Introduction

AMD today debuted the Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card, and we have with us the Sapphire RX 7600 XT Pulse, the company’s custom-design implementation. The RX 7600 XT is a purely partner-led launch—there are no reference design cards. The RX 7600 XT is recommended by AMD for maxed out AAA gaming at 1080p, as well as creator and AI workloads that can take advantage of its large 16 GB video memory. AMD is getting its partners to price the RX 7600 XT competitively to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060. The Sapphire Pulse combines this with a well tuned cooling solution designed for low noise.

The Radeon RX 7600 XT is an effort by AMD to compete with the RTX 4060 within its price range, while also appealing to the creator and AI acceleration crowd. It is based on the same 6 nm Navi 33 monolithic silicon driving the RX 7600 from last year, and the RDNA3 graphics architecture. If you recall, AMD had used up all shaders available on the Navi 33 to create the RX 7600, leaving us to wonder how it would go about creating the RX 7600 XT. One way to do it would be trying to heavily cut down the Navi 32 silicon, but that is a particularly expensive chiplet-based GPU that we doubt AMD could profitably sell under $300 or engage in a price-war with, against NVIDIA’s frugal AD107 silicon driving the RTX 4060.

And yet, AMD found a way to create the RX 7600 XT. First, it doubled the memory size to 16 GB. This is across the same 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface as the RX 7600, and using double the memory chip density—an approach similar to that of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. Second, the GPU engine clock speeds were dialed up. The GPU game clocks are now set at 2470 MHz compared to 2250 MHz of the RX 7600; and the maximum boost frequency set to 2760 MHz, compared to 2660 MHz of the RX 7600. For AMD GPUs, the game clock is more relevant than maximum boost, as this is the frequency the GPU holds during a typical gaming session. In that sense, this is a nearly 10% increase in engine clocks. Third, to support these clocks and ensure good boost frequency residency, AMD raised the total board power (TBP) to 190 W, compared to 165 W of the RX 7600. To support the added TBP, AMD is switching to a dual 8-pin power connector setup. As a final premium touch, AMD mandates its board partners to wire out DisplayPort 2.1, this was optional with the RX 7600, and partners could opt to provide DisplayPort 1.4a and save on some exotic SMDs needed by DP 2.1.

The RX 7600 XT, as we mentioned, is based on a maxed out Navi 33 silicon. This tiny chip physically features 32 compute units, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 Ray accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The chip features 32 MB of Infinity Cache memory, which cushions memory transfers to the vast 16 GB of memory across its 128-bit memory bus. The card’s 16 GB of GDDR6 memory ticks at 18 Gbps, producing 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Much like its NVIDIA competitor, the RX 7600 XT features a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, it will work on any PCIe x16 slot.

Under the hood is AMD’s latest RDNA3 graphics architecture. There are several architectural improvements, including the new generation compute unit, which in addition to a 17% IPC gain over the RDNA2 CU, supports new math formats, and dual instruction issue rate. Each CU features two AI accelerators, a new component AMD introduced with RDNA3, which prepares matrix math workloads for processing by the SIMD units of the CU. The second generation Ray accelerator incorporates several design improvements over RDNA2, offering a 50% generational increase in ray intersection performance. RDNA3 also introduces MDIA (multi draw indirect accelerator), a hardware component that provides a 2.3x speedup for specific DirectX 12 draw commands, and reducing CPU API and driver overhead. Lastly, the Navi 33 supports AMD Radiance Display Engine (RDE), which supports the latest DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR13.5, and USB-C with DisplayPort 2.1 passthrough, for supporting several new display types.

AMD is pricing the Radeon RX 7600 XT at a starting price of $330, or a $60 (22%) premium over the RX 7600, which is also Sapphire’s asking price for this card. The Sapphire RX 7600 XT Pulse comes with a dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution, using an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, and a pair of fans that are easy to detach without disturbing the heatsink underneath, so you can keep your graphics card clean. The card features a unique display output configuration of two DisplayPort 2.1, and two HDMI 2.1a connectors. In this review, we find out what the RX 7600 XT brings to the table, particularly over the RX 7600, and whether the RTX 4060 stares at a challenger.