rx 7600 xt

intel’s-second-generation-arc-b580-gpu-beats-nvidia’s-rtx-4060-for-$249

Intel’s second-generation Arc B580 GPU beats Nvidia’s RTX 4060 for $249

Alchemist, arc b570, arc b580, battlemage, gaming, intel, Intel Arc, rtx 4060, rx 7600 xt, Tech / /

Turnover at the top of the company isn’t stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.

Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won’t be available until January 16.

The two cards are Intel’s first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation “Battlemage” architecture, a successor to the “Alchemist” architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel’s Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel’s Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel’s factories.

Both cards use a single 8-pin power connector, at least in Intel’s reference design; Intel is offering a first-party limited-edition version of the B580, while it looks like partners like Asus, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, Onix, and Sparkle will be responsible for the B570.

Compared to the original Arc GPUs, both Battlemage cards should benefit from the work Intel has put into its graphics drivers over the last two years—a combination of performance improvements plus translation layers for older versions of DirectX have all improved Arc’s performance quite a bit in older games since late 2022. Hopefully buyers won’t need to wait months or years to get good performance out of the Battlemage cards.

The new cards also come with XeSS 2, the next-generation version of Intel’s upscaling technology (analogous to DLSS for Nvidia cards and FSR for AMD’s). Like DLSS 3 and FSR 3, one of XeSS 2’s main additions is a frame-generation feature that can interpolate additional frames to insert between the frames that are actually being rendered by the graphics card. These kinds of technologies tend to work best when the cards are already running at a reasonably high frame rate, but when they’re working well, they can lead to smoother-looking gameplay. A related technology, Xe Low Latency, aims to reduce the increase in latency that comes with frame-generation technologies, similar to Nvidia’s Reflex and AMD’s Anti-Lag.

Intel’s second-generation Arc B580 GPU beats Nvidia’s RTX 4060 for $249 Read More »

$329-radeon-7600-xt-brings-16gb-of-memory-to-amd’s-latest-midrange-gpu

$329 Radeon 7600 XT brings 16GB of memory to AMD’s latest midrange GPU

AMD, gaming, GPU, Radeon, RDNA 3, rx 7600 xt, Tech / /

more rams —

Updated 7600 XT also bumps up clock speeds and power requirements.

–

The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat.

Enlarge / The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat.

AMD

Graphics card buyers seem anxious about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren’t otherwise equipped to play games at super-high resolutions. And while this anxiety tends to be a bit overblown—lots of first- and third-party testing of cards like the GeForce 4060 Ti shows that just a handful of games benefit when all you do is boost GPU memory from 8GB to 16GB—there’s still a market for less-expensive GPUs with big pools of memory, whether you’re playing games that need it or running compute tasks that benefit from it.

That’s the apparent impetus behind AMD’s sole GPU announcement from its slate of CES news today: the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT, a version of last year’s $269 RX 7600 with twice as much memory, slightly higher clock speeds, and higher power use to go with it.

RX 7700 XT RX 7600 RX 7600 XT RX 6600 RX 6600 XT RX 6650 XT RX 6750 XT
Compute units (Stream processors) 54 (3,456) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 28 (1,792) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 40 (2,560)
Boost Clock 2,544 MHz 2,600 MHz 2,760 MHz 2,490 MHz 2,589 MHz 2,635 MHz 2,600 MHz
Memory Bus Width 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 192-bit
Memory Clock 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 1,750 MHz 2,000 MHz 2,190 MHz 2,250 MHz
Memory size 12GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 12GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP) 245 W 165 W 190 W 132 W 160 W 180 W 250 W

The core specifications of the 7600 XT remain the same as the regular 7600: 32 of AMD’s compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA3 GPU architecture and the same memory clock speed attached to the same 128-bit memory bus. But RAM has been boosted from 8GB to 16GB, and the GPU’s clock speeds have been boosted a little, ensuring that the card runs games a little faster than the regular 7600, even in games that don’t care about the extra memory.

Images of AMD’s reference design show a slightly larger card than the regular 7600, with a second 8-pin power connector to provide the extra power (total board power increases from 165 W to 190 W). The only other difference between the cards is DisplayPort 2.1 support—it was optional in the regular RX 7600, but all 7600 XTs will have it. That brings it in line with all the other RX 7000-series GPUs.

  • AMD’s hand-picked benchmarks generally show a mild performance improvement over the RX 7600, though Forza is an outlier.

    AMD

  • The 7600 XT’s performance relative to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 is also a little better than the RX 7600’s, thanks to added RAM and higher clocks. But Nvidia should continue to benefit from superior ray-tracing performance in a lot of games.

    AMD

  • Testing against the 4060 at 1440p. Note that the longest bars are coming from games with FSR 3 frame-generation enabled and that Nvidia’s cards also support DLSS 3.

    AMD

  • The complete RX 7000-series lineup.

    AMD

AMD’s provided performance figures show the 7600 XT outrunning the regular 7600 by between 5 and 10 percent in most titles, with one—Forza Horizon 5 with ray-tracing turned all the way up—showing a more significant jump of around 40 percent at 1080p and 1440p. Whether that kind of performance jump is worth the extra $60 depends on the games you play and how worried you are about the system requirements in future games.

AMD says the RX 7600 XT will be available starting on January 24. Pricing and availability for other RX 7000-series GPUs, including the regular RX 7600, aren’t changing.

$329 Radeon 7600 XT brings 16GB of memory to AMD’s latest midrange GPU Read More »