AMD has announced its new RX 6600 graphics card. This entry-level 1080p GPU starts at $329 (depending on configuration) and is ideal for budget-conscious gamers, with a variety of configurations available from board partners including MSI, Gigabyte, Sapphire, and Asus.

The RX 6600 is similar to the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT released over the summer, but with less performance: 28 compute units, 1792 stream processors, 32MB of AMD's Infinity Cache, up to 8GB of GDDR6 vRAM The system is designed to be used in a wide range of applications. Power consumption is 132 watts and can be paired with a 450-watt power supply; AMD says the RX 6600 is on average 23% faster than the Nvidia RTX 2060. It also supports AMD's FidelityFX super resolution upsampling technology. High-resolution monitors can get better image quality without affecting performance, with many games displaying 60 frames per second or more.

As The Verge noted, many of AMD's GPU board partners are not taking full advantage of the RX 6600's power savings, at least at this time. All graphics cards offered by board partners occupy at least two slots in the case and require an 8-pin PCIe power connector. Despite this, the graphics card is solid for a power-hungry gaming rig.

The RX 6600 is an attractive card for those on a tight budget. However, it will be hard to find at MSRP due to the ongoing worldwide chip shortage. Having to pay (potentially) exorbitant prices negates the point of purchasing a low-budget graphics card in the first place; AMD is aware of this situation and told The Verge: "We've been working with AMD for years to make the RX 6600 more affordable.

"AMD is working closely with board partners, OEMs, SIs, and retail/retail partners to ensure that as many graphics cards as possible are available to gamers, and we expect a healthy supply of AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics cards at launch.

This is an optimistic claim, and we do not know if AMD can make it; even AMD CEO Lisa Su has suggested that the chip shortage could last until late 2022.

We will have to wait and see how things play out.

In the meantime, AMD is rumored to be releasing a less powerful and more affordable Radeon RX 6500 XT GPU, which could appear as early as January; according to a post on Videocardz, the RX 6500 XT will appear in January and the Radeon RX 6400 will appear in March. [Both cards will feature 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and the less expensive RX 6400 will likely not need to be connected to a PSU thanks to its sub-75W power consumption. Earlier rumors indicated that the RX 6500 XT would have a 1,024-core Navi 24 GPU and the RX 6400 would have a 768-core Navi 24 GPU.