AMD announces the $329 RX 7600 XT, bringing 16GB of VRAM to its lowliest RDNA 3 chip

pcgamer.com:

AMD has kicked off 2024 for its Radeon line-up of graphics cards with the RX 7600 XT, sporting 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM and minor boosts to the GPU's clock speed. It's still using the same Navi 33 graphics chip as in the original Radeon RX 7600, so there are no additional shaders or memory controllers, though.

That means the new RX 7600 XT has 2,048 shaders and a 128-bit combined memory bus width, but AMD has upped the Game clock by 220MHz (2.25 to 2.47GHz) and the Boost clock by 100MHz (2.66 to 2.76GHz), increases of 9.8% and 3.8% respectively. The VRAM's clocks are unchanged, though, so the transfer rate is still 18Gbps.

Unfortunately, the higher clock speeds and extra VRAM means the power demand has risen, too. Where the RX 7600 has a total board power of 165W, the RX 7600 XT pushes this to 190W. An extra 25W is nothing, to be honest, and should mean that it will only require a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

I say 'should' because it's not 100% clear in the various images of the third party models. There won't be a reference Radeon RX 7600 XT from AMD, just the likes of Sapphire, PowerColor, etc but I think it's safe to assume that you won't need a secondary power cable.

With the combined higher clocks and the extra VRAM, AMD is claiming that the RX 7600 XT is anywhere between 6 and 31% faster than the standard RX 7600, at 1440p. Of course, these figures are for very specific games and the highest increases stated are for Forza Horizon 5, when using maximum ray tracing settings.

When chip vendors release a new product, they typically like to highlight its performance by comparing it to a very specific model from the competition. In the case of the RX 7600 XT, AMD has bizarrely chosen Nvidia's four-year-old GeForce RTX