AMD Radeon RX 7600 vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 vs Intel Arc A750: the 1080p graphics shoot-out

Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on June 17, 2023

So far, we've seen Intel dominate ray tracing results, we've seen growing support for XeSS scaling, which is competitive with DLSS, and we've seen varying results from AMD. Owing to super-aggressive price cuts, the RX 6650 XT has been duking it out with the new RX 7600, but pricing on the less capable RX 6600 may prove to be more decisive as we move into rasterisation tests, where the 'good all-rounder' that is the RTX 3060 12GB may come under more pressure.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Control

As the 'corridor of doom' is such a demanding area of Remedy's Control, we've relocated our rasterisation benchmark to the same area because it turns out that it's not the RT element that makes this place so demanding - it's inherent to the corridor whether you're running RT or not.

Without RT in play, we'll start to see the Arc cards' strong performance peter out somewhat in other games, but that's not the case here in Control, where the game runs beautifully on Intel hardware - out-pacing the 3060 by around 28 to 28 percent, bring them more closely into contention with RTX 3060 Ti and even 4060 Ti.

Control has always been what you might call a banana skin game for AMD and only the RX 6700 XT is competitive here. I noted egregious stuttering issues on all the other AMD cards, explaining those ludicrous-looking one percent lows.

Control, High, 4x MSAA

Cyberpunk 2077

W're going to start to see a resurgent AMD in our benchmarks going forward, as the RX 7600 is exceptionally good in raster performance more generally. I noted some 'unicorn' benchmarks in AMD's own numbers that saw it outstripping the RTX 3060 considerably and that seems to be the case here as we run Cyberpunk 2077 without RT features. The 7600 not only pushes way ahead of the 3060 but also beats RX 6600 and even RX 6650 XT convincingly - so much so I considered this to be an error, perhaps, as FSR2 upscaling automatically engages in the settings unless you turn it off. These results are very definitely with upscaling disabled on all cards.

Testing and re-testing confirms the result. This is a really good result for the new AMD hardware here - it's just a shame that we don't see more convincing wins like this elsewhere within our benchmarks.

Cyberpunk 2077, Ultra, TAA

Forza Horizon 5

Results on the prior page revealed something rather odd - there's no way the Arc A770 should be outperforming A750 in the way it does at a reconstructed 1080p resolution. However, move into native resolution rendering and we see it again: the A770 is tremendously more performant than A750.

My contention is that not only is the A750 hitting the limits of its 8GB framebuffer, it's more impactful to performance than it is to AMD and Nvidia GPUs that also have 8GB of VRAM. Possibly a memory compression weakness in Arc? This would explain some of the alarming 4K results I highlight in the video version of this review.

Memory issues may also explain some of the frame-time judder inherent in the bnechmarks, while at the same time shining a light on how the RX 6650 XT is essentially on par with the next generation RX 7600. This title isn't a good look for the new AMD card. The RX 6600 is effectively a sub $200/£200 GPU these days, but the RX 7600 is so much more expensive for only 15 percent more performance.

Forza Horizon 5, Extreme, 4x MSAA

F1 22

This one's particularly heavy on the Arc GPUs - both of them - which, let's be honest, are not really at the races on this one. It's a crazy world wherein the budget RX 6600 defeats not just the A750 but also the A770 (!). Nvidia also looks some sub-bar here, with AMD's offerings in the sub $300 market knocking on the door of the RTX 4060 Ti. F1 22 is also one of those games where the difference between RTX 3060 Ti and its successor are vanishingly small to the point of irrelevance.

AMD takes pole position in this one, clearly. The RX 7600 is punching above its weight compared to its competitors on the green team, Arc is trounced, and the only real disappointment here is that at 1080p, the RX 7600 is beaten by the RX 6650 XT, which is the cheaper product in the current price-cutting period.