Graphics card
With so much competition in the market, Chris Szewczyk tries to work out whether the new RX 7600 does enough to beat the pack.
Following the release of the Radeon RX 7900 XT, AMD surprisingly followed up with the ‘budget’ second desktop RDNA 3 GPU, the Radeon RX 7600. It’s easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia, though it’s important not to overlook Intel’s Arc cards, at least regarding value.
AMD promotes the RX 7600 as a card for mainstream 1080p gamers. Its purpose is to bring competitive performance plus the latest technology and features down to an affordable price point. But don’t go expecting wonders from the RX 7600. It’s not a magical card that will compete with the top cards of the Radeon RX 6000-series. It’s nowhere near. It’s best described as an affordable upgrade for mid-tier GPUs of yesteryear. Think cards like the RX 580 or GTX 1060 and you’d be on the right track.
Then there’s the elephant in the room. AMD did miss a trick by sticking with 8GB of VRAM. It’s enough for 1080p in almost every current game, but can we say that two years from now? What if the next Grand Theft Auto turns out to be a VRAM-hogging monster? 192-bit and 12GB of VRAM would have given the card more appeal and a longer life. We’re seeing popular cards like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 6GB running into limits now, and there’s no reason to expect the RX 7600 won’t hit similar limits in a couple of years’ time, if not sooner.
There are things we love about the card. It’s got a good media engine that includes AV1 encode and decode support up to 8K, DisplayPort 2.1 and support for up to four simultaneous 4K displays at 144Hz each. That makes it a very capable HTPC or productivity GPU. There’s nothing else available (yet) at its £250 price point that ticks all of those boxes.
The RX 7600 is the first card to be released with the brand new Navi 33 GPU. Unlike the Navi 31 chiplet design found inside the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, Navi 33 is a more traditional monolithic or single-chip design. It’s built on TSMC’s 6nm node, which is a small step behind the more advanced 5nm node of the RX 7900 cards. That’s surely for cost reasons.
Even though the RX 7600 comes with faster memory and more bandwidth, it’s still not a major upgrade. We just can’t get used to 128-bit buses on mid-range cards. We had 512-bit buses going all the way back to the HD 2900 XT from 2007! There’s also
