AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT review – is it worth it?

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT is the latest GPU from Team Red aimed at the mainstream market. It features a generous amount of VRAM with the promise of being able to max out today’s games in 1080p and even 1440p. In actuality, however, it struggles in a couple of key areas when pushed, especially for creatives and when enabling ray tracing. While it definitely deserves respect among some of the best budget graphics cards, but it cannot quite be considered one of the best graphics cards available.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT price

The AMD RX 7600 XT was announced and released in January 2024 with starting MSRP of $329.99 / £319.99 from Team Red’s partners. Keep in mind that there’s no Reference Card (AMD-made) version, so you’re at the behest of the AIBs. For context, that’s a touch more expensive than the base RX 7600 which was released well over a year ago that debuted from $269.99 / £249.99 – an increase of 22%. The company’s latest is still very much a budget card, but it’s arguably less attractive pushing passed the $300 / £300 mark. There’s a lot of promise from RDNA 3 architecture at this rate.

Our specific review unit is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 7600 XT OC which retails for $329.99 / £332.99, matching the MSRP in the US and being a little over the RRP in the UK. It’s a solid buy if you want a fully featured model for your money without splashing out extra, but more on its design, features and performance further down the page. Regardless of variant, the RX 7600 XT’s biggest rival is the Nvidia RTX 4060 which sells for $299 / £289, so you’re paying a fair bit more for the new mainstream offering here.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT key specs

The main selling point of the AMD RX 7600 XT is the bump up in VRAM, which doubles the original model’s 8GB GDDR6 all the way to 16GB GDDR6 instead. In theory this should provide a significant amount of overhead to crank games up in 1080p and 1440p. It’s built on the Navi 33 GPU with a total of 2,048 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and 128 texture mapping units (TMUs) on a 128-bit memory bus. Little has changed over the base model apart from the memory pool increase, that is, until you look closer.

As with other hardware refreshes, AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 XT is significantly faster out of the box than its predecessor. It features a base clock of 1,980 MHz and a boost clock of up to 2,755 MHz with a bandwidth of 288 GB/s. That’s a subtle improvement over the original’s 1,720 MHz base and 2,655 MHz boost clock – an increase of 15% and 3% respectively. You won’t be pushing this card much further than the first version, but it can do a little more without needing to be put under undue stress.

What’s good about the RX 7600 XT is it keeps things nice and conventional. That means the return your standard 8-pin PCIe connector without the need of a fancy adapter and a dual-slot width. It’s also fairly low power with a 165W TDP, meaning any PSU above 450W should be able tor un this card no problem. Depending on the partner card you buy, you’ll either be using one or two, but more on that further down the page.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT key design

As there’s no Reference Model available, we can only go off the partner card we have in for review when we talk about design, and fortunately, the results are solid this time around. We have the Gigabyte RX 7600 XT Gaming OC model which features a triple fan setup for enhanced cooling over a dual-fan or single fan option. This does mean that it’s significantly longer and wider than some other variants, though. It measures in at at 11 x 4.5 x 2 inches (LxWxH) and requires 2x 8-pin PCIe connectors and a recommended 650W PSU.

That extra power usage and enlarged heatsink cooler are due to the overclocking potential, meaning you’ll be able to squeeze a couple extra frames out of the latest games releasing. Namely, this is a faster boost clock of 2,810 MHz and a Game Clock of 2,539 MHz which is an increase of 1.9% and 2.7% respectively. It may not sound like much, but depending on the optimization of the software, that could be the difference between 60fps and less than ideal framerates. The clock speeds are fairly good here.

What’s more, there’s also RGB Fusion lighting on the card as well as the “Windforce” cooling system which means those three fans spin in alternative directions to aid enhanced airflow. There’s also a metal backplate which should keep the GPU safely secure in your rig. The “3D active fans” provide semi-passive cooling which means even when not engaged, the card should still be chilled out when idle or under low loads, too. You’ll naturally find both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 here as well.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT gaming performance

AMD claims impressive figures for the RX 7600 XT of being able to max out games in 1080p and 1440p and the testing conducted by BGFG’s Sebastian Kozlowski shows the quoted potential largely hold up. In Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the GPU was able to achieve an average of 91fps in 1080p and 67fps in 1440p. The same cannot be said for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, however, which couldn’t quite produce 1080p60 with averages of just 45fps in 1080p and only 30fps average in 1440p; far from ideal.

This is echoed by Cyberpunk 2077, albeit not quite to the same extent. CD Projekt Red’s RPG manages an average of 86fps in 1080p but just 53fps in 1440p. Factoring in ray tracing, though, and the framerates begin to chug. You’re looking at unplayable averages of 24fps in 1080p and 14fps in 1440p in Ultra settings without FSR (AMD’s answer to DLSS) enabled. Not exactly ideal. Turn your attention to more well-optimized games, though, and the GPU redeems itself well.

The RX 7600 XT has no problem ripping straight through Doom Eternal with averages of 221fps in 1080p and 158fps in 1440p. This confident lead extends to games such as The Finals as well as the mainstream graphics card averages 141fps in 1080p and 87fps in 1440p at “Epic” settings. It doesn’t take too big a bump either with 135fps average in 1080p and 1440p with RT on. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but if you’re smart with your settings and enable FSR (our benchmarks are native) then you shouldn’t have many problems.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT synthetic benchmarks

The RX 7600 XT handles synthetic benchmark testing well but won’t exactly surprise you. The card performs well enough in 3D Mark through Fire Strike Ultra, Time Spy Extreme, and Port Royal but seriously lags behind the RTX 4060 Ti which features half the VRAM. Its scores are 7,465, 5,371, and 5,920 points in the respective software, which are figures dwarfed by its rival’s achievements of 14,518, 11,887, and 15,552 points respectively.

Unfortunately, this also extends to the likes of Blender 4.0, too. The RX 7600 XT pales behind the competition in Monster, Junkshop, and Classroom with just 606.6, 324, and 312.6 samples compared to the RTX 4060 Ti’s respective scores of 3,707.8, 1,785.2, and 1,883.6 points. There’s not even really a fair comparison here, which is shocking considering the former has a total of 16GB VRAM which just isn’t getting used in any meaningful fashion.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT encoding benchmarks

Encoding performance is fine but far from exceptional. The RX 7600 XT achieved a GPU performance benchmark score of 5,959 in Cinebench r24. For comparison sake, the RTX 4060 Ti boosts a far mightier figure of 25,211 which is over four times the performance, or an increase of 323%. If you’re really hard up and want the catch-all card, you may be better served by opting for Team Green’s mainstream model if you’re a creative.

Is the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT worth it?

The AMD RX 7600 XT holds its own in 1080p and can provide more-than-playable framerates in 1440p but not flawlessly. While the bump up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory is commendable for giving you overhead, it’s not really been put to any good use for gaming, nor encoding or synthetic benchmarks. For the money, it’s a respectable card but you may be better served by either upping your budget with Team Red’s latter offerings or going for an RTX 4060 or RTX 4060 Ti instead.

It’s worth pointing out that this card could live its best live when pushed with FSR 3 Frame Generation able to really push frame rates and flex its memory size with the help of AI accelerators. Considering its price point, it’s an affordable graphics card with a low total board power that should still perform superior to Intel Arc alternatives. The ray accelerators inside won’t be able to keep up with Nvidia, but RT is still solid. It’s not a sweeping upgrade from the original, but enough for those on a budget.

Copy by Aleksha McLoughlin ; Testing by Sebastian Kozlowski