What just happened? After months of rumors, leaks, and speculation, AMD has just officially announced the Radeon RX 6600 XT, describing the card as a "1080p" beast. It launches on August 11, which lines up with reports from earlier this month, and has an MSRP of $379---whether you'll find one for that price remains to be seen.

AMD isn't making any Radeon RX 6600 XT reference cards, leaving it to AIB (add-in board) partners such as ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX and Yeston. Reports claim there should be better availability than what we've previously seen with new graphics card launches, but don't hold your breath.

Most of what we've heard about the RX 6600 XT over the last few months has proved accurate: it features the Navi 23 GPU found in the Radeon Pro W6600/M and RX 6600M mobile card, though it uses the full die, which means 32 Compute Units (CUs) for a total of 2,048 streaming processors (GPU cores). That's just eight CUs fewer than the Navi 22-based Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Other RX 6600 XT specs include 32 ray accelerators, 9.7 TFLOPS of FP32 compute, a 128-bit memory interface with 8GB of GDDR6 16Gbps memory, 256GBps of bandwidth, 32MB of Infinity Cache, and a 160W TDP. AMD recommends a PSU of at least 500W, and the cards require an 8-pin connector.

As with the other RX 6000 line, the Radeon 6600 XT boasts some impressive speeds---a game clock of 2,359MHz and a boost clock of 2,589MHz.

AMD is positioning the Radeon RX 6600 XT as a direct competitor to the RTX 3060 12GB when it comes to 1080p gaming. The company's charts, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, claim up to 15% higher FPS performance than its green rival, with Horizon Zero Dawn the only game where it can't beat the RTX 3060.

AMD says the Radeon RX 6600 XT also has the edge in esports titles. Only Valorant runs marginally faster on the RTX 3060. The company does note that it has enabled Smart Access Memory (SAM) on the RX 6600 XT and Resizable BAR on the RTX 3060 for all these gaming tests.

The upcoming Radeon card also offers up to 1.7x more performance compared to the previous generation cards.

With the launch just over a week and a half away, we'll soon find out if the RX 6600 XT lives up to AMD's claims of price, performance, and availability.