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Review: Radeon 7600 XT offers peace of mind via lots of RAM, remains a mid-range GPU

There are a few measurable benefits to having more RAM, but also some drawbacks.

Andrew Cunningham | 74
AMD's RX 7000 series still provides some value for people who are willing to give up some of the fringe benefits of Nvidia cards. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
AMD's RX 7000 series still provides some value for people who are willing to give up some of the fringe benefits of Nvidia cards. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
AMD mandates DisplayPort 2.1 support on the 7600 XT, where it's optional on the regular 7600.
XFX's 7600 XT card dwarfs AMD's reference RX 7600 card, mainly in size but also sort of in power use.

We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600, but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you generally need to jump into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

RX 7700 XT RX 7600 RX 7600 XT RX 6600 RX 6600 XT RX 6650 XT RX 6750 XT
Compute units (Stream processors) 54 (3,456) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 28 (1,792) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 40 (2,560)
Boost Clock 2,544 MHz 2,600 MHz 2,760 MHz 2,490 MHz 2,589 MHz 2,635 MHz 2,600 MHz
Memory Bus Width 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 192-bit
Memory Clock 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 1,750 MHz 2,000 MHz 2,190 MHz 2,250 MHz
Memory size 12GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 12GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP) 245 W 165 W 190 W 132 W 160 W 180 W 250 W

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM becomes apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs.-Nvidia-vs.-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses.

Performance and power

Gaming testbed
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (provided by AMD)
Motherboard ASRock X670E Taichi (provided by AMD)
RAM 32GB (2x16GB) G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo (provided by AMD), running at DDR5-6000
SSD Western Digital Black SN850 1TB (provided by Western Digital)
Power supply EVGA Supernova 850 P6 (provided by EVGA)
CPU cooler 280 mm Corsair iCure H115i Elite Capellix AIO
Case Lian Li O11 Air Mini
OS Windows 11 22H2 with Core Isolation on, Memory Integrity off
Drivers Nvidia cards: Driver 551.15
AMD RX 7600: Adrenalin 23.12.1
AMD RX 7600 XT: Pre-release driver 23.40.0.1.15
Intel Arc: Driver 31.0.101.5085

AMD's official spec sheet for the 7600 XT advertises a 9.8 percent GPU game clock increase compared to the regular 7600, and a 3.8 percent boost clock increase. In most cases, with the XFX card we tested, performance improvements in most games were firmly in that low-single-digit range at 1080p and 1440p.

One broad exception to this, and one specific exception, based on the tests we've run: Generally, games with heavy ray-tracing effects—Cyberpunk and Returnal, namely—improved more than the non-ray-traced games we tested; at 1080p, we saw high-single-digit improvements, and at 1440p we actually measured double-digit speed increases. This is, unfortunately, not enough to make the RX 7600 XT's ray-tracing performance particularly great or competitive, with the RTX 4060 running at the same resolutions and settings.

But there's only one that shows a crystal-clear sign of video memory-related problems: Forza Horizon 5, which at 1440p begins throwing low-memory warnings on 8GB Radeon cards (it doesn't seem to have the same issues with 8GB Nvidia cards, at least not as visibly; chalk it up to games being better-optimized for the GPU market leader, maybe). This manifests as scores that look lower than they "should," and a lack of improvement (or even some backsliding) when you try to use FSR or XeSS upscaling.

The 16GB 7600 XT is a whopping 28 percent faster than the 7600 here and nearly 62 percent faster once you turn FSR on. That's a huge improvement for the money! However, it's also not nearly representative of the behavior you'll see from most games.

Power usage is easily the RX 7600 XT's Achilles' heel (bearing in mind the standard caveats about trusting software-provided power usage figures, and comparing software-reported power usage figures between different GPU generations and manufacturers; we trust these numbers to be broadly correct, but they may not be precise). The XFX model we tested used around 30 W more power than the regular RX 7600 in our Borderlands test, a 17 percent increase for what is clearly not a 17 percent increase in performance.

To put it in context, this 7600 XT uses about the same amount of power as a regular GeForce 4070, and the 4070's performance is in a different league. AMD at least continues to look pretty good compared to Intel's Arc A770, which has very similar power usage and is the only other way to get a new GPU in the low $300 price range with 16GB of RAM. Intel's Arc card consistently beats AMD's ray-tracing performance, and it can come close to the 7600 XT's speed in DirectX 12 games, but DirectX 11 games, in particular, remain a weak point for the architecture even with the latest drivers installed.

A cheap way to get 16GB

AMD's RX 7000 series still provides some value for people who are willing to give up some of the fringe benefits of Nvidia cards.
AMD's RX 7000 series still provides some value for people who are willing to give up some of the fringe benefits of Nvidia cards. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The RX 7600 XT is still a very good 1080p GPU that can usually manage 60 FPS 1440p in older or less-demanding games, and using FSR can help it stretch enough that you can turn some ray-tracing effects on and still hit a playable frame rate. You're still looking at the exact same silicon and the exact same memory system as on the regular 7600, and if the high GPU clocks help boost performance a bit, you could achieve similar results from overclocking a regular 7600 yourself.

Its positioning relative to the RTX 4060 or Intel's Arc A770 16GB, its main competition in this price range, also remains similar. The increase in power usage really hurts its positioning relative to Nvidia—the 4060 uses a lot less power to provide similar-ish performance, and the 4070 runs a whole lot faster in the same power envelope—and Intel's sometimes inconsistent performance still keeps me from giving the Arc A770 a full-throated recommendation. In this price range, the RTX 4060's performance isn't always the best but it's still the most consistent, without the game- and/or technology-related weak points of the AMD and Intel cards.

When deciding to buy the 16GB version of the RX 7600 series, what you're basically betting on is that in the next two or three years, more games are going to start acting like Forza does, even at relatively low resolutions like 1080p. It's not an unreasonable bet to make, given the rough and resource-hungry state of recent PC ports. But realistically, you'll end up being limited by the graphics silicon itself the vast majority of the time.

(The other possible audience for this card is one that wants a lot of graphics RAM for GPU compute tasks, but doesn't necessarily need a particularly fast GPU attached to all that RAM—some people have even made do with integrated GPUs attached to larger, slower pools of system RAM as AI accelerators. If that's you, the 7600 XT might actually be the GPU you've been waiting for.)

The good

  • Almost the cheapest way to get 16GB of RAM in a modern graphics card
  • Big performance uplift in the few games that are directly bottlenecked by 8GB of RAM
  • Reasonable across-the-board performance bump from the regular RX 7600 XT
  • Great at 1080p and not bad at 1440p
  • Same MSRP as the RX 6600, but faster and with twice the memory

The bad

  • Relatively poor performance in ray-traced games
  • A whole lot of games won't care about the extra RAM
  • No extra cores or memory bandwidth compared to the regular RX 7600; you could mildly overclock a 7600 and see many of the same performance benefits

The ugly

  • Higher power use widens the power efficiency gap between AMD and Nvidia—and it was already pretty wide
Photo of Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
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