlike the AMD Radeon RX 7600, AMD is not releasing a reference board for the Radeon RX 7600 XT. Instead, this GPU is only available through Aftermarket graphics card manufacturers like XFX, Powercolor and Sapphire.
Just like the rest of the Radeon 7000 series GPUs, the RX 7600 XT is built on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture. This generation brings better ray tracing and AI accelerators built into the chip, but don't get too excited, these AI accelerators are meant for enterprise-level AI workloads like Stable Diffusion, rather than using them to boost FSR.
The RX 7600 XT features 32 compute units, the same as the RX 7600, which equals out to 2,048 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). These compute units are increased a bit by a higher Game Clock, boosting up to 2,470MHz, rather than the 2,250MHz of the RX 7600. However, with this higher clock speed, comes a higher power draw. The Radeon RX 7600 XT is rated for 190W total board power, while the original 7600 is only rated at 165W.
This was reflected in my testing, throughout all of the tests, the card peaked at 194W of power. Meanwhile, the cooler on the PowerColor Radeon RX 7600 XT Hellhound was easily able to handle the load, with temperatures peaking at just 68°C, which is lower than the Radeon RX 7600 using AMD's own board design. Though, at a TBP of just 190W, you can expect pretty much any version of the graphics card to keep pretty cool, especially if you tinker with your fan curve.
With the slightly higher power requirement, though, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT needs both an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCIe power connector. But, hey, at least AMD isn't requiring you to use an adapter to power your graphics card like some other GPU manufacturers out there.
As far as ports go, this card has 3 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI, the same as any other AMD graphics card of this generation. Having 3 DisplayPort is fine, but with a budget graphics card like this, it would have made more sense to include two HDMI ports and two DisplayPort for folks that have lower-end or older monitors.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT – Performance
The AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT launches January 24 for $329, but the AMD Radeon RX 7600 starts at just $269 and offers performance that's on par, and sometimes almost matches what the 7600 XT can do, despite the extra 8GB of VRAM. However, the RX 7700 XT is $449 and offers nearly 50% better performance at a 36% higher price. This makes it hard to recommend the 7600 XT to anyone, because you can get nearly as good performance out of a cheaper card, and saving up an extra $130 results in a night-and-day difference in games.
That doesn't make the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT a bad graphics card – far from it – it just doesn't make a ton of sense to buy this GPU when you could get the RX 7600 and a full-priced game for the same cost.
For instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, the Radeon RX 7600 XT gets 33 fps, while the RX 7600 gets 28. The RX 7600 XT does get some extra performance at 1080p, though, netting 44 fps to the RX 7600's 33.
That looks pretty good for the RX 7600 XT but not every game tells the same story. In Total War: Warhammer 3, the RX 7600 XT gets 89 fps at 1080p, compared to 83 fps from the original RX 7600. That's just a 7% difference in performance.
Even in synthetic benchmarks, the difference isn't exactly stark. in the 3DMark Speed Way test, for instance, the Radeon RX 7600 XT scores 2,050 points to the RX 7600's 1,956, a difference of just 5%.
Things look even worse for the Radeon RX 7600 XT when compared to the $299 Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, though.
Despite costing $30 more than the RTX 4060 to start, the Radeon RX 7600 XT is slower most of the time, and when ray tracing is enabled, the difference is significant. In Cyberpunk 2077, the RTX 4060 gets 62 fps with the "Ray Tracing Ultra" preset and DLSS on Quality mode. I tested the 7600 XT in Cyberpunk with FSR instead of DLSS, which is where a lot of that performance delta comes from, but you just have to look at the synthetics to see Nvidia's lead solidify itself.
In the 3DMark Speed Way test, the RTX 4060 scores 2,536 points to the RX 7600 XT's 2,050. That's a 23% difference in Nvidia's favor, while Team Green's card also enjoys a 10% lower price. If you're going to buy a graphics card for 1080p gaming, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT will absolutely get the job done, there's no question about that. However, it doesn't make sense to buy this card when there are better options – from both AMD and Nvidia – to buy at the same price.
