Well then. Mere minutes after Nvidia hit the launch button on the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, AMD rocked up with a new 1080p graphics card of their own: the Radeon RX 7600. Though it’s likely more of an RTX 4060 rival, given the RX 7600 will go on sale tomorrow – May 25th – at £260 / $269, slightly less than the $299-tagged 4060.
Based on the same RDNA 3 architecture as the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, the RX 7600 nonetheless targets a much more widely-used monitor resolution than those 4K-minded GPU hulks. Which makes a nice change, and means AMD will beat Nvidia’s RTX 40 series to the punch on a sub-£300 GPU, with the RTX 4060 not set for release until July.
Keeping in mind, the red team’s most recent attempts at 1080p domination have largely underwhelmed: namely the remarkably unremarkable RX 6650 XT and the downright dreadful RX 6500 XT. Will the RX 7600 be different?
Quite possibly, as RDNA 3 does make significant changes under the hood even when the key specs appear familiar. For example, both the RX 7600 and RX 6650 XT feature 32 Compute Units (CUs), but the RX 7600’s CUs have twice as many arithmetic logic units inside them. This should double the compute performance, which is handy even if that’s not exactly the same thing as doubling eventual framerates. There have been some efficiency improvements as well, with the RX 7600’s TDP down to 165W – a modest reduction on the RX 6650 XT’s 180W.
Conversely, the RX 7600 will still launch with 8GB of VRAM, same as the RX 6650 XT with no further changes to bandwidth or memory speed. Here are some more choice specs for the new GPU:
| Radeon RX 7600 specs | |
|---|---|
| Compute Units | 32 |
| VRAM | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Memory interface | 128-bit |
| Infinity Cache | 32MB |
| Game Frequency | 2250MHz |
| Max boost clock | 2655MHz |
| Stream processors | 2048 |
| Typical board power | 165W |
| Minimum PSU recommendation | 550W |
Regardless of how the RX 7600 performs at launch, any would-be graphics card upgraders might want to wait and see how the RTX 4060 measures up. If the RTX 4060 Ti is any indication, Nvidia’s GPU probably won’t offer a huge performance upgrade on the RTX 3060 in most games, but Nvidia DLSS 3 – or more specifically, its FPS-injecting frame generation feature – has been very convincing so far. The RX 7600 will support AMD FSR upscaling, including FSR 3 (and its own version of interpolated frame generation) when it comes out. But it hasn’t, leaving all Radeon GPUs at a disadvantage in games that support DLSS 3.
Still, let’s not condemn the RX 7600 before it’s even out, eh? Especially when it clearly has ambitions to become a “good but cheap” kind of card. Lord knows we haven’t had many of those in 2023.
