XFX MERC 308 Radeon RX 6600 XT Review: 1080P Gaming Speedster

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards represented in this article on a MSI X570 Godlike motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, games, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

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Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (3.4GHz - 4.9GHz, 16-Core) MSI X570 Godlike (AMD X570 Chipset) 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio Integrated Network Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super FE AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308

Relevant Software: Windows 10 Pro x64 (21H1) AMD Radeon Software v21.8.1 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v471.41 Benchmarks Used: VRMark 3DMark (Time Spy, Fire Strike, Port Royal, DXR) Unigine Superposition Crytek Neon Noir Metro Exodus Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Gears 5 F1 2021 FarCry: New Dawn

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Unigine Superposition Benchmarks

Superposition is the latest benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in as well. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in two modes using the DirectX code path – 1080p Extreme and VR Future -- to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition

The Unigine Superposition 1080P Extreme test has the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 finishing right in-line with the PowerColor Red Devil we previously tested, smack dab in the middle of the pack.


Superposition's VR Future benchmark also showed a fractional performance delta separating the PowerColor Red Devil card and the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308. Both cards clearly outpaced the GeForce RTX 3060.

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


The XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 trailed all of the other cards we tested in VRMark's most taxing Blue Room test, just missing the mark set by the higher-clocked PowerColor card.

UL 3DMark Time Spy DX12 Benchmarks

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from UL. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multithreading. Time Spy is designed to test the DX12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the UL Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards and other system resources driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs. In the DX12-based 3DMark Tme Spy benchmark, the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 finished right on top of the PowerColor card, outrunning the 5700 XT and RTX 3060, and finishing in the middle of the pack.

UL 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra Benchmarks

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

3DMark Fire Strike Radeon RX 6600 XT Details

As you would expect given their similarities, the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 once again finished right in-line with the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT.

UL 3DMark Port Royal Ray Tracing Benchmarks

Port Royal was released earlier this year as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable DXR.

3DMark's Port Royal benchmark does two things: 1) Illustrates NVIDIA's clear advantage with DXR-enabled content and 2) Solidifies the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308's position, just a hair behind the Red Devil.

We also experimented with the DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test, which was recently released as an update to 3DMark...
The XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 managed to eke out a technical victory over the Red Devil here, but we are talking about the smallest of possible deltas.