Radeon RX 6600 1440p Gaming Performance
Stepping up to 1440p might be asking a bit too much of the RX 6600, depending on the game and settings used. As before, we'll start with our legacy test suite running at medium quality (which is one of the inputs used for the GPU benchmarks hierarchy), and then we'll move on to the expanded test suite and 1440p ultra settings, and wrap up with some ray tracing charts.
1440p at medium quality often ends up performing about the same as 1080p at ultra quality, which means the games in our slightly older test suite still run quite well. Better than that, really, as the RX 6600 averaged 106 fps, 15% behind the RX 6600 XT and 9% slower than the RTX 3060. Also, none of the games tested here fell below 60 fps.
The smaller Infinity Cache size generally means less benefit at higher resolutions, but even at 1440p the Infinity Cache clearly helps a lot. Considering the RTX 3060 has 50% more memory and memory bandwidth, the fact that the RX 6600 is even in the same ballpark shows how beneficial that large L3 cache is.
Using the RX 6600 at 1440p ultra wasn't nearly as compelling. All of the games were still playable, provided you think 30 fps or more is "playable," but multiple games came in far short of 60 fps. You can probably get by with high quality settings, or some mix of medium and high settings, and 1440p will still run fine, but don't be surprised if more games arrive in the next few years where 1080p is a far better choice for the RX 6600.
The RX 6600 again loses to the RTX 3060 by about 9%, though flipping through the individual games shows some variation. Far Cry 5 and Strange Brigade favor the RTX 3060 at 1440p ultra, even though they're formerly AMD promotional games, while newer releases like Valhalla are strongly in AMD's camp, and most Nvidia-promoted games still favor Nvidia hardware years after release. Considering the added memory and generally faster performance, it's only the street price of the RTX 3060 that keeps it from being a clear victor.
There's really nothing good to say about 1440p ultra with ray tracing enabled on the RX 6600. Dirt 5 was the sole bright point, averaging 56 fps — but that's largely because the visual difference between the ray traced shadows and rasterized shadow mapping techniques just isn't all that meaningful. Godfall also had issues at 1440p ultra with ray tracing, and performance fluctuated a lot between runs — that's a problem we've noticed on multiple GPUs with less than 12GB VRAM.
We also saw some pretty significant fluctuations in Cyberpunk 2077, though when you're getting under 10 fps it really doesn't matter. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus also barely managed to stay above 30 fps, but again, that's because they're only using one RT effect and they're both first generation ray tracing games — more recent RT games perform quite a bit worse.
