Now this is a graphics card release we can finally praise. AMD’s new $269 Radeon RX 7600 delivers fantastic 1080p gaming that can keep even a high refresh rate monitor well fed in a tiny, quiet, incredibly power-efficient package. Better yet, while Nvidia continues to push either stagnant generational performance upgrades or exorbitant prices for its rival GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards, AMD’s budget champion delivers a massive step-up in frame rates for $60 less than its predecessor’s launch price.
Budget gaming requires compromise, and the Radeon RX 7600 isn’t good at ray tracing, especially since image upsampling technologies like FSR 2.0 and Nvidia’s DLSS don’t look great at 1080p resolution. Don’t get it twisted, though; other than the ferociously powerful (and pricey) RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagships, this modest GPU is the first of this generation worth paying attention to—and the first new sub-$300 graphics card to get excited about since the pandemic threw the world into chaos. Seriously.
Let’s go.
SPECS AND FEATURES
AMD built the Radeon RX 7600 using the same RDNA 3 graphics cores that debuted in the flagship 7900-series GPUs. This new architecture offers dedicated AI accelerators, AV1 encoding, DisplayPort 2.1 (RTX 40-series has 1.4a), second-generation ray tracing and Infinity Cache hardware, and more.
One difference between this and the RX 7900-series: While the more advanced GPUs use a cutting-edge chiplet design that flanks the main die with memory controllers, this budget chip sticks to a traditional single 6-nanometer die (204mm2) that packs everything in.
As you can see, the Radeon RX 7600 packs in more hardware for a lower price than the older (still good) . Memory and GPU clock speeds are up, stream processor and RT accelerator counts are up, and AI accelerators make their debut as part of AMD’s AI push. Spoiler alert: The Radeon RX.
