RX 7600 vs RX 7600 XT – Worth the upgrade?? | Budget Gaming GPU Tested!

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that the RX 7600 XT is the exact same core as the RX 7600. It’s fully, completely, the same thing. They both have 2048 cores, 32 Ray tracing units, 64 AI Accelerators, and a 128 bit memory bus. The ONLY difference is the XT gets a 100MHz boost clock increase – at least on the reference cards – and 16GB of GDDR6 versus 8GB on the non-XT. That’s it. For that privilege, AMD expects you to pay a full £100 more – the 7600 is around £250 right now, where the XT is £350. Now you can find cheaper XT’s – this Gigabyte OC card is more like £330 – but is that extra £50 to £100 more actually worth it? Well, let’s test ‘em and find out!

Now I’ve tested at both 1080p and 1440p for your viewing convenience – starting with Starfield at 1080p, the XT enjoys a healthy lead here, at 126 FPS average, versus 111 FPS average on the 7600. Both of these are perfectly playable, of course, and this is actually a pretty stark difference considering these are otherwise identical cards. Clearly the extra VRAM was useful here. At 1440p the difference is a little more substantial, going from 109 FPS average, down to 94 FPS average. You also go from 80 FPS in the 1% lows to 69 – which while is memingly ‘nice’, isn’t as smooth. Again, it’s still perfectly fine, but that’s a pretty decent win for the XT. 

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, strangely, sees literally no difference between the two, with the XT technically running slower (by a shocking 0.6 FPS average, mind). It does seem to have slightly higher 1% lows though, but only by 2 FPS. At 1440p it is the exact same story – save for a slightly larger gap in the 1% and 0.1% lows in favour of the XT. You are going to get the same gaming experience on the XT as you are the 7600 in Cyberpunk, at least on medium settings.

In CS2 there is equally no difference. The margin of error here is a little larger than other titles as this is a more manual benchmark, but still, it’s functionally identical. In general, CS2 is a more CPU limited game, so it isn’t too surprising two cards with identical cores perform functionally the same. This is the same at 1440p – so I won’t stay here too long – even the better 1% lows are present on the XT!

Fortnite at 1080p is, again, the same damn thing. The averages are the same, although strangely the 1% and 0.1% lows are actually inverted, with the 7600 coming out 5 FPS ahead here. Can’t say I can explain that one. At 1440p the results swap so the XT is faster across the board – not by much, of course, but still. The only standout here is the 1% lows where the XT mustered 15 FPS higher than the 7600, which is actually a noticeable difference in smoothness. It still isn’t night and day, but finally something remotely tangible. 

Flight Simulator actually has the 7600 ahead – only by an FPS or two so pretty close, and not exactly significant enough to make any conclusions from. At 1440p that flips so the XT is a couple FPS ahead across the board. That’s all pretty standard for two functionally identical cards…

Hitman three’s built in benchmarks lets me break out the CPU and GPU performance, and obviously we’re looking at the GPU performance here. With this level of isolation it seems like you can expect a pretty decent amount more performance out of the XT, with an extra 15 FPS on average over the 7600. That’s pretty significant, although strangely the 1% lows are inverted here. Not sure what went on there, especially as the 0.1% lows are in the XT’s favour. The gap seems to be consistent at 1440p too, with a 13 FPS advantage, and this time much more sensible 1% and 0.1% low figures. 

As for Rainbow Six Siege, much like CS2 this is a more CPU limited game, so understandably there is functionally no difference here. The XT has a slight lead in the 1% lows, but it’s so slight it isn’t worth considering really. At 1440p the XT does take a slight lead, but only by 4 FPS, and at 300 FPS average, 4 FPS is not a useful addition. 

Lastly, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I honestly expected this to be a bigger difference, but it really isn’t. Just 5 FPS difference here, at least on average. The 1% and 0.1% lows tell a different story though. I noticed this during the benchmark run too, but the 7600 had a tiny bit of stuttering present where the XT didn’t. That’s reflected in the 1% and especially 0.1% low figures being so drastically low in comparison. Of course both are perfectly playable, but one is undoubtedly better. The trend is the same at 1440p, where the averages are functionally the same, but the 1% and 0.1% lows tell a very different story. I’d much rather be gaming on the XT here.

One potential reason for some games seeing a difference in performance – things like Hitman seeing a decent amount more performance on the GPU side – is thanks to the increased power budget of the XT. Of the two cards I’m using here, the 7600 drew a maximum of 173W of total board power, versus the XT pulling more like 200W instead. Now this isn’t a massive difference in the grand scheme of things, and power consumption versus performance is very much nonlinear – as in 30% more power doesn’t mean 30% more performance – but it’s something to consider. 

The other thing to consider is that the settings I was testing at here might not be the best for extracting the differences between the cards. Testing at low or medium settings is a lot less likely to stress, say, the VRAM, so I went back and did a couple more tests, specifically at ultra settings. Starting with Hitman, again using the GPU data, interestingly while the FPS is obviously lower than the medium settings run, the performance gap isn’t all that different. Both are around 10% faster on the XT, but that percentage doesn’t change. 

Rainbow Six Siege doesn’t change much either on the Ultra preset. Performance goes down, obviously, but the gap between the cards is functionally identical. And the same goes for Cyberpunk on Ultra. There’s just 2 FPS average separating the cards here. There really, really isn’t much of a difference. With that said, I know some games will see a difference, and so in the next video I’m going to take a closer look at VRAM usage in games with these cards and see just how badly you need that extra VRAM – because currently it doesn’t look like much of a problem to have 8GB and save your cash!

Of course, futureproofing is something you might want to consider, as well as other use cases you might have, like running LLMs locally (as I demonstrated in a recent video, link in the cards above), or creative workloads like video editing. If those workloads are on the cards, the XT makes a lot of sense. One thing I would say about the notion of buying the XT as a way to “futureproof” your card, there’s a good chance that by the time 16GB of VRAM is a necessity, the Hotpink Bonefish core in these cards (legit, that’s their name, seriously) is likely to be outdated and underperforming anyway and you’ll likely want to upgrade GPUs to something more powerful outright. With that said, the XT is a decent card, and at the right price I think it can be worth the extra, especially for the increased stability it seems to bring on the whole. It’s also worth mentioning that I have 64 GB of Crucial’s 6000 MT/s DDR5 in here, which means the system RAM always had room to spare regardless of the GPU VRAM’s capacity. If you only have like 16GB of RAM and the 8GB card needs to spill into system RAM, that might be a bad time, whereas the XT might not run into that issue. Either way I’ll link to both cards in the description and leave it to you to decide which one is best for your needs.