AMD has finally released the budget-friendly Radeon RX 7600, satisfying the 1080p crowd. Unlike Nvidia’s more expensive GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, the RX 7600 costs just $269. It may not perform as well with ray tracing enabled, but in a time when affordable graphics cards are in short supply, the price point may be worth the trade-off. The RX 7600 is currently the most affordable current-generation card on the market, with the next closest competitor, the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, costing over $100 more. The size of the card is also noteworthy, as it’s only 8 inches long, making it perfect for smaller PC builds.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 Design and Specs
The Radeon RX 7600 uses RDNA 3 like its predecessors, with updated ray tracing cores and improved power efficiency. It features 32 compute units and 2,048 total stream processors. New in this generation is the introduction of AI accelerators, which should make traditional AI workloads run smoother. However, ray tracing performance is subpar, and the ray accelerators are underwhelming. The RX 7600’s main advantage is traditional, rasterized workloads, as opposed to ray tracing.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 Performance
Although the RX 7600 performs well with traditional rasterized workloads, it struggles with ray tracing. For instance, Cyberpunk 2077 runs at only 33 fps maxed out at 1080p with FSR on its Quality preset, while Hitman 3 with all its eye candy enabled only runs at 30 fps. However, there are a few games where the RX 7600 performs decently with ray tracing, such as Far Cry 6 and Forza Horizon 5. Both games exceed 60 fps at 1080p with ray tracing enabled.
1080p Matters
Despite the hype surrounding 4K gaming with ray tracing, a considerable amount of gamers still prefer 1080p. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, 64.52% of Steam’s install base are 1080p gamers, while 1440p gamers make up only 12.49% of the userbase. This makes the RX 7600 the best graphics card for those who value affordability and want to play games at 1080p. The biggest downside of the RX 7600 is its underwhelming ray tracing performance, which makes it less suited for modern games with advanced graphics.