Skip to main content

AMD’s RX 7600 XT might be dead on arrival — but there’s a catch

The RX 7600 XT graphics card on a pink background.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

AMD’s new RX 7600 XT graphics card isn’t off to a great start, at least according to sales data shared by 3DCenter. The new video card launched on Wednesday alongside Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super, and even with a relatively poor reception, Nvidia sold nearly 10 times as many graphics cards as AMD did in a sampling at a German retailer.

There are a few caveats to that, however. 3DCenter takes data for the number of sales from Mindfactory, a German hardware retailer, 12 to 14 hours after release. According to the data, weaker GPUs like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 sell considerably less than more powerful GPUs like the RTX 4070 Super and RX 7800 XT. It indicates some bias in this data, perhaps showing that this retailer caters to a crowd willing to spend more money on a graphics card.

Nvidia typically leads AMD in overall sales, but that’s not exactly what we see play out here. According to the data, AMD’s RX 7800 XT sold around 400 units in the short window after release, and that’s one of the best-reviewed graphics cards of the year (read our RX 7800 XT review). By comparison, Nvidia’s competing RTX 4070 sold just over 300 units.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Although this data is just from one retailer and shows some clear leanings toward higher-end GPUs, it would make sense if the RX 7600 XT isn’t selling well. As you can read in our RX 7600 XT review, the card barely moves the performance needle compared to the base RX 7600, and it comes with a 22% price hike.

Radeon logo on the RX 7600 XT graphics card.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The biggest claim to fame for the GPU is 16GB of VRAM, which is unheard of for a graphics card that costs $330. Unfortunately, that extra VRAM only makes a difference in a small subset of games like The Last of Us Part One, which hog an unnecessary amount of VRAM. In many titles, the RX 7600 XT offers identical performance to the RX 7600, which makes sense considering both graphics cards hold identical core counts.

As for Nvidia, the Mindfactory data shows the RTX 4070 Ti Super selling considerably less than the base RTX 4070 Ti, moving around 30% fewer units. This is likely due to the awkward position of this GPU compared to Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4080 Super, which you can read about in our RTX 4070 Ti Super review.

The latest batch of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia is an attempt to improve the designs we saw over the past year, fixing either specs or pricing issues. That could explain why we’re seeing lower sales overall — after all, PC gamers who wanted to upgrade this generation have likely already picked up a graphics card.

Editors' Recommendations

Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
AMD’s GPUs had a bigger year in 2023 than you might realize
AMD's RX 7700 XT in a test bench.

It's safe to say that 2023 turned out to be a good year for the discrete graphics cards market. According to the latest data, both AMD and Nvidia saw an increase in add-in board (AIB) GPU shipments in the final quarter of 2023, and the year-to-year gains are also massive. While Nvidia still dominates the market, AMD's share is climbing steadily, and Intel remains in the shadows.

Today's round of market insights comes from Jon Peddie Research (JPR), and it's all about discrete GPUs. According to the analyst firm, discrete GPU shipments increased by 6.8% over the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to the previous quarter. This is above the less-than-impressive 10-year average of -0.6%. The year-to-year gains are even more impressive, though, as JPR notes a 32% increase compared to the final quarter of 2022, with a total of 9.5 million GPUs shipped (as opposed to 8.9 million units at the end of 2022).

Read more
Nvidia is the ‘GPU cartel,’ says former AMD Radeon manager
A hand holding the RTX 4090 GPU.

AMD's former senior vice president and general manager of Radeon has come out with some strong words against Nvidia. Scott Herkelman called Nvidia "the GPU cartel" in response to a story from the Wall Street Journal in which Nvidia's customers claim that it delays GPU shipments in retaliation for those customers shopping with other suppliers.

The accusation in question comes from Jonathan Ross, CEO of AI chip startup Groq, who said, "a lot of people that we meet with say that if Nvidia were to hear that we were meeting, they would disavow it. The problem is you have to pay Nvidia a year in advance, and you may get your hardware in a year, or it may take longer, and it's, 'Aw shucks, you're buying from someone else, and I guess it's going to take a little longer.'"

Read more
This might be why AMD’s FSR 3 isn’t picking up momentum
Combat in the game Nightingale.

AMD's platform-agnostic FSR 3 is a great feature, but months after releasing, it's only available in a small list of titles. Now, we might finally have a clue as to why.

Developers of the upcoming open world survival game Nightingale posted a development update stating that it was removing FSR 3 due to crashes. "After reviewing crash data from the Server Stress Test, a significant number of them seemed to point to FSR3 integrations, whether or not users had the setting turned on," a prelaunch update post reads.

Read more