AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT Now Costs Less Than RX 7600 While Offering Similar Performance

AMD recently launched its brand new Radeon RX 7600 graphics card for $269 US but it looks like the older RX 6650 XT might still be a better option for gamers.

It looks like GPU manufacturers are having big trouble with their older-generation cards offering better value to gamers than their brand-new offerings. NVIDIA faces the same issue with its GeForce RTX 3060 & RTX 3060 Ti which have recently received price cuts and are now available at lower prices than the RTX 4060 series despite the new models being priced just slightly lower than their predecessors (e.g. RTX 4060 8 GB has an MSRP of $299 US while the RTX 3060 12 GB had an MSRP of $329 US).

Now, AMD is facing similar issues with its older Radeon RX 6600 series cards offering a better performance value than the newly released Radeon RX 7600. AMD already had to do a last-minute price cut on the Radeon RX 7600 which was originally going to cost $299 US. The new pricing of $269 US is definitely better but it doesn't resolve the competitive issue.

The AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT graphics card which offers the same performance in raster and ray-tracing is available for a low price of $244.99 US, $25 US lower than the MSRP of AMD RX 7600. The more entry-level AMD Radeon RX 6600 8 GB can be found for $179.99 US but that is a much bigger performance difference.

Between the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the Radeon RX 6650 XT, both cards feature a similar core count and memory configuration as seen in the chip differences pointed out below:

AMD Navi 33: 2048 Cores, 128-bit Bus, 32 MB Infinity Cache, 204mm2 GPU Die @6nm

AMD Navi 23: 2048 Cores, 128-bit Bus, 32 MB Infinity Cache, 237mm2 GPU Die @7nm

Even in China, the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT costs as low as 1899 RMB which converts to 269 USD or the US MSRP of the Radeon RX 7600.

The former is based on the RDNA 3 architecture but besides improvements to ray tracing acceleration and the addition of AV1, there isn't a lot more that you get for paying extra. The power efficiency doesn't see a big drop as NVIDIA's Ada cards do over the previous-gen Ampere offering and one of the biggest features, FSR 3, is yet to launch. Though it is possible that FSR 3 will be enabled on RDNA 2 GPUs too which means there's not a whole lot of incentive for existing Radeon RX 6650 XT and RX 6600 XT users to upgrade to the new cards.

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 did receive a small price drop in certain regions but that is by no means an official price cut. However, based on what we have seen with all recent graphics card launches, more retailers will be offering discounts and promos on the newly released cards in a few months' time.