- I want to help you, AMD, free of charge.
Just drop by the lab and I'm gonna have
the team show you how to benchmark a GPU
so then you can choose a price that reflects its performance
because, frankly, you guys are all over the road here.
The RX 7600,
the card you're launching today manages to get handily
outclassed by your own products.
(record scratching)
Is what I was going to say.
Then, on Monday afternoon, just 39 hours from launch,
AMD dropped the price!
Let's go, gamers!
We're gonna have a rough cut
of our original review on floatplane.com/ltt
if you're curious, by the way,
but the gist of it is this:
we liked the card, but didn't like the price.
Well, now,
it is $60 less than the launch price
of its predecessor and it's within $10 of our suggestion
that we thought would make it competitive, which is nice,
but then they also dropped the price
on some of their last gen products,
making those even more attractiver.
There is a lot to unpack here,
but one thing we know for sure is that thanks to AMD,
there are finally some, not one,
some decent mainstream cards
that gamers can actually afford.
Let's start with the new kid on the block.
The all-new Navi 33 GPU at the heart of the 7600 is built
on AMD's latest RDNA 3 architecture,
which comes with some key benefits,
like the addition of AI cores that, well,
don't seem to do much right now, but in the future,
we're expecting that to change.
You know, fine wine driver development and all of that.
And right out of the gate,
RDNA 3 also comes with substantially
improved ray-tracing performance,
but then so does the competition.
And AMD has only made things more difficult for themselves.
Just last month ,
they were over there throwing rocks
at NVIDIA over the lack of memory
on their more affordable cards.
I guess they forgot about their own glass house here.
"But this card is for 1080P
where eight gigs is enough," says AMD.
Unfortunately, that's not entirely true.
Have a look.
In "F1 22," AMD pulls off both a big win and an own goal.
Their last gen 6700 XT leads the entire field,
beating even the 4070 that costs almost twice as much,
but then their shiny new 7600 falls squarely
in the middle of the pack and behind their own 6650 XT,
a last gen card that at press time costs anywhere
from 10 to $30 less.
Rough start and definitive proof
that you should completely ignore performance rumors
for upcoming products.
In "Far Cry 6,"
AMD manages to avoid beating themselves
at their own game by keeping ahead
of their own lower priced cards, albeit barely.
And the same goes for "Hitman 3"
where the most interesting result is actually the Arc A770.
Intel's software team has clearly
been working their butts off to the point where
they now kind of sort of have a card that manages to keep
up with the competition, or it did anyway.
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- As we tested more and more games,
we realized that the main takeaway
is that for 1080P gaming,
you really don't need to spend more than a few hundred bucks
on a replacement for your aging mid-tier GPU.
Even in "Returnal" and "Cyberpunk,"
we saw average frame rates
above 60 fps across our entire stable of modern cards,
even if the 1% lows are a bit lower.
With that said, there is a big asterisk here.
Look at the results for "The Last of Us Part 1."
The 3060 has been quietly getting its butt handed
to it the whole time, and then, boom!
It's out in front of the 7600.
Interesting.
We're gonna talk about that in a moment.
First, if you're a 1080P gamer,
AMD's new card seems to slot into their lineup very nicely,
falling behind its bigger, older brother, the 6700 XT,
by about 20% in both price and performance.
While it's little, though still older brother,
the 6650 XT gives up just 5% performance
on average and doesn't net you much in the way of savings.
Given that this is a newer GPU that will likely
receive driver support for longer,
the 7600 is getting very close to a recommendation here,
kinda like how we'd recommend an insulated water bottle
from lttstore.com.
But, first, we need to talk about VRAM.
Both Team Green and Team Red are adamant
that eight gigs of GDDR 6 is enough for 1080P.
And yet we found real world examples
of games that did struggle,
especially those pesky PlayStation ports.
This was very apparent when we saw the 3060 12 gig
suddenly outperforming the supposedly faster RX 7600.
And whether you like it or not,
this is gonna be a trend, gamers.
For over a decade now,
consoles have been what dictates the rate
of growth for hardware requirements.
It's no coincidence that the PS5
and the Xbox Series X both feature a shared memory
architecture of 16 gigs and 10 gigs respectively,
and now all of a sudden,
we're seeing games developed for these consoles
that can demand significantly more VRAM
than an eight gig GPU can provide.
And with the potential for a mid-generation refresh
to these consoles,
it's not entirely unrealistic to expect
that VRAM requirements could increase further
in the coming years.
