Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6600 review

The Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6600 is a high-end graphics card that offers the best performance for its price. It is one of the most powerful cards available in its class, and it can run games at 4K resolution with ease.

The amd 6000 series is a graphics card that has been released by AMD. It is the best value for money graphics card on the market today.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 is a new competitor in the entry-level gaming graphics card market. On paper, this $330 card utilizes AMD’s high-end RDNA 2 architecture, which should be plenty for 1080p gaming. Is it, however, really good? With our Radeon RX 6600 Sapphire Pulse review, we’ll find out.

The new RX 6600 may be a tempting purchase for those of you who are still playing 1080p games on Steam with an older card like the GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580.

AMD said that it would cost $330 (on paper), which is the same as Nvidia’s RTX 3060’s SRP, although the latter currently costs up to $700 in the real world. Several individuals today, however, straddle the ephemeral notion of ‘entry-level.’ AMD’s $379 RX 6600 XT is already available, while Nvidia’s $329 RTX 3060 is the cheapest. Both aren’t quite entry-level in the conventional sense, but that’s the situation we’re in, and that’s what AMD’s RX 6600 is up against.

In a nutshell, the Radeon RX 6600

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT uses the Navi 21 GPU, one of the latest second-gen Navi chips based on the excellent RDNA 2 architecture. It’s another TSMC N7 (7nm) GPU, but it’s the smallest of the current AMD GPUs. In spite of its compact size, it has more transistors than the Navi 10 chip in the RX 5700 XT. Finally, the chip has 32 compute units (CUs) and the RDNA 2 dual-CU workgroups have 2,048 stream processors total.

The RX 6600 has a high GPU frequency. The present card’s ‘game clock’ is 2,044MHz in gaming mode, compared to 1,755MHz on the RX 5700 XT. The RTX 3060, on the other hand, is an Ampere silicon rival that seldom reaches 2GHz, which is why AMD has been able to narrow the gap with its competitors’ top cards.

It also neatly fills a gap in the red team’s RX 6000-series line-up after the Radeon RX 6600 XT. However, there are a few differences to note between the two, making it all the more important to consider paying the additional money for the XT model if at all feasible.

Let’s start with the most obvious similarities. RDNA 2 is AMD’s finest architecture to date, and it’s already made its way into a plethora of graphics cards. In general, this is a positive thing, since the RDNA 2 design has proved to be a considerable advance over AMD’s first-generation RDNA architecture. When it comes to pushing performance per watt, the RDNA 2 architecture comes in useful, as do AMD’s new capabilities like FSR, which, as you’ll see later in this review, significantly compliments the RX 6600 performance.

In terms of power consumption, we think the RX 6600’s 132W TBP is excellent, owing to RDNA 2’s efficiency.

Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6600

Specs for the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6600

The Pulse is a dual-slot card with a good distance between its neighbors; this, coupled with its low power consumption, makes it a good physical match for updating older systems. It is just a well-built implementation of the AMD GPU, with no flashing lights or BIOS switching, despite the limited feature set. The card stayed cool and quiet even while fully loaded, with a 2.3GHz GPU clock speed (a little higher than the usual 2.2GHz) and no irritating whining from the fans.

Gaming Capabilities

We put this graphics card to the test in a few games against the RTX 3060, which gives us a decent idea of how the RX 6600 could do.

We can observe that the esports title Rainbow Six: Seige played well in DirectX mode with the Ultra graphics setting, with a frame rate of above 300 FPS. With this graphics card, a competitive esport player may quickly enjoy the advantages of a high refresh rate display and click heads due to the competitive edge of high frames in-game. 

Next, the RX 6600 was able to maintain a constant 65 FPS average at high settings in Cyberpunk 2077, a visually demanding tiple-A game. This enables us to appreciate the visual quality and eye-candy that Cyberpunk 2077 has to offer while playing a seamless high-end gaming title.

Finally, Monster Hunter: World is another triple-A title. Because of its hack and slash gameplay, this is a game that demands quick movements, but it also has a lot of visual candy in terms of in-game graphics. The Radeon GPU was able to pump out a comfortable 79 FPS on average in the highest graphics setting, providing for smooth gameplay and excellent visual fidelity.

FidelityFX Super Resolution from AMD is incredible.

FidelityFX Super Resolution is a feature that improves gaming performance at the expense of picture quality. The goal isn’t to reduce the eye candy in your game, such as textures, geometry detail, effects, and so on, but to render it at a lower resolution and then upscale the output to your desired resolution while reconstructing details so it doesn’t feel like a low-quality image squeezed into a small space. Framerates are enhanced because the computational cost of restoring details to the upscaled picture is less than the cost of producing the game at the higher resolution.

FidelityFX Super Resolution is a feature that improves gaming performance at the expense of picture quality. The goal isn’t to reduce the eye candy in your game, such as textures, geometry detail, effects, and so on, but to render it at a lower resolution and then upscale the output to your desired resolution while reconstructing details so it doesn’t feel like a low-quality image squeezed into a small space. Framerates are enhanced because the computational cost of restoring details to the upscaled picture is less than the cost of producing the game at the higher resolution.

We put this to the test on Far Cry 6, a recently published action game that we consider to be the gold standard in terms of FSR implementation. Far Cry 6’s average frame rate in the Medium graphics setting was 45 FPS without FSR enabled. Though the average frame rate is higher than 30 frames per second, it falls short of the required 60 frames per second for a triple-A gaming experience. Turning on FSR, on the other hand, substantially increases the average FPS. I was pleasantly pleased by how well it worked without compromising picture quality. We noticed a 177 FPS boost on average while using FSR on Ultra Quality settings. This simply goes to prove that FSR has its advantages and that it should be used in more games. 

Changing the FSR preset to Quality didn’t make much of a difference in terms of FPS and visual eye-candy, but we did get 126 and 125 average FPS in Balanced and Performance modes, respectively. Although in Performance mode, the picture quality was the worst, making the game seem like a low-resolution fuzzy jumble. As a result, I’d avoid the performance setting entirely. I believe that the Ultra Quality FSR setting will provide the player with a pleasurable gaming experience.

FSR is put to the test in Far Cry 6.

Conclusion

If you should purchase the Radeon RX 6600 depends on whether an RTX 3060 12GB is available in stock and at a price near to its $329 MSRP. At this price range, Nvidia has put up a graphics card that is usually more performant than AMD’s and performs well in most games. To get the highest frame rate, the Radeon RX 6600 needs friendly in-game optimizations, SAM, and PCIe 4.0.

That’s not simple these days, so the Radeon RX 6600 may not be the graphics card you desire, but it’s a good option at a lower price. At the very least, while MSRP cards are still available when the game is released.

The RX 6600 isn’t a bad graphics card in general. However, if AMD can sustain supplies and the $330 SRP, they may be able to win the entry-level market. We didn’t test any Ray tracing for the time being since we believe the functionality isn’t suitable for graphics cards of this caliber. Furthermore, with higher-tier GPUs like the RX 6700XT and above, you’ll be better suited enabling real-time ray tracing. The cost with realtime ray tracing is a reduced FPS in exchange for unceccary visual candy, which we believe is not worth it.

I don’t understand why anybody wouldn’t want to buy the RX 6600 just for gaming reasons. It’s a fast graphics card with high FPS in professional esports and enough power for a triple-A gaming experience that will keep you occupied for days.

I’m an in-house geek. Gamer on the PC. Probably one of the team’s most dedicated FPS players, although he never manages to get beyond silver.

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• radeon 6700
• amd rx 6800 xt
• 6900 xt price