AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Launching For 1080p RDNA2 Gaming At ~$379 USD

[bridgman]

Wait what, 32GB of cache? H- Oh, it was 32MB...

Yeah, sorry - typo and fixed. Even I was impressed by the 32GB cache

I almost thought that AMD managed to wire a massive SRAM chip to the processing core...

We probably have something like that in one of the labs... I bet there's something with a rack of GPUs and an octopus (or maybe a dolphin) if you look hard enough.

[perpetually high]

Shameless plug for my RX480.. best purchase I've made for my desktop, still going strong. Bridgman's link to Amazon is pretty hilarious.

Got mine back in Feb 2017 (see Phoronix join date). AMD Fine Wine™ at its finest. Mined 1.5 ETH with it a couple years ago and blew it on online poker. Should've held on to it.

Also - any love for cable management around here, or are you guys just a bunch of animals?? And no, we don't do RGB. We leave that to the Gen Z crowd (no offense)

[bridgman]

All true and valid points. Do you think that for next gen it will be worthwhile to keep the gaming GPUs a bit longer on 7nm rather than the cutting edge node where they are competing for wafers with all the other products?

Tough question - I imagine that if we had known that COVID-19 and/or the semiconductor shortage was coming we might have hedged our bets a bit, but I don't think we had a lot of options other than maybe carving out a bigger chunk of GF 12LP/12LP+ capacity and spinning Polaris one more time. That would have worked out pretty well but we would have had to have known that another mining boom was coming as well.

Going forward there are more options (5nm should be ramped up for a while before 7nm becomes obsolete) so I think we will have a better chance of spreading products across the fab processes more than we could in the last year.

There is a big fear right now amongst PC gamers (windows and Linux alike) that their hobby is increasingly becoming more expensive and niche, something for the rich. And that the USD 200 mainstream GPU will never again be a thing.

Yeah, one thing that nags at me is that while we are addressing that market pretty well via increasingly capable iGPUs an APU doesn't give a solution for someone who only wants to upgrade their GPU right now. Downside is that it seems to be a fairly small market these days and one which was driven more by fab processes driving cost per transistor down and making upgrades attractive (which isn't happening much right now) rather than by a market for new cards.

We do have the 5500 XT in the sub-200 USD market today but IIRC it launched while 580's were still being dumped by both miners and retailers so it seemed expensive at the time despite being both cheaper and faster than the 580 at launch.

It also seems like GPUs by their very nature take a lot of die size and transistors. So obviously when their is a chip shortage it makes more sense for companies like AMD to prioritize CPUs which are more profitable.

Yep, the lower market price per transistor for GPUs has been a challenge for as long as I can remember, and I don't see it changing any time soon (other than mining booms and chip shortages, of course). NVidia worked around it by pushing into the ultra high end, and we worked around it by joining up with a CPU vendor.

That said, having to prioritize fab capacity between CPUs and GPUs is something new - I don't remember it being a big issue until the last year or so.

Fab capacity was always something that had to be managed carefully, and there were times when you were unable to sell as many of a hot product as you would like, but we all planned things out with the fabs far enough in advance that shortages could either be identified and eliminated (by bringing more capacity on line) or worked around (by shifting product schedules).

The last year was different. I had a much longer paragraph typed but "the last year was different" sums it up pretty well

[torsionbar28]

Come to think of it... The high end RX 480 was ~$379 in 2016...

Pretty sure my 4GB Rx 480 was $199 brand new. That's USD.

[perpetually high]

Pretty sure my 4GB Rx 480 was $199 brand new. That's USD.

Yeah, but what kind? Is it the OEM one with just that single fan? I don't think that really compares to an 8GB gaming version from MSI, eVGA, etc.

I got mine for $238 I think it was. Worth. Polaris support on Linux has been incredible as of late. Polished

[torsionbar28]

$380 and they call it 'entry-level gaming gpu'. No, thanks. I'm fine with rx550, it's just enough.

Like the article says: AMD acknowledged that this suggested retail pricing on the RX 6600 XT is driven by the current market conditions and they opted for setting a realistic price versus putting an artificially lower price knowing full well the prices for what other graphics cards are commanding these days and retailers would likely otherwise mark-up the card pricing themselves.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Certainly better than the $490 intel CPU's that retailers are asking $1000+ for.

