AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

Next up we have two Ubisoft games, Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, plus two other semi-recent releases: Death Stranding and Hitman 2. Note that we have an even split between DX11 and DX12 representation here, with Far Cry and Assassin's Creed on the older API and the remainder on the latest DirectX.

As we mentioned earlier, we're using our 2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a ultra premium Asus Maximus 13 Hero Z590 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal at DDR4-3600 CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by an 850W DeepCool PSU.

Death Stranding

The Decima Engine tends to favour AMD hardware, so this should give us one of the best chances for the $379 RX 6600 XT to face off against its Nvidia opposition. Thankfully, AMD capitalises here, with the RX 6600 XT leading the $329 3060 by an impressive 20 percent at 1080p - awesome! The RX 6600 XT is also demonstrably better than the RX 5700 XT at 1080p, by a five percent margin, and the RTX 3060 Ti is only nine percent faster than the 6600 XT here - one of the first times we've seen a single digit percentage lead for the $399 Nvidia GPU. Do the wheels fall off at 1440p and 4K? Not really - the 6600 XT is still a few percentage points better than the RX 5700 XT, while maintaining a 7 percent lead against the RTX 3060. All in all, a solid showing for AMD's new blood here.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 tends to be quite CPU-bottlenecked at 1080p resolution, and indeed we see there's not much in it across a wide range of cards - pretty much everything we've tested can deliver around 140 to 165fps, so you'll be able to max out a 144Hz monitor on most every modern card. The RX 6600 XT's result of 140fps is a little ahead of the RTX 3060, by a six percent margin, but there's not much in it generally. The RX 6600 XT does better at 1440p, with a 10 percent advantage over the 3060, but the 3060 Ti is 13 faster than the RX 6600 XT in turn at this res. At 4K, the RX 6600 XT is one of only a handful of current-gen cards to not crack the 60fps average barrier, alongside the RX 5700 XT and RTX 3060.

Hitman 2

Hitman 2 is even more strongly CPU-bound, so the 1080p results are pretty meaningless - pretty much everyone is able to hit around 150fps, from the top of the field to the bottom. At 1440p, we start to see the expected hierarchy emerge, with the 6600 XT beating the RTX 3060 by eight percent while the 3060 Ti beats the smallest Big Navi card by 23 per cent.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

AC Odyssey's built-in benchmark has various foibles, like occasional clouds that tank frame-rates on runs where they appear, plus heavy CPU and GPU utilisation that makes it difficult to find meaningful performance advantages - especially at the Ultra High preset we're operating under here. This is one of the best results for the RX 6600 XT, with the card tying the RTX 3060 Ti and leading the 3060 by 21 percent. If this kind of performance was more typical, the RX 6600 XT would be an incredible value - but as it stands, this looks like an outlier so far. At 1440p, things become more like previous games - the 6600 XT leads the 3060 by 11 percent but the 3060 Ti leads the 6600 XT by seven percent. It's still a narrow margin, but it's clear to see that the new card's performance falls off as the resolution increases.

Next, let's look at our final set of rasterised game benchmarks - including one of our favourite games to benchmark of all time.

AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT analysis

• Introduction and hardware analysis
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Game Benchmarks Part 2 [This Page]
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks
• AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT - the Digital Foundry verdict