Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail) vs AMD Radeon RX 6600

Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail)

The Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail) is a low-end integrated Bay Trail graphics card found in certain Atom models (Z3770), nettops (J2850) and notebook SoCs (N3510). It supports DirectX 11 and is based on the Ivy Bridge GPU. Clock rates and shader cores, however, are considerably lower.

Compared to Ivy Bridge, which offers either 6 or 16 Execution Units, the HD Graphics (Bay Trail) comes with only 4 EUs. The core clock is significantly lower as well. Depending on the specific model, the maximum Turbo Boost is 896 MHz or less and the memory controller can support DDR3(L), DDR3L-RS or LPDDR3 in single- or dual-channel operation.

The fastest notebook models equipped with this GPU nearly match the performance of the HD Graphics (Sandy Bridge) and the AMD Radeon HD 6310. Therefore, older and less demanding Windows games like World of Warcraft or Half-Life 2 can be played fluently in very low settings. Performance is not sufficient for most modern titles.

Compared to competing ARM SoCs, Bay Trail outperforms the Adreno 320 (which can be found in different Qualcomm SoCs like the Snapdragon 600) and offers a performance similar to the Tegra 4 GPU. That is enough power to run even the most demanding Android games smoothly in very high resolutions as of 2013.

The integrated video decoder supports all popular codecs such as MPEG2, H.264, VC1, VP8 and MVC and is suitable for resolutions up to 4K up to 100 Mbit/s. The user can connect up to two displays via HDMI 1.4 (max. 1920 x 1080) or DisplayPort 1.2 (max. 2560 x 1600). Another new feature is the support for Wireless Display and Quick Sync, Intel's fast and power efficient H-264 hardware encoder. Some of these features are not available on all models.

Depending on the model, the power consumption of the entire SoC is somewhere between 2 and 10 W. The most efficient versions are therefore suitable for passively cooled tablets, whereas faster variants are used in larger subnotebooks with active cooling.

AMD Radeon RX 6600

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is a mid-range desktop graphics card that is based on the RDNA 2 architecture and uses the Navi 23 chip. It offers 1,792 shaders and 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM with a 128 bit memory interface (14 Gbps, 224 GB/s max).

The RDNA2 architecture offers new features like SAM (Smart Access Memory) and Infinity Cache. PCIe 4.0, RIS (Radeon Image Sharpener) and Raytracing support are also included in the RX6600.

The gaming performance of the RX 6600 is comparable to a GeForce RTX 2060 Super (Desktop). The previous generation Radeon RX 5600 can be easily bested. Therefore, the RX 6600 is best suited for demanding games in 1080p and high details.

The power consumption is rated at 132 Watt (TGP) by AMD and therefore offers a rather low power consumption compared to the previous generations with similar performance.