AMD Radeon RX 7600 Review: Incremental Upgrades

We updated our GPU test PC at the end of last year with a Core i9-13900K, though we continue to also test reference GPUs on our 2022 system that includes a Core i9-12900K for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. (We'll be updating that later today, once the embargo has passed.) Our RX 7600 review will use the 13900K results for the gaming tests, which ensures, as much as possible, that we're not CPU limited. We also use the 2022 PC for AI tests and the professional workloads.

Multiple games have been updated over the past few months. We retested most of the cards for the RTX 4070 review, and we've retested additional midrange cards for this and the 4060 Ti review. We're using preview drivers provided by AMD for the RX 7600, which only has support for that GPU. The other AMD GPUs used 23.2.1–23.4.3 drivers, depending on when they were last tested. Intel's Arc A770 cards were (re)tested with the latest 4369 drivers, and Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti was tested with Nvidia preview 531.93 drivers, while other Nvidia cards were tested with 531.41–531.79 drivers.

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six of the games. At the time of testing, five games support FRS 2. In contrast, 12 of the games support DLSS 2, and five support DLSS 3. Because only five of the games support FSR2, we're just going to include those results (for 1080p/1440p ultra) in our main charts. Speaking of which...

We tested the RX 7600 at 1080p (medium and ultra), and 1440p ultra — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We ran the rasterization tests at 4K as well, but we won't show those results here as they're not super meaningful — the overall average was 29 fps, if you're wondering.

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to potentially experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available on the fastest GPUs. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As you can imagine, most games can't get anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor, especially not with the RX 7600 trying to push 4K.

As far as the GPUs we'll be including in our charts; we've elected to put in 15 cards that range in current price from $200 and $500. We're only looking at current and previous generation hardware (so no RTX 20-series or RX 5000-series parts), but if you want to have a decent idea of where those GPUs land, check out our full GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Since the RX 7600 falls at the lower end of that price range, it's fair to expect it to land in the lower portion of the charts as well. We could have included RX 6500 XT or other slow GPUs, but we generally don't recommend those as good gaming solutions in the first place.

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When we assembled the new test PC, we installed all the then-latest Windows 11 updates. We're running Windows 11 22H2, and we've used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (critical security updates still get installed each month).

Our new test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

 AMD RX 6700 Overclocking?

Unfortunately... we have run out of time. Yesterday's RTX 4060 Ti review took its toll, so we'll see about adding overclocking test results in the next day or two once we've recovered and slept.

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