The AMD Radeon RX 7600 brings the latest-generation RDNA 3 architecture to the sub-$300 realm. It may even qualify as a "budget" graphics card, depending on how you want to stretch that definition. Originally planned for a $299 launch price, AMD dropped the official RX 7600 MSRP to $269 over the past weekend, likely thanks to Nvidia's RTX 4060 $299 announcement. Numerous leaks over the past few weeks have already hinted at what we'll see today, but let's get to it.
Will the RX 7600 rank among the best graphics cards? We'll give it a resounding maybe. Ultimately, it will come down to street prices over the coming months. Right now, plenty of existing RX 6650 XT, RX 6600 XT, and RX 6600 cards largely fill the same role, but with lower pricing. Those originally had significantly higher MSRPs, thanks to the GPU shortages and mining that was going on in 2021–2022, but now you can pick up one of the XT models for under $250, and the vanilla RX 6600 starts at just $199.
What does the new RDNA 3 architecture bring to the party? Reworked compute units (CUs) with a big boost in theoretical number crunching prowess, improved FP16 (AI) functionality, and better silicon utilization, according to AMD. In addition to our normal gaming, power, and thermal tests, we also ran the card through some stable diffusion tests. Here's the overview of the specifications.
On paper, there appear to be some major upgrades. For example, the dual compute units have twice as many ALUs (arithmetic logic units) as before, so the RX 7600 has a massive increase in FP32 teraflops: 21.5 versus just 10.8 on the RX 6650 XT, or basically double the compute performance. FP16 throughput is also doubled.
That sounds good in theory, but in practice, the real-world gains seem to be far more limited. For example, the RX 7900 XT has 51.6 teraflops of FP32 while the RX 6950 XT only has 23.7, so a 118% increase in compute. In our benchmarks, particularly for games, the 7900 XT is about 20% faster on average. If the same pattern holds with Navi 33 (spoiler: it mostly does), gaming performance won't be significantly faster.
Elsewhere, you don't get any extra VRAM, and both the RX 7600 and RX 6650 XT use 18 Gbps GDDR6. Even the process node hasn't been radically altered, as TSMC's N6 is a refined variant of the N7 node used for Navi 23. Density did improve, though, from around 47 million transistors per square millimeter (Mtrans/mm^2) to 65 Mtrans/mm^2. However, that's still a far cry from the ~122 Mtrans/mm^2 that Nvidia is getting on its Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs, or the 152 Mtrans/mm^2 for the Navi 31 (RX 7900-series) GCD.
Besides doubling the maximum FP32/FP16 throughput from the shader cores, one of the biggest architectural changes with AMD's RDNA 3 architecture is the move to GPU chiplets. Except Navi 33 doesn't do that, sticking with a traditional monolithic die approach. That's not really surprising, as GPU chiplets are primarily about cost savings, and adding in extra interconnects between a GCD and multiple MCDs likely only makes sense with wider memory interfaces and stacked L3 caches.
