AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT is ready to shake up the list of best graphics cards and join the upper tiers of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. PC Partner (via Harukaze5719) has filed its Radeon RX 6600 XT today before Korea's National Radio Research Agency (RRA) for certification. PC Partner isn't exactly a household name, but the company is one of the leading global manufacturers of graphics cards. The submission implies that the Radeon RX 6600 XT shouldn't be too far off.
Leaked GPU-Z screenshots reportedly exposed the primary specifications for the Radeon RX 6600 XT. The information also hinted that the Navi 23 graphics card is potentially capped at PCIe 4.0 x8, just like the prior Radeon RX 5500 XT and Radeon RX 5500. The Radeon RX 6600 XT is rumored to land with 32 compute units (CUs), which would equal 2,048 stream processors (SPs). If accurate, 32 Ray Accelerators and 32MB of Infinity Cache should accompany the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Thus far, the RDNA 2 graphics card has been spotted with a 1,692 MHz base clock and 2,684 MHz boost clock, although these values could just be for AMD's reference design.
The schematics for Navi 23 (codename Dimgrey Cavefish) claimed that the silicon will likely utilize a 128-bit memory bus with eight memory channels. The maximum amount of GDDR6 memory that you can slap on Navi 23 is 16GB. However, we won't see that amount on a consumer model so AMD will probably save the 16GB configuration for its Radeon Pro SKUs.
For the Radeon RX 6600 XT, we can expect 8GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 16 Gbps. Across a modest 128-bit memory interface, the graphics card provides up to 256 GBps of memory throughput with the Infinity Cache balancing out the somewhat low bandwidth.
Although rumors of the Radeon RX 6600 XT have been stacking up for months now, we still haven't seen any benchmarks or retailer listings for the graphics card. The big Navi 23 leak from German publication Igor's Lab suggested that the Radeon RX 6600 XT could be on par with the Radeon RX 5700 XT. The latter is comparable to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti if you need another point of reference.
There's speculation that the Radeon RX 6600 XT may debut at $399 since it allegedly performs like a Radeon RX 5700 XT. However, that wouldn't make any sense, especially if AMD wants to seriously compete in the entry-level market. Let's forget the graphics card shortage and the scalping fiasco for a moment. The GeForce RTX 3060 launched at $329, so AMD should want to match the same MSRP with the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Even $350 would be more compelling price, because we simply can't see the Radeon RX 6600 XT succeeding with a $399 price tag.
