RX 6600 XT Benchmarked at LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH / ULTRA / Ray Tracing – ASROCK Phantom Gaming
You’ve probably already seen reviews of AMD’s latest GPU, the RX 6600XT, so in this video I want to do something a little different. I’m going to run through a handful of games at their various settings so you can see how the card performs across the range of settings. I’ll be testing at both 1080p and 1440p, and I’m even including ray traced results where possible, so let’s get started!
First off, a quick look at the card I’m testing. This is the ASRock RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming, one of their top end models sporting a large triple fan cooler with only the central fan and the badge on the side running RGB lighting. It supports PCIe gen 4, but interestingly despite the card using a fully pinned x16 connector, if you look carefully you can see there aren’t any traces going to the rear of the connector, only the front half, meaning this is an x8 only card. That’s still fine as if it’s running at PCIe gen 4 it’ll have the same bandwidth available as a PCIe gen 3 x16 card, and even if it’s running on gen 3 that’s still plenty of bandwidth for this level of card.
As for power, this card only needs a single 8 pin thanks to its 160W stock TDP. This is a factory overclocked card though, running at a max boost of 2607MHz, although it’s game clock – AMD’s term for what speed they expect the card to be actually running at while gaming – to be more like 2428MHz. That’s still 69MHz higher than stock (nice), and you can even use AMD’s driver to automatically overclock it if you’d like to push it even harder.
So that’ll do for a look over the card, let’s see it’s performance! I’m testing with a Ryzen 5600X, 16GB of 3600MT/s CL14 RAM, and I’ve made sure the CPU is running at it’s standard 88W PPT as I’ve had trouble with that before. I’ll start with the 1080p numbers, with the first game up being Watchdogs Legion. At low settings you should be seeing over 120FPS average here, the tradeoff is image quality and considering how little performance you lose stepping up to medium, just 6FPS, I’d be pretty hesitant to use low personally. High has a bigger hit, although it’s still over 100FPS average and a respectable 79FPS in the 1% lows, and for me the visual quality improvement easily justifies that performance hit. Very high drops another 10FPS down to 91FPS average, but ultra takes the crown for biggest drop at just 65FPS average. Personally I’d stick this on either very high or high as they both strike a good balance between frame rates and visual fidelity.
Interestingly, even at 1080p Watchdogs reported using 7.12GB of VRAM at Very High, and exceeded the 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM the 6600 XT has with 8.84GB at Ultra. That might help explain such a large drop in performance going from very high to ultra as it has to dip into system memory which is not only much slower, running at around 29GB/s at 3600MT/s versus the 256GB/s the card’s GDDR6 offers, but much further away from the GPU core introducing longer latency between the core requesting the data and it receiving it.
Moving onto Cyberpunk, as I’ve explained in my recent video on the GTX 1060 in 2021 versus an RTX 3060, there are two quality options that matter here. You have the quality preset options, which range from Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ray Tracing Medium and Ray Tracing Ultra. Then you have the texture quality setting which can either be low, medium or high. For simplicity I’ll be matching low textures with low quality, medium textures with medium quality and high textures with the rest of the settings. You can mix these around though if you wanted, say, better textures but lower quality, or vice versa.
At low settings it ran at just over 100FPS average, which for this game isn’t bad. Image quality is pretty horrific though, so stepping up to medium nets you a little over 10FPS less on average but offers a better visual experience. High is personally where I think I’d set it, as you still get over 70FPS average and close to 60FPS in the 1% lows, and get a visual quality that’s good enough to maintain your immersion in the world. Ultra drops almost 10FPS more, but that’s nothing compared to enabling ray tracing. At ray tracing medium it ran at just 29FPS average, with 1% lows down to just 21FPS. It didn’t even look better, just much less smooth. Even worse is ray tracing ultra, offering slide-show like performance at 17FPS average and just 11FPS in the 1% lows. It’s genuinely unplayable, and again it doesn’t even look better to me.
Moving on to CSGO, at the lowest settings you are definitely CPU bound, peaking at 554FPS average and 207FPS in the 1% lows. A middleground setup only drops 50FPS average, and even setting everything to their highest, most performance impacting options still nets you 372FPS average. This sort of performance can be expected across most esports titles, so if you are just after a card to power your ultra high refresh rate monitor in this sort of esports game this is a great option.
