Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. Right now the XFX MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black is the only 6600 XT that we have to compare. But I’m especially curious to see how it compares to last generations 5600 XT, 5700 XT, and of course the RTX 3060 so I will be focusing on those especially at 1080p and 1440p resolutions when possible.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The XFX MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black did well in the first Fire Strike test, the performance setting where it came in at 28481 and just behind the RTX 3060 Ti. This was well ahead of the RX 5700 XT as well. On the extreme detail, we see it drop a little down the list but was still just behind the 1080 Ti which is still a powerful card. The 6600 XT was 628 points ahead of the 5700 XT and the RTX 30360 was far down the chart here. Then for the ultra detail setting the 6600 XT dropped a touch more and this time was right with the overclocked RX 5700 XT.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. For the Time Spy tests, the Nvidia cards do a lot better than on Fire Stike so you see the 6600 XT drop down a little farther in the chart but it still does well. It came in below the 2070 SUPER and above the 1080 Ti. This was 663 points or a 7.4% improvement over the 5700 XT and 9% over the overclocked RTX 3060’s! For Time Spy Extreme the XFX MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black was below the 2070 SUPER and again above the 1080 Ti. The RTX 3060’s were much closer on this test but still 3.3% behind.
I also took a look at ray tracing performance using 3DMark’s Port Royal benchmark now that Radeon cards have support. The XFX MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black came in at 4446 points which is behind the original RTX 2070 and above the RTX 2060 and over 12% behind the RTX 3060.
The last test was using the Unigine based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with medium detail and again at 1080p with the extreme detail setting. In the extreme detail setting the XFX MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black came in behind the 2070 SUPER and right with the Radeon VII. This put it out in front of the RTX 3060’s by a good margin and 603 points over the 5700 XT as well.
