For nearly six months, Nvidia's $329/£299 RTX 3060 has stood alone as the only next-gen graphics card targeting 1080p gaming – the most popular monitor resolution and one that accounts for 67 percent of displays, if the Steam hardware survey is to be believed. Now, AMD has a next-gen 1080p card of its own in the form of the RX 6600 XT, a $379/£329 option that costs $100/£90 less than the previous most affordable RDNA 2 graphics card, the RX 6700 XT.
With a $50/£30 price premium over the RTX 3060, Team Red will be looking to offer demonstrably better performance in most titles, while narrowing the gap in games that use hardware-accelerated ray tracing – a weakness for AMD this generation. The $399/£369 RTX 3060 Ti is also dangerously close to AMD's new GPU, so we'll have to see how these two graphics cards compare as well.
Of course, whether the RX 6600 XT will actually make it to market at $379/£329 remains an open question. AMD's own reference cards tend to sell out in a matter of seconds, and custom cards often come at much higher prices. AMD isn't making a reference model RX 6600 XT – we're testing a PowerColor Red Devil card that feels like a more premium offering – so it will be fascinating to see if regular people that aren't plugged into stock availability Discord servers and Twitter accounts will be able to actually buy one on launch day at MSRP. Regardless of the ground truth, for now we'll assume that the card will be available at $379 – as we need some basis by which to make comparisons!