Microsoft Flight on it’s low end preset honestly astonished me, running at 135FPS average. Sadly the visual quality meant you were flying over a 144p image of the earth with basically no 3D buildings so stepping up a touch to medium makes sense, running at 111FPS average. Even high end offers near on 90FPS and that’s a pretty decent balance of performance and visuals. You can stretch to ultra at 65FPS average, that’s certainly still playable, but I think high-end offers the best balance personally.
Lastly in Fortnite this is easily the widest range in performance, with low and it’s 44% render scale running at an insane 584FPS average, and 402FPS in the 1% lows, medium and it’s default 66% render scale running at 446FPS average, high still hitting over 200FPS average, epic at 142FPS, and with all the ray tracing settings maxed out and on epic settings, it ran at just 9FPS average. 9. Unplayable doesn’t even begin to describe what a bad experience that is, although realistically I can’t imagine anyone even with an NVIDIA RTX card actually playing Fortnite with ray tracing enabled let alone turned up this much.
So at 1080p I think you’d be pretty comfortable running pretty much any game on high, with some titles still offering good performance even at ultra. Ray tracing isn’t something you want to use on this card though, as even in Cyberpunk going from getting over 60FPS at ultra to just 29FPS on just the ray tracing medium setting is not a tradeoff you’d want to make.
So that’s 1080p, what about 1440p? Well, in Watchdogs even on low it is under 100FPS but this is a pretty demanding game so that’s not too bad. Medium nets 88FPS average, high 76FPS, very high 65FPS and ultra a less-than-ideal 44FPS average and just 29FPS in the 1% lows. Again I think high or very high are the sweet spot for this card, with very high reporting 7.68GB of VRAM usage, just below the 8GB available. Ultra swallows 9.19GB, meaning it’s using well over 1GB of system RAM, which again might help explain such a large performance hit.
Cyberpunk on low runs at just over 80FPS, and is the only setting that runs at over 60FPS. Medium is just shy at 58FPS, then it’s down to just 44FPS at high. Ultra isn’t all that much lower at 39FPS, but the real shocker is the ray tracing options. Just 12.5FPS average on RT medium, and a jaw dropping 5FPS average at RT Ultra. I couldn’t even walk about slowly at that performance, let alone drive or shoot.
CSGO does take a bit of a hit at 1440p, by a full 100FPS at low settings, but it’s still 450FPS average so I can’t complain. There’s still a pretty small gap from low to medium, with actually a better 1% low run that time, and the highest settings still get over 300FPS average so it’s still plenty.
Microsoft Flight manages almost exactly 100FPS average at low, again with a big sacrifice in image quality. Medium runs at 72FPS average and runs over 60FPS in the 1% lows, and high end just dips below 60FPS average Ultra pushes a little too hard, running at just 44FPS average, making either medium or high my pick for this card, at 1440p.
Finally in Fortnite we again have a pretty incredible range. Low runs almost identically to 1080p low at 577FPS average. Medium is actually an FPS faster on average, possibly thanks to slightly less CPU bottlenecking at the 1690×950 resolution it’s rendering at with the 66% render scale, compared to 720p it renders at on 1080p low. High runs at 202FPS average again almost identical to 1080p high, with only epic settings finally showing the GPU limit rather than CPU, running at 88FPS average. Then there is the ray traced result. The lowest result I collected, at just 5.08FPS average, and 2.41FPS in the 1% lows. Here’s what that looks like. I reckon I could hand animate each frame faster than it’s drawing this.
So at 1440p you’ll generally want to keep it at medium or high, with only the lighter titles stretching into the ultra territory, and if I wouldn’t recommend ray tracing at 1080p, I’m not quite sure how I could describe how awful it was at 1440p. The good news is that at least at the time of filming, this is actually a GPU you can go and buy today, and at MSRP. You could argue it’s priced a little too high, as from most other reviews I’ve seen it’s a little closer to RTX 3060 performance than 3060Ti, but the obvious caveat right now is that you can’t buy an RTX 3060 or 3060Ti right now. Actually a brief look shows you can, but only for around £600 versus around £400 for this 6600 XT. So if you’ve been waiting for an RTX 3060, or at a push 3060Ti, you might want to give this a look, at least for now.
