Earlier this month AMD has launched their Radeon RX 7600 graphics card. This is my 5th review of this product, previously I've reviewed the AMD Reference, ASRock Phantom Gaming, PowerColor Hellhound and Sapphire Pulse.

With the RX 7600, AMD is going after the high-volume segment of gamers looking for affordable graphics that can still drive their Full HD displays at highest settings in the newest titles. The RX 7600 is based on the new Navi 33 GPU, which uses AMD's newest RDNA 3 graphics architecture. The chip is fabricated using a 6 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The Navi 31 GPU, which powers the RTX 7900 Series uses a 5 nm process for its compute chiplets, so we can expect slightly worse efficiency from RX 7600. Another major difference is that Navi 33 on the RX 7600 is a classic monolithic chip design, whereas Navi 31 uses multiple chiplets.

The Strix OC is the ASUS flagship RX 7600 card, the company also offers the more affordable "Dual," there is no "TUF" at this time. With the Strix you get a large factory OC, a serious-looking triple-slot dual fan thermal solution and a dual BIOS with a "quiet" mode option. The price increase over MSRP is quite a lot tough—$70, which brings the price to $340.

The ASUS Strix gains 3% in performance at 1080p over the RX 7600 Reference Design from AMD. Not a lot, but that's normal for factory OCs these days. Actually, the ASUS Strix is the fastest RX 7600 that we've tested so far, a tiny bit faster than the ASRock Phantom Gaming. Compared to last-generation's RX 6600 XT, the ASUS card is 11% faster, the gap to the older RX 5700 XT is 19%. The gen-over-gen performance uplift vs RX 6600 non-XT is 30%, which is not too bad, but AMD was smart to make the 7600 a non-XT card, so that this comparison looks more favorably. At least those gains are more than what NVIDIA showed with the 4060 Ti, they had merely 12%. At this time there's no indication that AMD will even release a RX 7600 XT, the RX 7600 non-XT in this review is already the full Navi 33 GPU, and it's unlikely that AMD will use Navi 32 to create an "XT" product.

Overall performance of the RX 7600 is considerably lower than the RTX 4060 Ti, which offers around 25% better performance, a full tier basically. Even the older RTX 3060 Ti is 11% faster; RTX 3060 is 15% slower than the new Radeon though. Intel's Arc A770 graphics card is 10% behind the RX 7600, so if Intel can lower their price and improve the drivers, they'll have a real chance at breaking into this segment. With these performance levels, RX 7600 is a solid choice for gaming at Full HD—you'll be getting 60+ FPS in nearly all titles at highest settings. 1440p is in reach at decent FPS rates, too, but you'll have to reduce settings in some games, or use FSR upscaling.

As expected, ray tracing performance of the RX 7600 is slow, very slow. The underlying reason is that AMD executes RT instructions on their shader cores, while NVIDIA can offload them to dedicated circuitry inside the chip. GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is a massive 68% faster than RX 7600 in ray tracing. Still, I don't think that ray tracing really matters in this segment. The technology comes with such a big performance hit that I find difficult to justify, especially when you're already fighting to stay above 60 FPS in heated battles.

What does matter more in this segment is support for upscaling technologies. While NVIDIA has DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 Frame Generation, AMD's new card offers the same set of technologies as the RX 6000 series, namely FSR 1 and FSR 2. The two latter technologies even work on NVIDIA, too, because AMD was kind enough to open up their code, to make it universally usable on all GPU architectures. Still, this means that with an NVIDIA card you'll end up having more choice in terms of upscaling. With GeForce 40, NVIDIA is introducing DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which is a completely novel way to create additional frames, without actually upscaling the pixels. Rather, an additional frame is generated "between" two frames coming out of the graphics card. This approach is even able to increase your FPS in CPU-limited situations. AMD has nothing comparable. They've mentioned "FSR 3" from time to time, but we haven't seen a single demo, and there was no news at Computex either, so I'm having doubts right now. FSR 3 could be a huge selling point for the RX 7600.

