AMD RX 6500XT – The 200$ 4GB Abomination Launched in 2022

If you are on PCIe Gen 3.0, Then Basically F**% You

Tech Jesus – Gamers Nexus

AMD Announced the RX 6500XT With 4GB VRAM with Buckets Of Salts, Just to Suffices the situation that Gamers are in a desperate need for a GPU, Will get the opportunity buy one at an affordable $200 Price Range.  I digress pricing in India. lol

According to the price leaks and availability its much more likely to be priced closed to $200 or even a bit more or less depending on where you belong.

But is the RX 6500 XT Really made for Gamers?

Likewise, the answer to the question is to be taken with buckets of salt, why? its because an year back AMD Claimed that 4GB Ram isn’t enough for gaming, now they are launching the same for Gamers** (I hope miners don’t digest the stocks this time)

Specifications wise the GPU clocks out pretty high and is capable to chunk out 5.7 Tflop’s of Compute power on an Average

But according to reviewers, the problem is multifaceted but fairly simple to sum up: AMD cut serious corners on the RX 6500XT while also failing to improve performance. They point out that performance is roughly equivalent to the card’s direct predecessor, the RX 5500 XT — a card that came out two years ago, for less money, with more video outputs. (Here, you only only get one HDMI and one DisplayPort.)

rx 6500xt ports
Source: PC Gamer

Major Performance Issues

And if you look further back, like Gamers Nexus and others did, you might notice performance hasn’t meaningfully improved over AMD’s RX 580 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060 — mid-range cards from 2017 and 2016 respectively. (The RX 580 seems to beat it in some of the benchmarks — Seems Like AMD Trying to Be Nvidia for $229, that seems bad, no?)

Not done pulling the Triggers yet over the RX 6500XT, I assume you don’t happen to belong on the PCIE Gen 4.0 Bandwagon… oh dear it gets even worse if you’ve got an older PCIe 3.0 motherboard, some point out, because AMD reportedly decided to limit the card’s bandwidth to 4x, instead of the full 16 lanes of bandwidth, when it’s plugged into a PCIe 3.0 slot. Here’s TechSpot again, talking about testing Shadow of the Tomb Raider using one of those older boards

The average frame rate also fell by 28% and this saw the RX 6500 XT go from 65 fps to just 47 fps. It also meant although it was able to match the 5500 XT when using PCIe 4.0, when installed in a PCIe 3.0 system you’re looking more at base GTX 1650 performance, which is worse than the RX 570.

The only spotlight for this GPU is that it draws less power, then again, its broken from launch.

Toms Hardware

Of the six games with ray tracing that we tested — and admittedly, we used more demanding RT games, as otherwise the effects are largely wasted — only one qualified as even remotely playable: Fortnite. And even it wasn’t without trouble.

PC World

But the modest GPU and bizarre memory configuration mean you’ll need to be careful about the settings you use. If you crank visuals up to ultra or run into a game with especially high memory demands, the limited memory capacity and bus width could result in jarring frame-time spikes when your PC exceeds the 4GB barrier and needs to tap into your system’s general RAM pool for help. Don’t push this GPU harder than it’s intended for and you should be fine.

Hot Hardware

The new Radeon RX 6500 XT is one of the more power-friendly GPUs of the bunch. Despite offering much better performance (more often than not) then the GeForce GTX 1650, the 6500 XT consumes only slightly more power. In comparison to the Radeon RX 5500 XT and Radeon RX 570, however, the new 6500 XT uses significantly less power when under load.

3.5 > 4 on This One.. Might Consider Waiting For Nvidia to Announce a 1650 Super Duper xD.