Introduction

AMD today released its Radeon RX 7600 graphics card, and you'll see a rare overlap of launch-day reviews between AMD's RX 7600, and NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Ti on the same day. Both cards go on sale today. The RX 7600 is a mid-range offering from AMD's latest RDNA 3 family, and sees the company jump from the enthusiast-segment RX 7900 series straight to the most hotly contested market segment, the $300-ish mid-range, where the RX 7600 is expected to square off against NVIDIA's RTX 4060 series. The new RX 7600 is designed for AAA gaming at 1080p, with high to maxed-out details, you can take advantage of features such as FSR to further dial up display resolutions, and effectively game at 1440p.



The Radeon RX 7600 in this review is based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture that also powers the RX 7900 series, but understandably scaled down. What's unexpected, though, is that unlike the RX 7900 series, which use 5 nm GCDs, the Navi 33 silicon at the heart of the RX 7600 is a monolithic 6 nm chip, an entire generation older than 5 nm due to its DUV lithography, compared to the more advanced EUV. AMD probably calculates that for the target power and performance/Watt of the RX 7600, the 6 nm node fits the bill, and is cost-effective for the company, giving it headroom for future price-wars against NVIDIA in this segment.

Since it's based on the latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, the RX 7600 comes with advanced Dual Issue-rate Compute Units with over 17% IPC improvement over the previous RDNA2 CUs, second generation Ray Accelerators with a claimed 50% increase in ray intersection performance; and for the first time on an AMD GPU, hardware acceleration for AI in the form of two AI Accelerator units per CU. RDNA 3 also introduces hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding, and the new Radiance Display Engine, with support for the latest DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1a ports, and advanced 12-bpc color formats.

AMD intends for the RX 7600 to be seen as a successor to the RX 6600, and not the RX 6600 XT or RX 6650 XT, and so although the Navi 33 silicon has numerically the same number of shaders as the Navi 23 powering the RX 6600 series, there is a numerical increase in shaders for the RX 7600 over the RX 6600, because it maxes out the chip. The Navi 33 features two shader engines, and 32 RDNA 3 compute units, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI Accelerators, 32 Ray Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory sub-system sees minor updates—the same 8 GB GDDR6 over a 128-bit memory interface, but clocked faster at 18 Gbps, and backed by a faster Infinity Cache memory.

AMD has a reference-design "Made by AMD" (MBA) graphics card design for the Radeon RX 7600, which it intends to sell directly on the AMD website, as well as through its board partners, with minimal re-branding. The company is setting $269 as the baseline MSRP for this card, with board partners expected to come out with overclocked premium non-reference designs.