Introduction
CES 2024 is underway, and we are on the ground floor finding you all the latest, hottest news updates for launches. Today AMD is making some announcements, a lot of it will be AI talk for sure, but there are also some hardware launches coming which should be exciting for PC hardware enthusiasts. We’ll be breaking this down into two main categories, first AMD’s Radeon Graphics group for a new GPU, and then AMD’s client computing for desktop processors with some new APUs. We look forward to providing reviews when this hardware is available, so make sure to check back.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT
Let’s get straight to the important part first, and get that out of the way, how much will it cost you ask? The Radeon RX 7600 XT 16GB will have a suggested retail pricing of $329 and will be available on January 24th, 2024. Ok, now let’s get to all the info.
If you thought AMD was done with the Radeon RX 7000 series (RDNA 3) launches, you’d be wrong. Up until now, it seemed as if AMD had released all of its Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs ending with the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT, but it seems AMD was not finished at all. Here’s a quick recap of the date for each launch, and a link to our reviews.
The AMD Radeon RX 7000 series debuted with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT both launched on December 12th, of 2022. That’s right, those high-end $999 and $899 MSRP (respectively) video cards came at the end of 2022, so we are already at 1 year and 1 month of their launch here in 2024. Next, in a surprising move, AMD launched its lowest-range Radeon RX 7600 on May 24th, 2023 for $269 MSRP. Following that, AMD launched the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT on September 6th of 2023 for an MSRP of $499 and $449 respectively. This seemed to be it, until now.
AMD has decided to one-up the Radeon RX 7600 and squeeze a brand new Radeon RX 7600 XT in between the Radeon RX 7600 and Radeon RX 7700 XT. We will post the full press-presentation below, for your viewing pleasure so all facts and information that we know, you can also see. We will comment on the slides as well.
The first bit of information here is quite striking, and will surely garner attention, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT is a 16GB video card. This means that a 16GB video card will be slotting in between the Radeon RX 7600, an 8GB video card, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT, a 12GB video card. Therefore, the Radeon RX 7600 XT will have more VRAM than the more expensive Radeon RX 7700 XT. It’s an odd move, but it is one we have seen from the competitor as well in this graphics card space.
In the second slide, AMD is showing that gamers are not having a great experience at 1080p playing at maximum graphics settings, allegedly. If you are on older hardware, performance is not where you might want it for today’s gaming experience. The Radeon RX 7600 XT 16GB video card will allow 1.9x faster performance in gaming and ray tracing compared to a GeForce RTX 2060 in select games, at 1080p. It is even ready to take on 1440p, AMD claims with forward-looking features utilizing 16GB of VRAM, and DisplayPort 2.1. With twice the VRAM of the Radeon RX 7600, it is for sure quite a bump in available capacity.
Here are the full specifications above. We can see that the Radeon RX 7600 XT has the same number of Compute Units and Ray Accelerators as the Radeon RX 7600 with the same number of Stream Processors at 2,048. What separates it from the Radeon RX 7600 is an increase in the GPU clock speeds for the Game Clock and Boost Clock, and of course, double the VRAM.
The Game Clock has been increased from 2.25GHz up to 2.47GHz, and the Boost Clock has been boosted from 2.66GHz up to 2.76GHz. It has the same memory speed at 18Gbps, and the same memory bus at 128-bit, but the VRAM has been doubled from 8GB to 16GB. The AMD Infinity Cache also remains the same at 32MB. Due to the higher clock speed and extra VRAM, the Total Board Power does increase from 165W up to 190W now. It also uses DisplayPort 2.1 and supports AV1 Hardware Encoding.
Therefore, we can truly and factually state that the Radeon RX 7600 XT is a clock-boosted Radeon RX 7600 with double the VRAM. How this will play out in actual gameplay performance, we will have to see. The natural argument will be, is this performant enough to actually utilize that extra VRAM at lower resolutions like 1080p in games? It’s the same argument made for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB model. At least the Radeon RX 7600 XT has a clock speed improvement to the GPU, but the memory bandwidth stays exactly the same as the Radeon RX 7600, we would have also liked to have seen that improvement to give the video card a greater potential.
AMD is comparing and providing this as an opportunity to upgrade from older video cards, such as the GeForce RTX 2060 6GB to give gamers a better experience at 1080p in today’s games. In its charts, we can see that the Radeon RX 7600 XT offers anywhere between a 40% to 135% performance increase over the GeForce RTX 2060, depending on the game. Looking at just the Radeon RX 7600 XT compared to the Radeon RX 7600, AMD is showing mostly around a 12-13% advantage at 1440p over the Radeon RX 7600, except in one game which is surprisingly a 45% increase at 1440p.
AMD is also making it known that its AMD Fluid Motion Frames are now a part of Hypr-RX as well. This can make gaming at 1440p with this video card, more viable. AMD is also announcing that AMD FidlityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) is coming soon to more games. We would like to see AMD improve the Super Resolution component of FSR by updating it to an FSR 3 version over FSR 2.2, but so far that has not been discussed.
AMD also continues to improve its encoding software and encoder image quality improvements. In January 2024, AMD is making video upscaling streaming quality improvements as well as Radeon-specific VLC player optimizations. In Q1 with VLC, Radeon GPUs will have better upscaling with the FSR algorithm, hardware framerate conversion (FRC), and hardware noise reduction for clear video playback. AMD is also making improvements to its AVC/HEVC/AVI encoders to improve image encoding quality from previous drivers. These optimizations are done in AMD’s advanced media framework SDK, so they apply to all software like OBS.
AMD is also going to offer a new video upscaling option in its drivers to upscale videos from lower resolution to a higher resolution, such as low-quality YouTube videos. For example, you could upscale a 720p video to 1440p for better image quality on your display. This will take lower-resolution video and upscale it for better quality. And of course, it wouldn’t be complete without mentioning AI and the fact that more VRAM, 16GB can help with large language model local processing performance. Therefore its use case is increased, and allows you to do more than just gaming with such a large framebuffer.
Now, the price, the Radeon RX 7600 XT will have its pricing set at $329. This puts it about $60 more expensive than the Radeon RX 7600, a difference of 22% in pricing. This doesn’t quite scale with the performance increase, which AMD was showing above at about 12-13%. We have opinions about this, but we will save that for our full reviews once we actually test performance and see where it lands. For this article, we just wanted to get the news out there at this time.
This will be an add-in-board partner launch, meaning no made-by-AMD video card for this one, and these are some of the pictures we can share of partner Radeon RX 7600 XT’s provided by AMD.
