It was always a given that AMD would expand its family of Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards to include lower end models at more affordable price points, and that day is apparently coming soon. As in, just a few weeks from now. If the latest rumor is accurate, we can expect AMD to launch the Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 on August 11.
That is just over three weeks from now. Even if the date is off by a few days (or more), there is still reason to believe the new cards are right around the corner. Case in point, PowerColor recently
referenced the Radeon RX 6600 series (and specifically mentioned the Radeon RX 6700 XT) on its website. Though the references have since been removed, a trip in the Wayback Machine shows they did appear online in early July.
Prior to that,
Gigabyte had registered half a dozen custom Radeon RX 6600 XT cards with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), including both stock-clocked and factory-overclocked models. So more RDNA 2 cards are definitely on the horizon.
Some unnamed sources feel confident the
Radeon RX 6000 series will debut on August 11. There is no mention of price or specs, but evidently there will be "plenty of cards around," despite the lingering GPU shortage. Color us skeptical, but we'll see.
According to previous leaks and rumors, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is
powered by a Navi 23 XT graphics chip with 2,048 stream processors. It's also said to feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory (16Gbps) tied to a 128-bit bus, for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth, and 32MB of Infinity Cache. There's been no reliable mention of clock speeds up to this point.
A prior rumor also suggested the Radeon RX 6600 XT could debut at $399 (though it was said AMD is still up in the air about the MSRP), and offer performance comparable to a Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
As for the Radeon RX 6600, it is rumored to wield a Navi 23 XL GPU with 1,792 stream processors, with 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 memory (16Gbps) linked to the same bus width, with the same memory bandwidth and amount of Infinity Cache.
There's been no mention of the suspected performance of the Radeon RX 6600 or where pricing will land. However, if the rumors about the Radeon RX 6600 XT prove accurate, both of these models could prove popular, depending on how much they cost and if they are actually available to purchase for more than 2 seconds after launch.