AMD Radeon RX 6600 tested: A gaming GPU that levels up your 1080p play

In what I suspect is the last new graphics card release of 2021, AMD launches its entry 1080p Radeon RX 6600 GPU, a lower-power sibling to its recent RX 6600 XT and direct competitor to Nvidia's RTX 3060. Both the RX 6600 and RTX 3060 are aimed at gamers looking for solidly playable, high-quality 1080p -- AAA games at 80-100fps or so with some fiddling of settings -- as opposed to high-frame-rate, high-quality 1080p. And for that, the RX 6600 delivers solid, if not stellar results. 

Although the RX 6600 is nominally priced at $329, this is the absolute worst time to buy a graphics card, and has been for a while. Yes, the cryptocurrency mining crackdown in China and regulatory smackdown in Europe may lessen the demand for GPUs, but we're still in the middle of a silicon supply crunch that affects many components of graphics cards and that's expected to last at least until the end of the year, if not into 2022. 

So it's bound to keep availability low, shopbots busy and prices high; they'd dipped a little in August, but now seem to be back up to high levels. For instance, in August, a spot check of available RTX 3060 cards, which are targeted to start at $329 like the RX 6600 is, were going for as "low" as $500; now they're closer to $800. 

And if you're looking at entry-level cards like the RX 6600, you're probably really price-sensitive to begin with, making it a doubly bad time -- unless you're desperate.

Without knowing what the actual-real-true prices are as opposed to the what-planet-do-you-live-on prices, it's difficult to make a call about which GPU to recommend you make a fruitless attempt to buy. You can check all the usual suspects, though, including Amazon, Newegg, Walmartand Best Buy.  

Like Nvidia's RTX 3060 models and the RX 6600 XT, there's no official AMD-branded version of a card using the RX 6600 GPU, so we tested the Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 6600, a dual-fan factory-overclocked model that's a solidly built and performant take on this class of cards. In our testing, the 6600 generally delivered in-game 1080p frame rates above 70fps with whizzy speedup features turned off, and proved a fine card for single-screen photo editing. It ventured into 1440p territory with mixed results: Playable, but usually with some scaling back on quality.

It's a dual-slot card, but a real one that doesn't cut it too close with neighbors; that, plus its low-ish wattage makes it a good physical fit for for sticking into older systems as an upgrade. 

There's not a lot to the Pulse's feature set -- it's just a well-built implementation of the AMD GPU, with no flashing lights, BIOS switching, performance logging and so on. Running at full tilt, the card remained relatively cool and quiet, sustaining a 2.3GHz GPU clock speed --  a little more than the typical rating of 2.2GHz -- and the fans are quiet, with no irritating whine.

You have access to the multitude of settings made available by Radeon Adrenalin, as well. They include Radeon Boost (which selectively renders scene elements at a lower resolution, based on visibility, for higher frame rates); Radeon Anti-Lag (reduces latency by lightening the load on the CPU); Radeon Image Sharpening; and Smart Access Memory (AMD's Resizable BAR implementation, in which the CPU can store game-related data in GPU RAM rather than system RAM so the GPU doesn't have to traverse the system bus to retrieve it).      

Enlarge Image

You can also use Sapphire's Trixx Boost utility, which uses using simple upscaling algorithms, tweaked by AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening, to boost frame rates. AMD's  FidelityFX Super Resolution (upscaling from lower-resolution textures to achieve faster frame rates, a la Nvidia DLSS)  and Contrast Adaptive Sharpening require integration by game developers, while the combination of Trixx Boost and driver-implemented RIS can work with any game that runs on DX9 or later. 

Trixx does have some advantages over some other manufacturer's utilities. It doesn't insist on running all the time or loading itself at Windows launch, for one. And Boost has a setting for upscaling to 1080p; algorithms like Nvidia's DLSS and FSR are optimized for upscaling from 1,920x1080 textures. The flip side is that it's a bit stripped down; of course, the card doesn't have much to control, but I would at least like to be able to save performance logs.

Based on my testing of the Pulse and the Asus RX 6600 XT, I'd probably avoid cards based on the chips as an upgrade for older Intel systems with PCIe 3 buses (that's 10th gen or earlier) since it doesn't perform as well as the RTX 3060. They rely heavily on the faster PCIe 4 bus and AMD's Smart Access Memory in some cases to compensate for the narrower 8-lane PCIe connection rather than Nvidia's 16-lane connection, which really impacts the bandwidth. And AMD, with its single Ray Accelerator per compute unit, has yet to catch up with Nvidia on performance for some DirectX 12 technologies, notably DXR. So it might not be a good choice for games which are reliant on ray tracing for decent quality.

Performance snapshot