Radeon RX 7600 comes with an 8 GB VRAM buffer—just like AMD's last-generation cards, i.e. RX 6600 XT, RX 6600, RX 5700 XT. There have been heated discussions claiming that 8 GB is already "obsolete," I've even seen people say that about 12 GB. While it would be nice of course to have more VRAM on the RX 7600, for the vast majority of games, especially at resolutions like 1080p, having more VRAM will make exactly zero difference. In our test suite not a single game shows any performance penalty for RX 7600 vs cards with more VRAM (at 1080p). New games like Resident Evil, Hogwarts Legacy, The Last of Us and Jedi Survivor do allocate a lot of VRAM, which doesn't mean all that data actually gets used. No doubt, you can find edge cases where 8 GB will not be enough, and you'll run into stutter, but for thousands of games it will be a complete non-issue, and I think it's not unreasonable for buyers in this price-sensitive segment to set textures to High instead of Ultra, for two or three titles. If you still want more memory, then you could opt for last-generation's RX 6700 XT, which has 12 GB VRAM, or the RX 6700 non-XT with 10 GB. AMD recently ran a campaign that highlighted VRAM, and how generous they are on the higher models, so it's a bit surprising that RX 7600 comes with 8 GB, even though I firmly believe that this makes sense economically and AMD did the right thing putting 8 GB on the RX 7600. RX 7600 is one tier below the RTX 4060 Ti, 25% slower, also $270 vs $400.

The ASUS Strix OC looks fantastic, even though it retains the look of the older RX 6000/GeForce 30 Strix models, and doesn't adopt the new design introduced with GeForce 40 Strix cards. This is actually the first Strix card for Radeon RX 7000—there is no Radeon RX 7900 XTX Strix. ASUS has put a massive triple-slot, dual-fan thermal solution with five heatpipes on the card, which handles the heat output of the Navi 33 GPU easily. Temperatures are very low with just 62°C, and the fans can run very slowly, at much less than 1000 RPM. This results in an amazing low-noise experience. Under full load we measured only 24 dBA, which is basically inaudible. It is so quiet that you must turn off everything in your room, stand next to the card on an open bench, focus on the card and you'll be able to make out the noise it is emitting—remember, this is at full gaming load. As soon as you move and your clothes rub against each other, their noise will overpower what little sound comes from the graphics card—very impressive! Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test confirms that this is the most powerful cooler on an RX 7600. Compared to the AMD reference card, the Strix is almost 30°C (!) cooler at the same heat output and noise levels. ASUS does include a dual BIOS feature with their card, which lets you switch to a "Quiet" BIOS to reduce the noise levels. Unfortunately there's virtually no difference in acoustics when enabled. Considering that the default Performance BIOS is already insanely quiet, and runs very cool, I think there's no need for a dual BIOS on this card. Just like all other recent graphics card releases, the RX 7600 will stop its fans in idle, desktop work, internet browsing and light gaming.

AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture brings energy efficiency improvements, and the RX 7600 is no exception. With only 150 W during gaming, the RX 7600 is very energy efficient. The ASUS factory overclock adds 15 W on top of that, or 10%. Considering that we're seeing a 3% performance increase there is a net loss in efficiency, but it's really a non-issue as there's so much cooling potential available. NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Ti uses around 150 W, too, but is 25% more energy efficient, which lets them realize a 25% performance gain—coincidence? Probably not. Just like on previous AMD Radeon cards, multi-monitor and especially media playback power consumption is pretty high, which could be problematic for some media PC builds.

Overclocking on the RX 7600 Strix worked well, we've gained over 10% in real-life performance. Overclocking is just as complicated as on the RX 7900 Series—you'll have to increase the power limit and undervolt the GPU, or you'll not see any meaningful performance gains. I find it sad that AMD had to limit overclocking so much on their card. The slider lengths for GPU and memory are considerably shorter than what the hardware is capable of doing and we maxed them out within minutes of testing. Also, the power limit slider tops out at +12%—usually we're getting +15%.

The ASUS RX 7600 Strix OC is currently listed online for $340, which is a massive $70 increase over the AMD MSRP, or +25%. No doubt, the ASUS cooler is awesome and the noise levels are fantastic, I still find it impossible to justify spending that much money on a RX 7600. AMD's baseline MSRP of $270 isn't cheap in the first place, and for $340 you could be buying the RX 6700 XT 12 GB or RTX 3060 Ti. The RTX 4060 Ti with 25% higher performance and support for DLSS 3 is only $60 away at that point. At its current MSRP price point of $270, the RX 7600 offers virtually the same price/performance as the RX 6600 XT ($250). While AMD does have some technological improvements like HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1 and AV1 video encode/decode, I think none of these are relevant in this segment, at least not to the majority of potential customers. Another interesting alternative is the Radeon RX 6700 non-XT ($280), which brings with it a larger 10 GB framebuffer. Last but not least, GeForce RTX 4060 non-Ti will release in a few weeks, for $300, which will keep things interesting in this segment.