[idash]

The tricky part is that we are now putting that kind of performance into our integrated GPUs - a 5700G with decent memory is arguably a pretty decent 1080p 30fps gaming system all in one chip for only a bit more than the cost of an equivalent CPU.

There are people who would like to upgrade just the GPU rather than buying an APU, in which case chances are it's not compatible with their old motherboard, so they basically have to upgrade the whole computer, which defeats the purpose of a low-cost upgrade.

Believe it or not, I kept using my old PC with an Intel Q6600 for 12 years, only upgrading the graphics card twice, before I finally managed to build a new one a couple of years ago. And my plan is to do the same thing with this new PC, to use it for as long as possible.

It's a shame how things have evolved in the business, where true entry-level, low-TDP, low-cost graphics cards seem to be a thing of the past now, and it's not just because of the pandemic according to your original post.
There will always be people who would like to have that kind of option, it's just a question of feasibility from the vendor's point of view.

So I guess the only option now for those people is to wait longer until they can afford the costs of new hardware.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply.

[boboviz]

200$ is the correct price for this gpu.

[CochainComplex]

In fairness, if you compare "clearing out" price for the older model against "launched in the middle of a global semiconductor shortage" price for the newer model the upgrade path is always going to be a tough sell.

The other challenge is that price-per-transistor from the fabs used to go down significantly with each new process generation, so GPU vendors could deliver better price performance by moving to newer fab processes. That pretty much stopped happening some time between 14nm and 7nm, so end product price is back to tracking transistor count much more than in the past. Your 580 has ~5.7B transistors IIRC while the 6600XT has 11.1B.

I haven't looked closely at benchmark performance but I suspect the price/performance of the 6600XT at launch is at least as good as the RX580 was at launch ($229 US for 8GB). What is missing is the price/performance improvements that came along for the ride with new fab processes and which became a key part of new product expectations.

The per-transistor pricing trend was already interrupted before the chip shortage hit - there may be some improvements if/when capacity is able to catch up with demand, but the cost of fabs for newer and finer processes is going up so fast that I don't see the old pricing trend returning any time soon.

We may get lucky and find another sweet spot like 14nm where the increase in density (from finer process pitch) outstrips the increase in cost (from more complex fab process and cost of building yet another fab) and allows per-transistor pricing to head down some more, but I don't think we know yet.

For your amusement:

https://www.amazon.ca/Radeon-RX-580-...eon+RX+580+8GB

I do sometimes wonder if we should port the RX580/90 to GF 12LP+ and use that to try to keep the miners fed. The problem is that mining booms never seem to last long enough to have room for a product development cycle, and spending a big pile of money during a mining bust is a tough sell even if that is exactly the strategy recommended for stock market investing.

It is great to have you here and it is always very interesting to see your point of view.

Your argumentation makes sense and as someone with engineering and physics background I can slightly imagine the fabrication issues and the difficulties to make a good price point.

But on the other hand, I have to agree to the high price arguments of fellow posts. I'm a tech nerd and I'm in the lucky position to earn more the the average german. My most expensive card I have ever bought till now is my current Asus Strix 5700XT which I have bought few month before covid chrisis. I have paid around 530€ - I dont regret this purchase. It is a great experience especially under Linux.
But this is my absolute maximum which I'm willing to pay for a graphics card and likeminded nerdy friends even with better salary do think the same.

Now we have semiconductor/electric components shortage + miners + scalpers.
(it is very difficult to get Panasonic POSCAPs these days!! - need them for a hobby project)
Prices are way over the top. I know some people they bought gfx cards at the current price point but only because there was no chance for their yearly vacation and they saved more money because of homeoffice (less expensive food and no travel expenses). But this is more or less a "happens once" thing due to the circumstances.
Sure you will always find someone who is even willing to pay 20k for a gamer card. Like people willing to pay 3.5M or more for a car.

But this are usually niche products. What happens now we have only Nvidia and AMD in the gamer gfx cards market.
Entry price is 379$ - this is like the only cars manufacturers available are Porsche and Aston Martin and the entry model is starting with 60k€*. Might be a great deal but its absurd. Where is this going to end?

*I know we have rather powerfull iGPU's but none the less the gap between good iGPU and entry nextgen gfx is still quite big...edit:just figured out you wrote that too

[piorunz]

200$ is the correct price for this gpu.

Unfortunately, there is something called inflation. This card, and any other card, will only get more expensive in the future thanks to central banks efforts to rob us off of our wealth.