Review: Radeon 7600 XT offers peace of mind via lots of RAM, remains a mid-range GPU

We don’t need a long intro for this one: AMD’s new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year’s RX 7600, but with a mild bump to the GPU’s clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It’s a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren’t worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It’s priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you generally need to jump into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we’ve already seen. The clock speed bumps provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM becomes apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn’t fundamentally alter the AMD-vs.-Nvidia-vs.-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600’s most glaring weaknesses.

Performance and power

AMD’s official spec sheet for the 7600 XT advertises a 9.8 percent GPU game clock increase compared to the regular 7600, and a 3.8 percent boost clock increase. In most cases, with the XFX card we tested, performance improvements in most games were firmly in that low-single-digit range at 1080p and 1440p.

One broad exception to this, and one specific exception, based on the tests we’ve run: Generally, games with heavy ray-tracing effects—Cyberpunk and Returnal, namely—improved more than the non-ray-traced games we tested; at 1080p, we saw high-single-digit improvements, and at 1440p we actually measured double-digit speed increases. This is, unfortunately, not enough to make the RX 7600 XT’s ray-tracing performance particularly great or competitive, with the RTX 4060 running at the same resolutions and settings.

But there’s only one that shows a crystal-clear sign of video memory-related problems: Forza Horizon 5, which at 1440p begins throwing low-memory warnings on 8GB Radeon cards (it doesn’t seem to have the same issues with 8GB Nvidia cards, at least not as visibly; chalk it up to games being better-optimized for the GPU market leader, maybe). This manifests as scores that look lower than they “should,” and a lack of improvement (or even some backsliding) when you try to use FSR or XeSS upscaling.

The 16GB 7600 XT is a whopping 28 percent faster than the 7600 here and nearly 62 percent faster once you turn FSR on. That’s a huge improvement for the money! However, it’s also not nearly representative of the behavior you’ll see from most games.