AMD's new Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card will be released in mid-August with a modest performance spec and $379 price tag, which will compete directly with Nvidia's $329 GeForce RTX 3060.

AMD made this announcement at ChinaJoy this week, confirming long circulating rumors that the company will release the Radeon RX 6600 XT in August. The final recommended price of $379 for this mid-range GPU is a bit cheaper than the rumored $399, but given the ongoing chip shortage and the volatile GPU market, we're not sure how easy it will be to find an RX 6600 XT at this price.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT's price tag makes it a direct competitor to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, answering the question of whether AMD's latest addition to the Radeon 6000 series is worth its price. Let's dig into the numbers to find out.

AMD has set a starting price of US$379 for the Radeon RX 6600 XT, making it the new low-end of the Radeon 6000 series GPUs, following the Radeon RX 6700 XT (US$479) and Radeon RX 6800 XT (US$649).

The $379 price tag makes the Radeon RX 6600 XT about $50 more expensive than Nvidia's mid-tier GeForce RTX 3060, but knowing where you can buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 without paying a ridiculously inflated price is difficult to find.

AMD has said that Radeon RX 6600 XT cards from manufacturers such as Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI should begin hitting the market on August 11.

By that time, laptop and desktop PCs from brands such as Alienware, HP, MSI, and Lenovo should begin to include the RX 6600 XT.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is a (relatively) affordable card with affordable specs and, according to AMD, is targeted at people who want excellent performance playing games at 1080p. If you want to get the best performance at 1440p or 4K, the very high performance (and very expensive) Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT are still the AMD cards to buy if you can find them.

As you can see from the table above, the RX 6600 XT has decent specs to begin with, although it is relegated to the low end of the Radeon 6000 XT series. Of course, it should still be able to run most games at 1080p just fine, and with GPUs becoming harder to find these days, any new card is a welcome addition to the market. [The 6600 XT supports all the key features of the Radeon 6000 series, including DirectX Raytracing support for immersive real-time lighting, shadows, and reflections, making these Radeon GPUs competitive with Nvidia's RTX cards These Radeon GPUs can compete with Nvidia's RTX cards. Developers can also take advantage of AMD FidelityFX for balancing fidelity and frame rates, and Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which dynamically adjusts in-game shading to improve performance without much sacrifice in visual quality.

This new technology will allow for the use of a more dynamic shading system.

We can't say for sure how well this new RX 6600 XT card will perform compared to the Nvidia GeForce 3060 and 3060 Ti, at least until we see third-party performance benchmarks, but AMD test data provided to the press shows that a system with a 6600 XT outperforms (in terms of raw frame rates) the same system with a GeForce 3060 in many games.

AMD states that the Radeon RX 6600 XT is truly focused on delivering superior performance at 1080p, which is backed by modest specs and price.

Given how crazy the current GPU market is, it is exciting to see a new card enter the market. However, it remains to be seen if the RX 6600 XT will offer significant value to those craving a new graphics card. At this point, we expect this to be the last big card release in the 6000 series before AMD announces a new family of GPUs (probably branded the 700 series) based on the next-generation RDNA 3 architecture in 2022.