Radeon RX 6600 XT Review: AMD RDNA 2 For Mainstream Gamers

Crytek’s Neon Noir demo was created with an advanced version of CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination technology, which is used in Crysis Remastered to enhance the game’s visuals. Neon Noir was developed on a customized version of CRYENGINE 5.5., and is both API and hardware agnostic. It enables ray tracing to run on virtually any modern GPU, however, future integration of the technology will be optimized for the latest GPUs and APIs like Vulkan and DX12...

Crytek Neon Noir Benchmarks

The PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards just miss the mark set by the GeForce RTX 3060 in the Crytek Neon Noir benchmark. AMD's newest mainstream Radeons do outrun the previous-gen Radeon RX 5700 XT, but they trailed all of the other cards we tested here at both resolutions.

When using the Ultra quality preset in Metro Exodus, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards return to the middle of the pack, out running the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 3060, but trailing only the higher-end cards.

Radeon RX 6600 XT Details @ 1440p

When using the RTX preset (which enables DXR ray tracing effects) in this game though, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards drop down a few rungs at both resolutions and end up trailing the GeForce RTX 3060. We should also mention that this game supports NVIDIA's DLSS technology, so the GeForces would jump out to even bigger leads had we enabled DLSS.

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmarks

All of the mainstream cards from the last couple of generations are evenly matched in the recently released Final Fantasy XIV Endwakers benchmark. Technically, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards sandwiched the GeForce RTX 3060, but we're talking about miniscule differences at both resolutions with this title. In fact, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT Fighter and RTX 3060 FE put up identical scores at 1440p in this test (no, that's not a typo).

Gears 5 Benchmarks

The Gears 5 benchmark exhibited performance similar to the other games that use traditional rasterization techniques. Here, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards once again landed in the middle of the pack, in front of the RTX 3060 and previous-gen cards, but behind their higher-end counterparts.

Far Cry New Dawn Benchmarks

FarCry New Dawn is somewhat CPU limited at 1080p, but the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards still end up finishing about in the middle of the pack. With the resolution increased to 1440p though, the deltas separating the cards get a little larger an the new 6600 XTs end up performing on-par with the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

F1 2021 Benchmarks (With Ray Tracing)

F1 2021 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX11 or DirectX 12, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX and NVIDIA technologies (like DLSS), though we didn't enable any of them to keep the playing field level. We tested the game with its Ultra High graphics preset with Ray Tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what the graphics cards could do.

F1 2021

We tested this game with its Ultra High preset, which enables Ray Tracing effects, so the Radeon RX 5700 XT is absent from the results. With F1 2021's DXR implementation, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT cards still ended up performing better than the GeForce RTX 3060 (and 2060 Super), but they couldn't catch the higher-end cards.