Tuesday, May 11th 2021
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 Surface in Regulatory Filing
Even as the desktop Radeon RX 6700 (non-XT) is nowhere in sight, AMD is planning to scale its RDNA2 graphics architecture further down, with the RX 6600 XT and RX 6600. Regulatory filings by board partner ASRock with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), for the unreleased RX 6600 XT and RX 6600, hit the web, courtesy Komachi Ensaka. The filings list out internal SKU numbers. An interesting thing to note here is that both the RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 could have 8 GB of memory as standard. Given that the RX 6700 series is already pulling up to 12 GB over a 192-bit wide memory bus, it's likely that the RX 6600 series could use a narrower 128-bit bus for its 8 GB, use the fastest 16 Gbps memory chips (at least on the XT variant), and attempt to shore up memory bandwidth using Infinity Cache. A market launch typically follows EEC filings by 3 months, so the RX 6600 series could see a late-Summer launch.
Sources:
EEC Filing, VideoCardz, Komachi_Ensaka
11 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 Surface in Regulatory Filing
I also still firmly believe the industry has had too high a focus on the high end low yield side of things rather than better emphasis at raising the standard for everyone as opposed to the most wealthy to preemptively. I get that they want to make a better profit, but it's bad for society and combined with the mining situation worse for the environment as well arguably in turn.
If you plan on using the card for 5 years at 1440p, then 12GB might become relevant, but the GPU will be too weak to max games out anyway, even in 2 years .. aaaaand you need to drop settings anyway, to get playable fps meaning VRAM requirement/usage drops too, so it's pretty pointless. Just like 12GB is absolutely useless on a 3060.
6700XT has way fewer cores than 6800 and clocked higher to compensate for this, meaning oc potential is much worse + low bandwidth which means it will suck at high res gaming.
If 6700XT were easy to buy, Steam HW Survey would have them listed, but none of the Radeon 6000 GPUs are represented here. All Ampere cards are listed and have been for months and months.
GPU mining is not the sole reason why GPU marked is wack. Demand is high + Lack of components. Mining only plays a small part of all this.
Demand is high because, (1) scalpers are soaking up a lot of cards for profit, (2) gamers looking to upgrade are still looking for a card to buy without overpaying, and (3) miners also join the race. I don't agree that miners play a small part in the demand. If that is the case, Nvidia will not be bothered with creating another product stake just for miners. Recall in the previous mining craze, any mining worthy cards are all snapped up by miners. Where 1 gamer usually needs 1 or 2 GPUs, 1 miner (even a small time one) may easily have more than 2 GPUs. The last I spoke to a miner, he had 6 RTX 3080 running and he is still looking for more.