AMD"s Navi 23 GPU came to laptops earlier with the launch of the Radeon RX 6600M discrete graphics as part of the mobile RDNA 2 lineup. However, this did not contain the full Navi 23 chip with the 32 Compute Units (CUs) and that is supposedly releasing on August 11 for desktops inside the new Radeon RX 6600 XT.
And according to an industry source, AMD is purportedly planning to launch the Radeon RX 6600 XT at an MSRP of $349. The 6600 XT is apparently performing better than the $329 GeForce RTX 3060 outside of ray tracing (RT) but isn"t quite as powerful as the $399 RTX 3060 Ti. Bear in mind though that the information our source has shared is about a month old and things may be different when the Radeon card actually launches.
In terms of specs, the RX 6600 XT comprises 32 CUs or 2048 stream processors. The GPU is seemingly clocking pretty high with clocks regularly reaching close to 2,500MHz. Memory-wise, the 6600 XT will pack 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM across a 128-bit wide interface for a bandwidth of 256GB/s. The GPU will have 32MB of on-die Infinity Cache. The proportion of Infinity Cache has been reduced on Navi 23 since the GPU is primarily being targeted at 1080p gaming.
Our source told Neowin that initially, AMD was contemplating whether to price the RX 6600 XT about $20 higher at ~$369. However, the company didn"t want buyers to be swayed away towards the RTX 3060 for its 50% VRAM capacity advantage. And Team Red also didn"t want the card to be priced too close to the better performing RTX 3060 Ti.
We have also got information on the RX 6600 that will feature the cut-down Navi 23 chip with 28CUs or 1,792 stream processors. The rest of the specs match that of its bigger cousin, the RX 6600 XT. The RX 6600 will reportedly be priced at $299 MSRP and is trading blows with the RTX 3060 in terms of non-RT performance. The card is allegedly not launching simultaneously with the 6600 XT and is planned to be released sometime down the line.
In fact, our source believes that since the availability of the 7nm-based RDNA 2 GPUs is low in general, AMD could be prioritizing the supply of the 36CU RX 6700 and the 28CU RX 6600 towards mobile in the form of the RX 6700M and RX 6600M respectively, which is why their launches are probably planned for later.
Of course, all this talk about launch MSRPs is pretty irrelevant right now given that the GPU shortage continues to persist and graphics cards prices are still much higher than the manufacturer-suggested ones. In fact, our source has added that while the purported MSRPs of the two upcoming RX 6600 series desktop GPUs are $349 and $299 respectively, the cards may actually be selling for much higher for around $599 and $499 respectively, and is somewhat close to what cowcotland recently reported.