Today AMD launches their Radeon RX 7600 graphics card, which is an entry-level model targeting a $269 price point. We have tested four cards: AMD Reference, ASRock Phantom Gaming, PowerColor Hellhound, 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 Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC is the company's entry-level RX 7600 design, there is no Pulse non-OC. Priced at $270, there's no price increase over the AMD reference price—very nice.

At the end of the day, what matters is actual gaming performance. Here the RX 7600 is able to outperform last-generation's RX 6600 XT by 10%, the gap to the older RX 5700 XT is 15%. The gen-over-gen performance uplift vs RX 6600 non-XT is 25%, 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 yesterday, 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. Yesterday's RTX 4060 Ti is 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, so I'm having doubts right now. FSR 3 would be a huge selling point for the RX 7600, which makes me wonder why not delay the RX 7600 launch until the new technology is ready, to show to potential customers?

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.

Sapphire's Pulse RX 7600 design looks great, thanks to carefully applied red highlights on a black background. The main cooler shroud is made of plastic, the backplate is metal. In the past we've seen fan assemblies which could be removed without affecting the underlying heatsink, the RX 7600 Pulse uses this technology, too. I like it, if your fans start making scratching noises in a few years, Sapphire can just ship you the fan assembly that you can easily install yourself, without messing with the thermal paste or anything else. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison tests confirms that Sapphire's Pulse heatsink is considerably stronger than the one on the AMD reference card, by around 10°C at the same heat load. Sapphire's card is factory overclocked though, running 172 W instead of 152 W, meaning the cooler has to work harder, which eats up some of those cooler improvements. Overall the card is still very quiet and runs cool enough—very similar to the AMD reference 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.

Right now there's some confusion about the fan profile of the new RX 7600 cards. Apparently there's a regression change between the 23.4.2 WHQL driver (April 20) and the newer Press Driver (May 15). With the Press Driver, the fans on all the cards that we've tested will run faster and louder, but temperatures will end up a little bit lower. I've talked to all AICs and AMD, and there's some confusion on which is the correct behavior and further confusion on which fan settings will be used in the public release driver and going forward. That's why I've tested heat/noise on all cards with both drivers. On the Sapphire Pulse there's clear differences, i.e. 31.4 dBA vs 33.5 dBA, but even that is small enough to not be noticeable subjectively, especially if you don't have any test equipment. Still, it's surprising to encounter such troubles so soon before launch. Just to clarify, all performance results ("FPS") are with the official Press Driver, because that has the newest optimizations, the older WHQL was used to provide an additional data point for heat/noise testing only.

AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture brings energy efficiency improvements, and the RX 7600 is no exception. With only 150 W during gaming, the card is very energy efficient. It's more efficient than all RDNA 2 designs, only the RX 7900 Series is a bit better, and NVIDIA's GeForce 40 cards. The 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 Pulse worked well, we've gained almost 9% 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%.

As mentioned before, Sapphire's RX 7600 Pulse comes at $270, i.e. no price increase over the AMD MSRP. I have to applaud Sapphire for including a factory overclock, even at that price point, which technically is trivial, but some vendors insist on charging more for that. While $270 is considerably lower than the $400 that NVIDIA wants for the RTX 4060 Ti, there's also a 25% performance difference. At its price point, 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; NVIDIA has the DLSS 3 carrot to dangle in front of gamers. The RX 7600 should really be $199 or $229 to make it an interesting option. Strong competition comes from the Radeon RX 6700 non-XT ($280), which brings with it a larger 10 GB framebuffer, and the Radeon RX 6700 XT is only $320, which is a pretty significant $50 increase, but you're getting 12 GB VRAM and 15% higher overall performance. As mentioned before, RTX 4060 Ti is one tier away, and much too expensive, but RTX 4060 non-Ti will release in July for $300, which will keep things interesting in this segment.