Take it with a grain of salt, rumors, and all of that.
The issue on top of that, though,
is all of this is just for 1080P.
If you own a 1440P display,
you might desire that extra VRAM today, right now.
Across our suite of games in 1440P,
our rankings remained largely similar to the 1080P results,
but it should be noted that the cards
with the extra VRAM tend to hold their positions better.
Intel in particular starts to pull ahead
and even managed some small victories where it lost before.
And the 3060 12 gig holds its position
despite its much weaker GPU.
Of course,
we were a lot more upset about all of this
before the 7600 got a new price point
and NVIDIA is clearly still the worst offender.
Moving on.
We know these are obviously not 4K cards,
at least not without the help
of their respective super sampling solutions,
but our pattern continues
with the 3060 12 gig closing its performance gap
versus the 7600 while Intel extends its own.
To be clear,
we wouldn't recommend any of these cards
for 4K ultra gaming, say, for the 4070,
but what's cool is that we no longer have to
say the same thing about ray tracing.
7600 isn't exactly a ray tracing monster,
but it did better than we expected at 1080P native.
And looking at our results
with FidelityFX Super Resolution,
which has massively improved,
even if it does still lag behind NVIDIA's DLSS,
you can get a decent 1440P gaming experience.
Although that is still a little
like saying my Civic can do 130 miles an hour
as long as it's on a steep hill.
So then, performance,
pretty solid for the price
and going with next gen comes with other upsides too, right?
Like a big leap in efficiency?
No, actually.
20% more performance over last gen
is gonna cost you a 20% increase in total board power.
I mean, at least it doesn't overheat, though?
Yes, it doesn't.
And while it isn't the quietest card,
it's not offensively loud despite its small size.
We also do get display port 2.1, so that's cool.
But AMD removed the one cable USB-C output
that is so awesome on the 7900 series.
So, oh, but what about productivity?
Well,
NVIDIA dominates Blender thanks
to its excellent CUDA integration.
And while the AV1 encoding times are competitive
with the more expensive 46 DTI,
that's a nice plus for YouTube streamers.
The RX 7600's H264 and H265 encoding
are nothing to write home about.
Sorry, Twitch streamers.
And in SPECviewperf,
it sits right in the middle of the pack,
though I doubt that dazzling productivity performance
would've persuaded the 7600's target audience anyway.
Not that it really needs it.
Assuming you can actually find one at MSRP, the RX 7600 is,
and I can't believe I get to
say this for the first time in years,
an attractive mainstream gaming card.
However,
I'm sure we weren't the only ones who were surprised
by the price change and AMD's partners
may have been caught with board designs
that make this new price point impractical.
So it could be some time before the market is flush
with sub $300 GPUs, at least from this gen.
The good news is AMD has lots of other options
with fresh price cuts as well.
For as low as $320 for the 6700 XT,
you'll get a roughly 20 to 25%
performance uplift for an equal bump in price,
albeit with a higher cost of ownership
from its increased power draw.
The 6650 XT, meanwhile, is looking like a pretty okay,
similarly priced alternative.
And the 6600 is kind of the quiet star of the show
if you can get it for the price we're seeing now.
Just 200 dollaridoos?
And then there's NVIDIA who has transitioned
from making GPUs for gamers
to making GPUs for fans of NVIDIA.
And now,
it's time to see our original outro
for this video where I low-key absolutely (bleep) nailed it.
It's not a budget productivity workhorse
nor is it a mainstream level gaming godsend.
It just kind of sits there
with its main differentiators being shiny and new.
Is that the play, then?
Try and get people who want the new shiny
and aren't doing much research?
- [Narrator] Incoming transmission from the future.
- It's been six months and in the wake
of recent catastrophic event,
AMD has decided to slash prices on their 7600.
Now that it's available for $259.99,
it's gone from no-buy to no-brainer.
And it's an especially good value compared to the 4060,
which is still $300 because
NVIDIA don't do no price drops.
Anyway, AMD's AI cores, they do something now,
so that's cool.
And if any of this is wrong,
just be sure to tune into the When Show
on Friday, November 24th, 2023
to let future Linus know that he went to the wrong time.
Oh God, they're coming!
(gun firing) (man yelling)
Don't forget to tell Linus
about the segue to our sponsor.
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- Another time loop successfully closed.
If you enjoyed this video,
you can check out maybe the coolest implementation
of RDNA 3, the ROG Ally.
That thing is sick and really, really efficient.