Folding Forum

The RX 6600 (not RX 6600 XT), is a new 'budget' GPU released by AMD, with a purchase price of around $330, and a performance falling between a 2060 and a 2060 Super.
Considering that the 2060 is now over 3 years old, and released at $300, but now costs closer to $440 and up, it might be the new budget king for folding!

It needs to be tested in actual folding performance before we can say that it's a good buy for folding or other types of compute workloads. There are some issues with performance with AMD drivers for some people, and AMD cards also lack the kind of support that Nvidia has given to Folding@Home (with hands-on optimization work for the CUDA folding cores).

Edit: The driver problems are so bad that F@H has had to exclude AMD from some of its projects. There are cases where it runs fine on an outdated driver, but runs like molasses on the current AMD driver.

gunnarre wrote:It needs to be tested in actual folding performance before we can say that it's a good buy for folding or other types of compute workloads. There are some issues with performance with AMD drivers for some people, and AMD cards also lack the kind of support that Nvidia has given to Folding@Home (with hands-on optimization work for the CUDA folding cores).

Edit: The driver problems are so bad that F@H has had to exclude AMD from some of its projects. There are cases where it runs fine on an outdated driver, but runs like molasses on the current AMD driver.

Yes, to be clear, I have a Radeon 6600xt. IE., the same chip this new one is (navi23), only not having some cores disabled.

I'm getting about 700k-800k PPD on it.

In the same system, with a Geforce 1650 (Tu117, GDDR6 ...note the GDDR6, that's important!), I was getting ~650k PPD. Yes, the Radeon 6600xt is technically higher, but...the card costs twice as much, and uses more than twice as much power (75w TDP vs 160w). All to get from 650k to (sometimes) 800k-ish. EDIT: And it's worth pointing out, the Radeon IS vastly more powerful. Pick your gaming benchmark, it crushes the 1650 like a bug. Hell, 3dMark11 'extreme' graphics at 4k resolution in this box? 1186 for the Geforce, 3956 for the Radeon. Folding on the same system? 650k for the Geforce 800k-ish for the Radeon.

AMD's drivers are just in a bad state, no way around that. Common advice on the forums is to just roll back to the 21.3.2 drivers, which were not AS bad, but...none of these new Radeons can run those, as they didn't exist when that driver was out, and so aren't supported by it.

(Now, if you want the card for GAMING, then sure - they work fine for that. But not Folding.)

The 6600 is going to be much more power efficient.
Though experiences like XanderF is important for the community to know.
I'm really hoping someday, AMD GPUs will work just as well as Nvidia GPUs.

For right now, I am of the opinion that when I can afford to upgrade the shared Ryzen 3 (3200G) system, to using a 3950X or 5950X CPU, that will be done. As I no longer have faith that if I were to use DDU to clean my GPU drivers on that system, and install the more current WHQL certified stable drivers for Win10, that my performance with F@H will not suffer--especially w/the AMD iGPU I'm using now.

Keeping in mind that I will be looking to put at a minimum, an NVidia GTX 16xx or RTX card on it too.

Paul

I can't complain my 6600xt routinely hits around 1million ppd if all I'm doing is web browsing. I've updated the drivers since the fix with no issues currently using 22.10.1 on Win11 pro. I've been contributing stats to folding.lar.systems since the weather got cold enough to resume folding.

AMD's OpenCL performance on linux seems to be worse than windows for now. Hopefully soonish the Final HIP Platform implementation for AMD GPUs on ROCm #3338 will become a reality. Also Rusticl is rapidly becoming viable if you saw todays report at Phoronix. Fun times ahead after being relatively stagnate for so long.

Maybe for gaming and folding it makes sense, but for folding alone it seems to still be at a premium price compared to the Nvidia options. After all the driver issues I honestly didn't even look at any AMD GPUs when I finally decided to grab something with the post COVID prices coming down. That long term lack of support really made me think twice, even if pricing was comparable.

I haven't seen any folding numbers on the non XT here yet, but the XT seems to be getting beat in both initial price and efficiency of points per watt. It might be a great choice if gaming is in the mix along with folding.