Finally, you can get a modern 1080p graphics card with 16GB of VRAM without spending a small fortune. AMD revealed the Radeon RX 7600 XT during the recorded CES 2024 keynote on Monday morning. Their US price: $330.
The description of the Radeon RX 7600 XT is simple: it's basically a Radeon RX 7600 with twice as much VRAM, higher clock speeds and slightly higher power consumption as a result. The 7600 XT also comes standard with DisplayPort 2.1, while AMD allows GPU manufacturers to equip the 7600 non-XT with either DP 1.4 or 2.1.
AMD
Other than that, everything else under the hood remains identical: same core counts, same Ray Accelerators, same 32MB Infinity Cache, same AV1 encoding, and – most importantly – same underlying memory configuration, aside from raw capacity. That means the Radeon RX 7600 XT comes with the same 128-bit memory bus as its $270 sibling, giving things an interesting twist.
AMD advertises the Radeon RX 7600 XT as capable of 1440p gaming. It is and will be in many situations. But the ultra-narrow 128-bit bus (previously only used on budget GPUs) can limit memory bandwidth, making the Radeon 7600 XT unappealing as a 1440p graphics card – just like Nvidia's similarly equipped 4060 Ti.
AMD
You can already see from AMD's slides that the 7600 XT can barely go beyond 60 frames per second in current PC games at 1440p, even when all available eye-candy functions are pushed to the extreme. Even with FSR 2 activated in Starfield and Forza.
However, AMD has a handy trick up its sleeve: Hypr-RX. This optional feature within the company's Adrenalin software suite is a single switch that activates Radeon Software's Radeon Super Resolution Upscaling, Radeon Boost and Radeon Anti-Lag technologies in one fell swoop to improve both refresh rate and responsiveness in games to improve drastically.
Additionally, AMD's DLSS 3 competitor, called FSR 3, is available in 20 announced games, while the underlying feature that powers FSR (AMD Fluid Motion Frames) is available at the driver level and, unlike Nvidia's DLSS 3, is available in thousands of games Can be used at will. That helps the Radeon RX 7600 XT boost performance, albeit with some potential minor image glitches, although you probably won't buy it just for 1440p gaming.
AMD
AMD
Still, the Radeon RX 7600 XT should be welcomed by gamers who think 8GB of VRAM simply won't be enough in 2024. Several triple-A games require more than 8GB to run at maximum graphics even at 1080p resolution, and that's an all-or-nothing requirement. If your graphics card doesn't have enough VRAM to handle everything a game asks of it, you'll either suffer from stuttering or downgraded graphics textures, depending on the game.
With the Radeon RX 7600 XT's 16GB buffer memory, you won't have this problem. And considering that Nvidia's cheapest RTX 40-series GPU over 8GB is the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti, which starts at $500, this is the first truly affordable 16GB graphics card of this generation. Hooray!
AMD
Of course, AI is the current buzzword among PCs, and AMD points out that this GPU's 16GB of VRAM meets the minimum requirements for generative AI applications, including Stable Diffusion and Facebook's Llama large-scale language models.
If you've been waiting for an affordable 16GB GPU before picking up a new graphics card of this generation, consider picking up the Radeon RX 7600 XT starting January 24th for $330 or Euro equivalent, with custom prices Models are available from all usual AMD partners such as XFX, Sapphire and Asus. The test reports should appear around the same time.
This article appeared here in the original English language at our sister publication PC-World and was translated by us.
