A pair of listings on PC-Canada has revealed the price of AMD's upcoming RX 7600 in Canada. One of the listings features a Sapphire Pulse RX 7600 for $451.99 CAD, and the other is $443.99 CAD for an MSI RX 7600 Mech 2x Classic. After converting to USD and factoring in any potential "early adopter tax," we end up with approximate prices of around $299 USD. That's technically less than the launch price of AMD's RX 6600, and well below the RX 6650 XT's $399 MSRP, though these days the various RX 66xx-class GPUs tend to sell far below their launch prices.
At first glance, AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU appears to be priced decently. The RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT for example launched at $379 and $399, respectively. Looking at the rumored RX 7600 specifications, the 7600 could have the same number of compute units (CUs) as the 6650 XT, and it uses AMD's potentially faster and better RDNA 3 architecture.
However, prices have changed drastically since release, with AMD's entire RX 6600-series lineup discounted well below the RX 6600's original MSRP of $330. Current-day prices have the RX 6600 starting at just $200, while the RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT can be had for around $250-$280.
At these highly discounted prices, there's no guarantee the RX 7600 will be a clear upgrade over the RX 6600-series. This is particularly true of the RX 6650 XT, which has the exact same core count as the RX 7600. Clocks, power, and other aspects will certainly factor in, but AMD's RX 7600 has its work cut out for it if it's going to deliver a better value than AMD's existing GPUs.
Part of the problem is that, unlike Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture, there aren't really any headlining upgrades with RDNA 3 over RDNA 2. Ray tracing performance is a bit better, the number of ALUs per CU has doubled, cache sizes have changed (doubled in some cases, shrunk in the case of the L3). But the biggest news was about AMD moving to GPU chiplets, which as far as we know isn't happening on the Navi 33 GPU that's purported to drive the RX 7600, and chiplets didn't actually do anything to improve performance — they were about saving on cost rather than improving performance, at least for this generation. We'll get a process node shrink, but even that might not mean much, as Navi 33 will likely still be on TSMC N6, based on earlier rumors, and that's just a tuned version of TSMC's N7 node.
Of course we have to wait for the launch day reviews before we'll know how good or bad the RX 7600 really is. But there's no denying that the RX 7600 is completely riding on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture to provide a legitimate performance advantage over its predecessors. This isn't confidence-inspiring, considering we have not seen any real innovations with AMD's RDNA3 architecture that makes it substantially better than RDNA 2.
By way of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, the RX 7900 XTX outperforms the RX 6950 XT by up to 40%, which is good, but that's with a 50% wider memory interface, 50% more memory, and 160% more theoretical compute. We can only wonder for now exactly how much more performance (if any) the RX 7600 will offer over the existing RX 6650 XT.
The end of the crypto-mining boom has created a lot of problems for the GPU industry in general, coupled with inflation and other challenging macro-economic factors. The fact that AMD appears to be launching RX 7600 ahead of potential RX 7700/7800-series cards says a lot, namely that many unsold RX 6700/6800/6900-class GPUs are still available. Hopefully AMD knows what it's up against and can deliver a compelling reason to choose the RX 7600 over the existing RX 66xx-series GPUs. If not, the RX 7600 could be a hard sell at anywhere close to $300.
