The $199 RX 6500 XT looks worse on paper than AMD's $199 GPU from six years ago | PC Gamer - griggsentionsm

The $199 RX 6500 XT looks worse on newspaper than AMD's $199 GPU from six geezerhood agone

(Image credit: AMD)

One of the nearly interesting things to happen at CES 2022 from a PC gaming perspective was that both AMD and Nvidia finally disclosed this contemporaries's sub-$250 nontextual matter cards. Piece we're still waiting for more glasses and performance details about Nvidia's RTX 3050, there are some depressing things to tone active AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT, most especially when you compare information technology with the $199 Radeon RX 480 AMD launched back in 2016.

The performance increases we've seen in graphics cards concluded the last some years has been astounding. We've been treated to the most powerful GPUs ever to saving grace a PC, slices of graphical silicon capable of pixel-pushy feats we could hitherto only ambition of. But that's come at the expense of affordability with even today's third-tier up graphics cards costing upwards of $700.

When you put down the twin mood-killers of a global general and a global come off shortage into the equation you as wel get a plac where information technology's non financially careful to create bring dow-priced GPUs that leave be in shrilling demand. Not when you can just make expensive products, which are in just now arsenic high demand, and watch those take flight off the shelves anyway.

So we've had to suffer higher-priced GPUs and an obvious lack of mainstream graphics card game for the normal humanity unable to pass their entire bank balance happening a newborn card.

But now we're finally getting untried, affordable RX 600-series and RTX 3000-serial publication artwork cards. Though, while it's great to imag both the GPU makers ultimately releasing budget graphics cards, it's painful to see equitable what that means in terms of their specs. These look to be every bit the pandemic GPUs of our worst nightmares, I just hope I'm wrong about them.

What we always deficiency to see is higher functioning and high specs compared with the same price GPUs of the last generation, and that is tangibly not the cause with the RX 6500 XT. O.k., so the jury is still out on genuine gaming frame rates from the late Radeon until we get it in our test bench, but our experiences with the RX 6600 XT—essentially an RX 5700 XT for the same price—and a read of the RX 6500 XT specs tabloid Don River't fill us with confidence.

I mean, this stark image comparison from reddit illustrates the issue perfectly…

	AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT	AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT	AMD Radeon RX 480
Release date	January 2022	December 2019	June 2016
Shader Cores	1024 RDNA 2	1408 RDNA	2304 GCN
ROPs	32	32	32
Texture Units	64	88	144
Storage	4GB GDDR6	4GB GDDR6	4GB GDDR5
Memory bus	64-bit	128-bit	256-bit
Retention bandwidth	144 GB/s	224 GB/s	224 GB/s
Processing great power	5.77 TFLOPS	5.20 TFLOPS	5.83 TFLOPS
Board power	107W	130W	150W
Cost	$199	$169	$199

When it comes to raw GPU performance, the RX 6500 XT comes in at 5.77 TFLOPS, piece the old (and still matched) RX 480 managed a healthy 5.83 TFLOPS. The aged lineup, even in its $199 4GB guise, has higher remembering bandwidth, far more shader cores, and way more texture units.

There's a chance that 16MB of Infinity Cache can make for the shortfall of the RX 6500 XT's 64-bit memory busbar, by boosting that bandwidth. When we initially checked out the Eternity Cache architecture with the Radeon RX 6800 XT, AMD told us cache hits were many likely at 1080p resolutions—where budget cards are aimed—which means the special bandwidth afforded by the smart cache tech ought to help.

But IT may only help in that IT gets it to do at the one level as an older, higher specced GPU exploitation otherwise weaker atomic number 14. I guess that's progress, but only if the terms tag were lower. Maybe those RDNA 2 cores will deliver any conjuring trick we've non previously seen, but they're loss to have to work damned effortful. I guess that's where the 2.6GHz clock speed is meant to come in.

Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB Pulse — (Image recognition: Future)

IT could and so possibly give the last-gen 4GB RX 5500 XT a run for its money then, but that's another depressing indictment of the state of the GPU market, because that was a cheaper $169 card when IT launched at the tail end of 2019.

But this all seems to make up part of an AMD strategy to put gamers first; by giving them graphics cards too weak to be worthy for mining and therefore more available to the rest of us.

Speaking at a CES round-table conference, Laura Adam Smith, CVP of Radeon Graphics at AMD said of the RX 6500 XT specs: "We have genuinely optimized this i to be play-first at that target market. And you rear end pick up that with the path that we organized the character. Even with the four gigs of compose buffer. That's a really nice frame buffer size for the absolute majority of AAA games, but information technology's not particularly attractive if you're doing blockchain type activities, or mining activities.

"Then we've tried to make some real gamer-first transitions for the things that we put on't ascertain but we have influence over to optimize that card to be as accessible as possible to that use of gamers."

On the Nvidia root, I've yet to be convinced the RTX 3050 is sledding to be in much wagerer condition gen-on-gen. That's a $250 GPU, and likely to be significantly quicker than the RX 6500 XT, merely I'd be dumbstruck if we weren't just looking at at GTX 1660 Titanium carrying into action for $30 less, though with the promise of DLSS support.

So, thanks CES 2022, for kicking the year off in depressing GPU style.

Dave has been gambling since the years of Zaxxon and Lady Microbe on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Belt along 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished pester-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he born it out of the windowpane. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World galore decades ago, then moved onto PC Format glutted-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics bill market, CPUs with many cores than sense, play laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.