AMD Promotes Broken RX 7600 in Light of RTX 3060 8GB Garbage

AMD’s latest Radeon RX 7600 missed the cut for best graphics cards by a whisker; bringing its pricing down to match that of the RX 6650 XT would help. A Twitter user challenged AMD’s senior director of gaming marketing, Sasa Marinkovic, to make a comparison between the Radeon RX 7600 and its competitors. Contrasted with the significantly more popular GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB), the comparison was made with a wink and a nod to the GeForce RTX 3060 (8GB), a scaled-down original version. According to the data presented by Marinkovic, the Radeon RX 7600 outperformed the GeForce RTX 3060 8GB at 1080p (1920×1080) with maximum settings by as much as 34% on average. In other games, including Borderlands 3, the Radeon RX 7600 reached 61%.

We don’t think AMD fudged the numbers, but the chipmaker should have tested against the full-fat 12GB RTX 3060 instead of the crippled version that nobody would ever buy. The GeForce RTX 3060 8GB has a smaller memory interface and half the capacity of the 12GB model. Memory bandwidth was significantly reduced because Nvidia lowered the original 192-bit bus to 128-bit for the 8GB variant. Due to its pared-down memory interface, the GeForce RTX 3060 8GB’s bandwidth was reduced by 33 percent. To some extent, the GeForce RTX 3060 8GB was a secret release like the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB, but it was a much less desirable graphics card.

The GeForce RTX 3060 8GB is reportedly 15% slower than the standard GeForce RTX 3060 with 12GB of RAM, though we could never get one to test in our lab. Therefore, the GeForce RTX 3060 8GB is between the GeForce RTX 3050 and the 12GB model. That isn’t the issue by itself. The fact that the 3060 8GB launched at the same pricing as the 12GB card ultimately killed the product. Although now $20 less expensive, this card has not gained much traction among consumers. Only when it comes to rasterization performance does the Radeon RX 7600 outperform the GeForce RTX 3060. In terms of ray tracing speed, Nvidia is still the industry leader.

Our tests show that the Radeon RX 7600 outperforms the GeForce RTX 3060 by 17% in rasterization performance at 1080p and extreme settings. In contrast, ray tracing performance on a Radeon RX 7600 can be up to 22% lower. To make the Radeon RX 7600 look better, AMD utilized the GeForce RTX 3060 8GB as a comparison. A 34% differential is much more enticing than a 17% delta, which makes sense. Before its release, the Radeon RX 7600 graphics card was met with skepticism. Users were skeptical that the Radeon RX 7600 would be able to outperform the previous-gen Radeon RX 6650 XT significantly.

The Navi 33-based graphics card ended up being slightly better than its predecessor, despite being more expensive and using the same amount of power. Since then, AMD has not released any benchmarks contrasting the Radeon RX 7600 with the Radeon RX 6650 XT. The Radeon RX 7600 isn’t invited to the best graphics card party because the Radeon RX 6650 XT is already there. Since custom Radeon RX 6650 XT units can be purchased for as little as $229, and the Radeon RX 7600 only gives a slight performance boost, the extra $40 seems excessive. You do get AV1 encoding support; otherwise, this isn’t a compelling bundle.