ARC A 750 VS RX 6600: Who wins the $200 GPU Battle

We have only a few choices for a $200 GPU, except for the AMD RX 6600 and Intel ARC A 750. The cheapest AMD RX 7600 8GB model is around $260, while the 16Gb XT variant is way more expensive. At the same price point, we also have the RTX 3050 8GB/6GB graphics card from mighty Nvidia. But including the RTX 3050 in this comparison is worthless. Because the RTX 3050 is an absolute joke compared to an ARC A 750 or RX 6600’s performance. Probably no one will consider an RTX 3050 over a RX 6600 unless diehard Nvidia fanboys. Many reviewers consider Nvidia’s entry-level RTX 3050 as trash. 

Nvidia is the GPU cartel, according to AMD’s former Radeon chief Scott Herkelman, as they have the majority of GPU market share. Nvidia remains unbeatable for high-end and upper-mid-range GPUs. Moreover, their driver optimization is far better than AMD and Intel, specifically for professional 3D software. Sadly, Nvidia has no competitive graphics card in the $200 price range. 

Did we miss something? Yes, the newly launched ARC A 580 is another great competitor for RX 6600 at the given price point. ARC A 750 costs a few dollars more than the cheapest RX 6600 at the time of writing. We’ll publish a separate article for RX 6600 vs ARC A580 battle soon. Let’s see how the ARC A750’s current 10% extra pricing justifies the difference. However, due to the GPU price volatility, we get the Arc A750 and RX 6600 at the same price.

AMD RX 6600 8GB: Specifications and features

The Radeon RX 6600 has aged a couple of years now. This excellent GPU launched in 2021 with a $330 MSRP aimed at mainstream 1080P gaming segments. Surprisingly, the RX 6600 still delivers decent frame rates in demanding games and has become very competitive after several price cuts. The RX 6600 is based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture and contains 1792 shader cores, 112 TMUS, 64 ROPS, and 28 RT cores. The graphics engine runs at 2044 MHz with a boost frequency of 2491 MHz. 

Back to the specifications, the RX 6600 houses an 8GB 14 Gbps DDR6 VRAM using a 128-bit memory interface that results in a total of 224GB/S bandwidth, almost half the bandwidth of the ARC A 750 we are comparing here. The RX 6600 uses an 8X PCIe 4.0 interface, but the ARC A 750 has a full X16 PCIE 4.0 interface advantage with faster DDR6 memory. The narrow 128-bit memory buses with fewer PCIe lanes helped AMD RX 6600 to be a power-efficient GPU. It has a 132W TBP rating and needs only an 8-pin power connector, whereas the Intel ARC A 750 has a massive 225W power rating. 

RDNA 2 is AMD’s first GPU architecture that supports hardware-based ray tracing acceleration, and we have 28 RT cores inside the RX 6600. Sadly, AMD’s ray-tracing technology isn’t that great and still performs terribly in most RT-supported games. They can’t match even Intel’s ray tracing while Nvida’s RT is miles away. However, RT performance won’t be an issue for RX 6600 as probably no gamers enable RT settings on these entry-level GPUs.  

This card doesn’t have AVI encoding support, which is a disadvantage. AMD introduced AVI encoding support in their RX 7600 series, but Intel’s ARC is superior in productivity. Moreover, Intel’s card benefited from hyper-encoding when paired with Intel’s CPU’s integrated graphics. A lot of hackntoshers are using RX 6600 for their native MacOS support. However, the Hackintoshing path is uncertain as Apple already moved to its custom silicon. 

Intel ARC A 750: Specifications and features. 

The ARC A 750 is a relatively new GPU compared to the RX 6600. It is a cutdown version of Intel’s flagship ARC A 770 but enjoys the same 256-bit memory bus with full X16 lanes PCIe 4.0 bandwidth as the flagship ARC Alchemist.  On paper, the ARC A 750 offers much better hardware specification than an AMD RX 6600, which contains 3584 shading units, 224 TMUs, 112 ROPS, and 28 RT cores. While the 28 RT cores remain the same on both GPUS, we have almost double core counts along with TMUS and ROPS on the ARC A 750. In addition to that, ARC A 750 houses 448 tensor cores for AI processing, while the RX 6600 has none of the tensor core goodness. 

Surprisingly, Intel’s first-gen GPUs beats AMD in ray tracing. We have mentioned AMD’s horrible RT implementation earlier. The RX 6600 is nowhere close to an ARC A 750 in real-time ray tracing test, even though both cards have the same 28 RT cores. The ARC A 750 is a power-hungry GPU due to its higher PCIE lane and 256 memory bus. This GPU has a 225W total board power design, and depending on the model, a 2X 8-pin or 8-pin+6-pin connector is needed.  This card has native AVI encoding support, which makes ARC A 750 a great productivity GPU. 

