Finally, you can get a modern 1080p graphics card with 16GB of VRAM without spending half a grand. AMD unveiled the $330 Radeon RX 7600 XT during its recorded CES 2024 keynote on Monday morning.
Describing the Radeon RX 7600 XT is easy: It’s basically a Radeon RX 7600 with twice the VRAM, higher clock speeds, and a slightly higher power draw as a result. The 7600 XT also comes with DisplayPort 2.1 as standard whereas the AMD allows GPU makers to equip the 7600 non-XT with either DP 1.4 or 2.1.
AMD
Other than that, everything else under hood remains identical: Same core counts, same ray accelerators, same 32MB Infinity Cache, same AV1 encoding, and – crucially – same underlying memory configuration, aside from raw capacity. That means the Radeon RX 7600 XT sports the same 128-bit memory bus as its $270 sibling, which adds an interesting wrinkle to the mix.
AMD pitches the Radeon RX 7600 XT as being capable of 1440p gaming, and it certainly is and will be in many situations. But that ultra-narrow 128-bit bus (which used to be exclusive to budget GPUs) can strangle memory bandwidth, which makes the Radeon 7600 XT uncompelling as a 1440p graphics card going forward – just like Nvidia’s similarly equipped 4060 Ti.
AMD
You can already see the 7600 XT struggling to surpass 60 frames-per-second in cutting-edge PC games at 1440p in AMD’s slides, albeit with all available eye candy cranked to the max. And that’s with FSR 2 enabled in Starfield and Forza, too.
AMD has a handy-dandy trick up its sleeve though: Hypr-RX. This optional feature within the company’s Adrenalin Software suite is a singular switch that activates Radeon Software’s existing Radeon Super Resolution upscaling, Radeon Boost, and Radeon Anti-Lag technologies all in one go to drastically improve both frame rates and responsiveness in games.
On top of that, AMD’s DLSS 3 rival, dubbed 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 can be used in thousands of games at will, unlike Nvidia’s DLSS 3. Giggity. That helps the Radeon RX 7600 XT supercharge performance, albeit with some potential small image quirks, though you still probably won’t want to pick this up solely for 1440p gaming.
AMD
AMD
That said, the Radeon RX 7600 XT should be welcomed by gamers who think 8GB of VRAM simply isn’t enough in 2024. Several triple-A games require more than 8GB to run with graphics maxed out even at 1080p resolution, and it’s an all-or-nothing requirement. If your graphics card doesn’t have enough VRAM to handle everything a game is throwing at it, you’ll suffer from either stuttering or quietly downgraded graphics textures, depending on the game.
You won’t have that problem with the Radeon RX 7600 XT’s beefy 16GB buffer. And considering Nvidia’s cheapest RTX 40-series GPU with more than 8GB is the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti, starting at $500, this is the first truly affordable 16GB graphics card of this generation. Huzzah!
AMD
Of course, AI is the hot buzzword among PCs right now, and AMD notes that this GPU’s 16GB of VRAM hits minimum requirements for a generative AI applications, including Stable Diffusion and Facebook’s Llama large-language models.
If you’ve been waiting for an affordable 16GB GPU before buying a new graphics card this generation, look for the Radeon RX 7600 XT to land for $330 on January 24, with custom models available from all the usual AMD partners like XFX, Sapphire, and Asus. Expect reviews to land around the same time.
