AMD Radeon RX 6600 Linux Performance

Today AMD is officially launching the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card as a trimmed down model from the Radeon RX 6600 XT that launched back in August. This new (non-XT) model has a suggested price of $329 USD and here is a look at how well this RDNA2 graphics card is performing under Linux.

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card features 28 compute units, 1792 stream processors, a 2044MHz game clock with up to 2491MHz boost clock, 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, and 32MB infinity cache.

The Radeon RX 6600 has a 132 Watt boar power rating meaning just a single external 8-pin PCI Express power connector is required. AMD is reporting the suggested price of the RX 6600 starts at $329 USD, but we'll see how the retail pricing ultimately plays out given the current economic conditions and how broad the availability will be over the days to come.

AMD's briefing talked up the Radeon RX 6600 as being 23% faster than the generation-old NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card on average. The Radeon RX 6600 with Smart Access Memory is also delivering sizable generational uplift from the Radeon RX 5600 XT.

Meanwhile the Radeon RX 6600 is shown at least under Windows to be running neck-and-neck and trading blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 but offering significantly better performance per Watt.

Given the recent launch of Microsoft Windows 11, AMD was promoting the Radeon RX 6600 as offering Windows 11 support at launch for this graphics card. But most important to Linux users is knowing that the RX 6600 works on Linux along the existing Dimgrey Cavefish driver path. If you are running a recent Linux kernel and Mesa, you should be good to go for the hardware support. Of course, the newer the kernel and Mesa will generally mean more performance and features. In my RX 6600 benchmarking under Linux so far it's been with the Linux 5.15 Git and Mesa 21.3-devel but Linux 5.14 and Mesa 21.2 was also playing fine.