Better Cache & VRAM Latency Are Found in AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU Than RX 7900 XTX

Last weekend, Chips and Cheese published their extremely thorough analysis of AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 GPU. Jiray, a team member, decided to actually purchase the card since a sample unit wasn’t provided for study. The Radeon RX 7600 received a largely unfavorable reception upon release at the end of last month, thus the site’s architectural investigation of this graphics processing unit discovered a few excellent characteristics. The Navi 33 XL GPU in the Radeon RX 7600 is a monolithic processor, outperforming chiplet-based architectures used in the much more potent (and expensive) Radeon RX 7900-series cards in terms of cache and memory latency performance.

When the RDNA 3 Navi 33 die’s reduced footprint is taken into account, it appears to outperform the flagship card. When compared to the previously announced sister, Chips and Cheese reports that AMD’s RX 7900 XTX requires up to 58% more time to access and extract data from its Infinity Cache pool. When reading data from the onboard GDDR6 VRAM chiplets, the RX 7600 GPU has 15% shorter VRAM latencies than the RX 7900 XTX. When comparing current high-end and mid-range GPUs to equivalent models from the generation before, the review finds a wider discrepancy between them: “With RDNA 3, the difference is notably significant. With RDNA 2, the RX 6900 XT’s Infinity Cache latency was 151.57 ns as opposed to 130 ns on the RX 6600 XT, resulting in a 16.5% latency penalty for the larger GPU. According to Chips and Cheese, the Navi 31 from AMD’s “chiplet configuration may be causing higher latency.”