AMD announced the long-anticipated Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card at CES 2024 this morning, offering an important GPU option for gamers on a budget and fixing the one major criticism we had of its non-XT predecessor, the AMD Radeon RX 7600.
The new 7600 XT, which will go on sale on January 24, has essentially the same hardware as the RX 7600 (which is currently at the top of our best cheap graphics cards list), but with one absolutely critical difference: it comes loaded with 16GB VRAM, something that is absolutely essential if you’re looking to play any of the best PC games at any resolution higher than 1080p.
It’s not just the additional VRAM that the new RX 7600 XT is going to bring to the best budget gaming PCs, however. The 7600 XT is also getting some higher clock speeds to help get more performance out thaks to a higher TGP of 190W, up from 165W for the RX 7600. The RX 7600 XT is going to come with a game clock speed of 2.47GHz (up from 2.25GHz for the 7600), and a boost clock of 2.76GHz (up from 2.66GHz).
One other thing to note is that there won’t be an AMD reference card for this release, so you’ll only be able to buy it from third-party AIB partners like PowerColor, XFX, Gigabyte, Asus, and others. This also means there won’t be an AMD card always selling at MSRP to keep AIBs honest, but given the strong pricing of this generation of AMD cards, we expect that the RX 7600 XT will be similarly well-priced.
We don’t know yet what the RX 7600 XT will sell for when it is released on January 24, but given the RX 7600’s MSRP of $269.99, it’s very likely that the 7600 XT will likewise sell for under $300. We’ll keep you updated an pricing as we learn more in the coming weeks.
AMD continues to deliver for everyday gamers
While AMD might still blow the RX 7600 XT launch with a terrible launch price, it wouldn’t just be highly unusual for AMD to misprice its graphics card the way Nvidia has this generation; everything we’ve seen from AMD this generation points to Team Red having a better read on where the GPU market is and acting appropriately.
That’s not to say that AMD’s GPUs aren’t still expensive (its flagship RDNA 3 card, the RX 7900 XTX, sells for $1,000, after all), and if anything, AMD undercut some of its stronger cards by pricing them too close to their next higher sibling, making these cards less of a value given the extra performance on offer for a marginally higher investment (i.e, the RX 7900 XT and RX 7700 XT).
But these missteps pale in comparison to Nvidia’s RTX 4080 debacle, where Team Green’s most important mainstream GPU went on sale for nearly twice the price of its predecessor, and only a few hundred dollars less than the absolutely incredible RTX 4090. This pricing strategy absolutely tanked demand for the card, and RTX 4080 sales have been fairly anaemic as a result.
AMD might have made several mistakes this generation, but this wasn’t one of them, and the incredibly well-priced AMD RX 7800 XT has been reportedly flying off the shelves as a result.
Now, with offering a 1080p graphics card with higher power, faster clocks, and double the VRAM of the RX 7600, AMD is primed to secure a major victory as we come to the end of this generation of GPUs, and it’s unquestionably a good thing for gamers. Now, of course, we'll need to wait and see how well the graphics card actually performs, but we won’t have to wait too long to find out.
Check out our CES 2024 hub for all the latest news from the show as it happens. We'll be covering everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI, so stick with us for the big stories. And don’t forget to follow us on TikTok for the latest from the CES show floor!
