AMD Radeon RX 7600 review: A welcome reprieve for gamers on a budget

AMD Radeon RX 7600 review: A welcome reprieve for gamers on a budget

Note: This review was first published on 29 May 2023.

AMD's Radeon RX 7600, priced at a humble – relatively speaking – US$269, brings a much-needed respite for those seeking a pocket-friendly graphics card. Even though this card doesn't quite match up to the recently released NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, especially in terms of performance under ray tracing, it aims to offer good value for money given the rarity of affordable graphics cards these days. The Radeon RX 7600's closest current-gen competitor right now is undoubtedly RTX 4060 Ti, which bears a price tag exceeding it by over US$100.

In truth though, its true peer is the yet-to-be released GeForce RTX 4060, which will only be available in July and cost US$299. So it might just pay to be a little patient and see how that card compares with the RX 7600.

Anyway.

An interesting point of comparison for the Radeon RX 7600 is its predecessor, the Radeon RX 6600 (which we didn’t get to test, unfortunately), which came with a launch price of US$329 amid the global GPU shortage of 2021. This price drop with the new generation might be an indication that PC component manufacturers are starting to recognise that the inflated pricing model of the pandemic era can't last forever, even though we might still be a long way from normalised pricing – if ever.

Design and Features

I often find myself handling numerous graphic cards of various shapes and sizes, but the compact size of the RX 7600 took me by surprise. With its length at just 204mm, it's a far cry from the behemoth GPUs that we have seen from not only NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series but even AMD’s own higher-end RX 7000 series.

The low power requirement of the RX 7600 is another noteworthy feature, with just a single 8-pin connector necessary to fuel its peak power consumption of 199W during my testing. Its petite size and relatively low power make it an excellent choice for compact PC builds, though the tradeoff would be settling for 1080p gaming.

Following in the footsteps of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, the RX 7600 utilises the RDNA 3 architecture, giving it improved power efficiency and upgraded ray tracing cores over its RDNA 2-based predecessors. Let’s have a look at the specs:

The RX 7600 card houses 32 compute units, each carrying 64 stream processors, summing up to 2,048 stream processors in total. But despite each compute unit having a ray accelerator, the ray tracing performance of the RX 7600 is abysmal. It seems like ray tracing has been included merely because it's supported by the RDNA 3 architecture, and quite frankly, there’s absolutely no reason to turn this visual option on even if the game supports AMD’s upscale tech – FSR.

Performance Analysis

The RX 7600 is firmly targeted at the 1080p gaming community, but yet it's not without its limitations. High-end games like Cyberpunk 2077 pose a considerable challenge, even with FSR switched on. The card, however, demonstrates its strength with more traditional rasterised workloads.

HWZ Test Rig Specs

• Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K CPU
• ROG Maximus Z690 Hero
• Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift PG43UQ 4K Gaming Monitor

To evaluate its performance, I ran tests at both 1080p and 1440p and at maximum graphics settings to maximise the card’s full horsepower.

Currently, the RX 7600 ranks at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of performance among current-generation graphics cards, with its nearest competitor, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, outperforming in all gaming benchmarks. This is actually to be expected.

In a 1080p run of Total War: Warhammer 3, the RX 7600 trails the RTX 4060 Ti by not much, to be honest, and considering that the latter is way more expensive. This makes the RX 7600 quite the obvious go-to card for games that don’t really on ray tracing, negating the advantage that the NVIDIA’s lower-end cards tend to have over AMD’s.

However, for games employing a substantial amount of ray tracing, the RX 7600 faces serious struggles. Of course, 4K is overkill and I agree. But even at 1080p, Shadow of the Tomb Raider could barely reach 60 fps without tinkering with the graphics settings.

The (unfortunate) importance of 1080p

It may seem less than thrilling to have a 2023 graphics card release mainly catering to 1080p gaming, and I for one cannot wait for 1440p to be catapulted as the new minimum standard. But according to the latest Steam Hardware survey, almost 65 per cent of its user base still play their PC games on 1080p, while only 12.5 per cent accounts for the 1440p segment. That’s a lot of 1080p gaming enthusiasts.

There’s no doubt that 4K gaming with ray tracing is still the top-tier sexy segment of PC gaming, but the numbers don’t lie. There just aren’t many who can afford PC rigs that can run games with these settings. So a reasonably priced card capable of smooth 1080p gaming – sans ray tracing – is still vital. While the top-of-the-line GPUs rake in the profit margins, I highly suspect that it’s the low-to-mid graphics cards that bring in the revenue volume.

That’s not to say the RX 7600 will not have benefited from improved ray tracing capability, given its growing importance in the gaming world. But at US$269, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 offers an economical solution for current-generation gaming, designed primarily for 1080p gaming. It generally manages this with aplomb, although performance dips and some graphics tweaking are necessary depending on the titles. But as I’ve said earlier, it will be best to hang on to your wallet first until NVIDIA’s true budget 1080p card becomes available in July. Even though there’s a price difference of US$30, NVIDIA’s superior DLSS 3.0 and driver support might give it an edge. We’ll see.