What you need to know
- AMD officially announces the Radeon RX 7600 desktop graphics card with 8GB of VRAM.
- Available from May 25, the GPU starts at $269 MSRP with third-party variants alongside the official AMD reference card.
- Some details of the card had leaked in days leading up to today's reveal, incorrectly overpricing the MSRP.
It's getting harder for manufacturers to keep a secret these days, and AMD is no exception. Formally announcing a May 29 launch for its brand-new Radeon RX 7600 graphics card as a successor to the RX 6600 from the previous generation, some tidbits had already leaked, and most of it was accurate, except for the $269 MSRP.
The standard RX 7600 features just 8GB VRAM, joining the low end of the 7000-series GPUs underneath the RX 7900 XTX and XT cards with 24GB and 20GB, respectively. AMD's big marketing push for this lightweight entry entirely relies on targeting 1080p gaming, although its choices for benchmark comparisons against NVIDIA are a little convenient.
Still, the generational improvements are welcome, and so is the slight drop in MSRP.
AMD vs NVIDIA
In its internal benchmarks, AMD pits the new Radeon RX 7600 against three NVIDIA GPUs, as you might expect. Picking from three previous generations, the 8GB RX 7600 went up against a GeForce GTX 1060, RTX 2060, and two variants of the RTX 3060, one with 8GB VRAM and the other with 12GB.
All the internal benchmarks show a clear lead, but it's not surprising for anything besides the beefier 12GB 30-series edging slightly ahead with ray tracing enabled in Remedy's Control. Undoubtedly the true challenge for AMD will be going head-to-head with NVIDIA's latest 4060 RTX with 8GB VRAM for $299.
Targeting the entry-level custom PC crowd will be tricky, given that real-world benchmarks can tip prospective buyers' decisions. Rest assured, if and when we get our hands on the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, we'll put them through their paces to see if 8GB of VRAM is too slim for modern gaming. Either way, AMD still professes the RX 7600's ability to break over 100FPS in the most popular competitive games like Overwatch 2 at 1080p.
Any PC gamers planning to build a custom rig on a budget will be tempted by the benefits of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in the same way that NVIDIA DLSS helps upscale the visuals of modern games without seriously impacting the framerate. Putting together a desktop that targets 1080p to 1440p resolutions around the 60 to 120FPS mark would put the Radeon RX 7600 high on the list of perfectly suitable GPUs.
Live streamers will benefit massively from AV1 hardware encoding in a more affordable package than the 7600 XTX and XT variants, offering much higher fidelity visuals without increasing the total bitrate. Streaming between 900p to 1080p will look crisper at around 6Mbps, and AMD boats generational improvements in rendering videos and images via popular AI generators like Stable Diffusion.
Overall, it's a tempting entry into the more affordable GPU category targeting anything below 4K gaming. AMD cites a recent Steam hardware survey (April 2023) that 65% of gamers play at 1080p, and 54% use less than 8GB of VRAM anyway. Dropping on May 25 for $269, third-party variants alongside the AMD reference card are expected from the usual suspects like XFX, Gigabyte, MSI, and more.
