AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Linux Performance
AMD announced back during CES the Radeon RX 7600 XT as a $329 USD graphics card for 1080p/1440p gaming. Today that card goes on sale and the review embargo has lifted. Here is an initial look at the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT performance under Linux with AMD's open-source driver stack.
For those wanting to handle slightly more demanding games as well as future titles, the Radeon RX 7600 XT is a step-up over the existing Radeon RX 7600 thanks to having 16GB of GDDR6 video memory rather than 8GB. Additionally, the game clock has been boosted from 2.25GHz to 2.47GHz and the boost clock is up to 2.76GHz from 2.66GHz. In turn the total board power is up to 190 Watts compared to 165 Watts on the non-XT model. The Radeon RX 7600 XT is carrying a launch price of around $329 USD compared to $269 USD for the Radeon RX 7600 8GB graphics card.
The Radeon RX 7600 XT has the same 32 compute units and ray accelerators as the RX 7600 as well as the 64 AI accelerators and 2048 stream processors. Plus all of the other standard AMD RDNA3 graphics features like AV1 hardware encoding.
Having the Radeon RX 7600 XT with 16GB of video memory though does put the Radeon RX 7700 XT in a bit of a weird spot due to it only having 12GB of video memory.
For this launch-day review on Phoronix, AMD and XFX sent over the XFX QICK 309 Radeon RX 7600 XT 16GB graphics card. The XFX QICK 309 has a tri-fan setup and looks fairly similar to the Radeon RX 7600 QICK 308 model.
The XFX Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card has three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI. For the 190 Watt total board power rating are two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors.
It shouldn't be surprising given AMD's trajectory in the Radeon open-source GPU support over recent years and the maturity of the rest of the RDNA3 GPU line-up, but there is fully open-source and upstream support for the Radeon RX 7600 XT for launch day. On the likes of Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora Workstation 39 with software updates is out-of-the-box support for the Radeon RX 7600 XT 16GB graphics card.
For those curious, and since it's been a while since having my hands on an XFX graphics card, XFX does list "Linux" support on the product packaging for this Radeon RX 7600 XT... Then again it's been fairly common to see across AMD's AIB partners but always fun seeing Linux mentions.
As is usually the case, the newer Linux kernel and Mesa you feel comfortable running, typically the better performance and features. For this launch-day testing I was testing all the GPUs atop Linux 6.7 with Mesa 24.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA for a fresh Linux gaming experience on the very latest drivers.
For those on an older Linux distribution like the enterprise distributions, AMD is making the Radeon Software for Linux 23.40 driver available today with support for the Radeon RX 7600 XT. Via the standard Radeon Software for Linux packaged drivers is going to be the RX 7600 XT support if unable/unwilling to upgrade your kernel or Mesa manually.