It has been around 18 months since Intel released the ARC A 750. We have seen that Intel aggressively pushes driver updates to fix the initial driver issue with DX9 and DX11 games in ARC graphics cards. Their desperate attempts benefited ARC users heavily as common driver issues are gone, and Intel promises to continue optimization to solve the remaining issues soon.

Not only the RX 6600, but ARC A 750 also started threatening more expensive Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 XT in many titles as Intel kept optimizing its driver. The ARC A 750 will get a longer driver support lifespan for being a newer GPU than the RX 6600.

RX 6600 VS ARC A 750: Synthetic Benchmark

Test system:CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming WiFi, RAM: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo 32GB (2x16GB), SSD: SAMSUNG 990 PRO Cooler: DeepCool AK620 Digital

Let’s begin the synthetic battle with the Geekbench 6 Onen CL test between Arc A 750 and RX 6600. In the first test, Intel’s ARC A 750 wins over AMD RX 6600 by a 27% margin for being 10% more expensive. AMD Radeon hit the 75K mark, while ARC A 750 smashed the chart with a 96K result.  

The scenario repeats on the 3D MARK Wildlife Time spy test, ARC A 750 took leads using the paper hardware advantages.

In the 3D Mark wildlife time spy test, ARC A 750 scores 31670 whereas AMD Radeon RX 6600 has only 23975 points. Let’s check the Novabench test.

Again, Arc A 750 wins in Novabench’s 3D Graphics test, but the performance difference is only 12%. The next benchmark is Unigine Superposition.

We can see ARC A 750 humiliated the RX 6600 in the Unigine Superposition benchmark by 76% percent faster. The newest ARC A 750 has 7670 scores in the superposition test, while RX 6600 struggles to get 4365. Move to the MSI Kombustor test.

Again, AMD RX 6600 was defeated by ARC A 750 with an insane difference. With 1080P preset, RX 6600 hit 34 fps but ARC A 750 pushes the boundaries to a massive 71 FPS in MSI Kombustor. That’s enough for the synthetic test. Now let’s check the gaming performance.

ARC A 750 VS AMD RADEON RX 6600: Gaming Benchmark

We have started with Resident Evil 4 – a classic survival horror masterpiece.

The ARC A 750 and RX 6600 both have playable frame rates at 1080P and 1440P resolution without any upscaling. ARC A 750 wins as expected, but AMD RX 6600 isn’t far behind. 

Dying Light 2: Stay Human is a graphic incentive game and ARC A 750 continues to push its muscle power in this title. At 1080P resolution, ARC A 750 hits 82 FPS with a respectable 1% low of 70 FPS. The Older RX 6600 accordingly 70FPS and 58 FPS.

At 1440P resolution, ARC A 750 is very close to hitting the desired 60FPS frame rate, while 1% low is also impressive 47. AMD’s RX 6600 can push 45 FPS at 1440P, and 1% low is 34FPS. 

Rainbow Six Seige isn’t a disaster for ARC GPUS anymore. The ARC 750’s latest driver can outperform the RX 6600 at 1080P and 1440P resolution. 

Sadly ARC A 750’s latest driver can’t keep up in Starfield. The game was completely unplayable at launch with ARC A 750, even after several updates it remains terrible for ARC A 750. AMD RX 6600 has a clear lead in this title.

Intel overcame its broken DX9 and DX 11 implementation in most games. However, modern Starfield shocked us. Intel promises to work with Starfield’s developer Bedesha Software closely. So far, we’ve not seen any significant improvement.

ARC A 750 VS RX 6600: Productivity Benchmark. 

AMD has a bad track of performance in 3D software like Blende against its longtime rival Nvidia. Let’s see how the RX 6600 fights against Intel’s ARC A 750.

Despite being a new player in the GPU market, the Intel ARC A 750 crushes the RX 6600 on the Blender chart with a 104% performance gain. We use the H264 encoding in our video export test in Adobe Premiere Pro as the RX 6600 doesn’t have native AVI encoding support.

Intel Arc A 750 takes less than a minute to render the 4K clip, while AMD RX 6600 suffers from a narrow bandwidth and exceeds 3 minutes for the same clip. Intel ARC A 750 is simply the best GPU over RX 6600 in the productivity perspective. Even though we didn’t include all productivity benchmark charts in this article, ARC A 750 performs significantly better than RX 6600 in After Effects GPU score and other productive applications. In the meantime, you can also check the ARC A770 vs Nvidia 4060 battle in the $300 range.

Conclusion: 

Unless you’ve got a question about the ARC A 750’s extra electricity bills, Intel ARC A 750 is the clear winner in synthetic, gaming, and productivity benchmarks. While the gaming performance difference is competitive, Intel’s ARC A 750 beats the RX 6600 heavily in productivity applications. 

However, AMD’s RX 6600 isn’t bad for those who care only about gaming. Intel ARC A 750’s 500W PSU requirement is relatively high, while the RX 6600 is more power efficient and smoothly runs on 400W PSU with an efficient processor.