A Look At “Epic” 1080p Gaming Performance With AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT

To take a look at GPUs from a power perspective, we’re using UL’s 3DMark Fire Strike 4K stress test, and the PC plugged into a Kill-A-Watt to monitor full system power draw. The PC is left to sit idle for about five minutes, or at least until the PC is idle, at which point that number is recorded. After five minutes of running the Fire Strike test, the load value is recorded (at the same point in the looped test).

Power Consumption

Poring over these power results, we can see that NVIDIA manages to sit idle at a slightly lower wattage than AMD, although the peak loads of Radeon seem to edge out NVIDIA a bit. The RX 6600 XT consumes just over the power of the RTX 3060 at full load, while performing a lot closer to the RTX 3060 Ti in the real-world.

Final Thoughts

While we didn’t get to test this card in a fuller range of tests as we would have liked to, we’re left with great impressions of AMD’s latest card overall, and are glad to finally see a sub-$400 RDNA2 card get out the door. That’s of course ignoring current market conditions. Each review we publish makes us yearn all the more for normality with real-world pricing.

Across our eight chosen games. both the RTX 3060 Ti and RX 6600 XT flip-flopped their leads, with NVIDIA gaining the overall edge. That said, you really have to pay attention to specific games that you’re interested in, since depending on the game you’re eying, one vendor’s card may outperform the other by a fair margin.

ASUS’ Radeon RX 6600 XT ROG STRIX

A bit of an ongoing thorn in AMD’s side is NVIDIA’s DLSS and increased ray tracing performance, which is hard to speak about here as we do not have updated test results for this article. NVIDIA has had more time to bake its upscaling tech, as well as has wider game support for it at the moment. AMD’s FSR is just starting to break through, and we’d imagine it will go down the same path and be supported in many more titles going forward. All of that said, the RX 6600 XT isn’t targeted at the die-hard ray tracing crowd, since if you want the best experience possible, higher-end hardware will be needed.

Price-wise, the RX 6600 XT sits at $379, while NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 Ti commands a $20 premium (again – ignoring current market volatility), and if you care about those aforementioned strengths, NVIDIA will be hard to ignore. Still, the RX 6600 XT is a great full-featured GPU for its SRP, and delivers on its promises of stellar 1080p gaming performance in many of today’s hottest games.