Hands On With The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT

After the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced last week and ahead of the retail availability next week, today AMD's "unboxing embargo" has expired for this new RDNA2 graphics card focused on delivering high 1080p frame rates. The card we have been testing out under Linux is the ASRock Phantom Gaming RX 6600 XT.

With today's embargo lift just being around the product unboxing, we aren't yet allowed to talk about the performance of the Radeon RX 6600 XT but can at least show the card... And needless to say, AMD wouldn't have sent out this graphics card to us if the Radeon RX 6600 XT wasn't working under Linux or had major problems. So that alone speaks to the Linux support, but of course more on that next week.

As a reminder, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is launching at $379 USD given today's graphics card climate and is focused on delivering superior 1080p performance. The RX 6600 XT based on the earlier announcement should be competing with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 series and deliver much greater uplift than the RX 5600 XT or RX 5700 Navi cards.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux support is under the "Dimgrey Cavefish" codename. The open-source Dimgrey Cavefish work dates back to September 2020 and with the kernel-side AMDGPU driver premiered in Linux 5.11 and has seen improvements in succeeding kernels. Likewise, Mesa 20.3 added Dimgrey Cavefish with RDNA2 / Dimgrey improvements across the Mesa 21.x releases. But regardless what version of the Linux kernel and Mesa you are on, AMD has been in good rhythm of releasing new Radeon Software for Linux packaged drivers around launch day for supporting new GPUs on enterprise Linux distributions. Long story short, you can expect Linux driver support for the RX 6600 XT with all the details next week.

Learn more on 11 August and stay tuned for the Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.