AMD’s $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT is right here, bringing both accurate-time ray tracing and cheap graphics playing cards encourage to the hundreds—if it is going to protect neatly-stocked ample to dwell on retailer cupboards for end to its suggested pricing, that’s. This ain’t your moderate graphics card although. AMD well-known to tweak and tune the Radeon RX 6500 XT to (confidently) protect cryptocurrency miners at bay and hit the coveted, well-known sub-$200 stamp level.
Inserting this GPU by means of its paces took slightly a little bit extra effort and explaining than usual. Head over to our comprehensive Radeon RX 6500 XT overview for your complete rundown, nevertheless for folks who don’t basically feel like wading by means of hundreds of words and dozens of charts worth of diagnosis, listed below are 5 key details you may want to uncover out about the Radeon RX 6500 XT.
Table of Contents
1. Right here is a big graphics card for beginning place PC avid gamers…
PC gaming picked up serious steam over the pandemic, nevertheless novices haven’t had a shot at investing in cheap recent equipment, with most graphics playing cards going for double MSRP or extra thanks to a mixture of a chip crunch, logistics woes, booming search details from from cryptocurrency miners in quest of revenue, and further. We’ve resorted to suggesting a CPU with fine integrated graphics as the only budget “graphics card” for gaming. Ugh.
That adjustments with the Radeon RX 6500 XT. No longer only is that this card cheap at $199, this could fully chunk by means of competitive e-sports titles at high body charges, and play stylish triple-A games at a like a flash hunch the exercise of Medium to Excessive settings at 1080p resolution. It additionally helps stylish parts like ray tracing, AMD’s Orderly Salvage admission to Memory, FidelityFX Gigantic Resolution, Radeon Anti-Jog, and Radeon Increase, and all nevertheless ray tracing can encourage make this graphics card mosey even sooner. Groovy.
If you’ve gotten already obtained a graphics card like the GeForce GTX 1650 Gigantic or Radeon RX 580, although, the Radeon RX 6500 XT doesn’t present ample of a performance uplift to be a compelling upgrade (until you wish secure admission to to those parts).
2. …when you stick with what it’s fine at
Crafting a sub-$200 graphics card in these attempting times required AMD to flip to some unorthodox secure decisions. The Radeon RX 6500 XT packs a scant 4GB of GDDR6 reminiscence over a minute 64-bit bus unheard-of in stylish gaming GPUs, although those reminiscence chips are clocked at a blazing-mercurial 18Gbps and arrive augmented by AMD’s radical Infinity Cache know-how. It additionally, a little shockingly, only helps four PCIe lanes as a replace of the same old 16.
Those decisions imply that whereas the Radeon RX 6500 XT excels at what it’s designed for—e-sports, and triple-A gaming at Mid to Excessive settings at 1080p resolution—when you crank the peep candy to Ultra or jack up the resolution to 1440p, chances are high you’ll presumably possibly mosey into performance disorders (like sluggish body charges or bolt spikes). Birth at 1080p Medium graphics presets in your approved games and nudge knobs up from there when you’re ready.
3. It’s built to evade crypto miners
AMD additionally introduced a Radeon RX 6400 graphics card unique to prebuilt programs, with slower clock speeds and a noteworthy decrease energy diagram.
AMD
While slightly a few AMD’s secure decisions were indubitably made to hit the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s juicy $199 suggested pricing, it’s a little bit extra advanced than that by means of the reminiscence machine. If the GPU world wasn’t so crazy factual now, releasing a 1080p graphics card with factual 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit bus in 2022 would secure AMD laughed out of metropolis. However in this day’s wild graphics card market, those microscopic specs are virtually real parts, as the reminiscence configuration will make the Radeon RX 6500 XT unappealing for mining Ethereum, the most approved cryptocurrency fueling rather a lot of the sky-high graphics card search details from. Ethereum thrives on reminiscence bandwidth, and mining it requires your graphics card to gain extra than 4GB of reminiscence.
“There’s slightly a few dynamics which shall be alive to in the availability of the GPUs now we gain,” Radeon vice chairman Laura Smith stated to PCWorld as piece of a diminutive roundtable with journalists at some level of CES. “We have basically optimized this one to be gaming first….That you must presumably possibly presumably peep that with the vogue we’ve configured the piece. Even with the four gigs of body buffer, that’s a terribly nice body buffer size for virtually all of triple-A games, nevertheless it without a doubt’s now no longer in particular gorgeous when you’re doing blockchain-form or mining activities. We’ve tried to make some gamer-first transitions for the things we don’t administration, nevertheless now we gain impact over, to optimize that card to be as accessible as conceivable to the utilization of avid gamers.”
We’ll peep if that translates into accurate frequent availability at its $199 suggested stamp, nevertheless the Radeon RX 6500 XT has an even bigger shot than most up-to-date graphics playing cards at basically being accessible—including Nvidia’s forthcoming $250 GeForce RTX 3050. Fingers crossed. For extra details, try our explainer on why much less reminiscence could presumably possibly imply extra in AMD and Nvidia’s budget GPU fight.
4. Don’t peril about the exercise of the Radeon RX 6500 XT in an older PC
After its hiss, avid gamers skittish that the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s four microscopic PCIe lanes would translate to dreadful performance on any gaming PC extra than a few years extinct. That’s because those lanes work only on stylish pc programs featuring the noteworthy-sooner PCIe 4.0 interface. Older PCs gain PCIe 3.0, and of us feared that ingredient, combined with the minimal amount of on hand lanes, would choke off body charges.
Utilizing the Radeon RX 6500 XT in PCIe 3.0 mode doesn’t devastate performance like some avid gamers feared, when you’re the exercise of reasonable graphics settings for this GPU.
Brad Chacos/IDG
Spoiler: It does, nevertheless now no longer to a stage worth caring about in most games, thanks to the helping hand supplied by AMD’s mercurial GDDR6 chips and 16MB of on-chip Infinity Cache. Across our 11-game take a look at suite, we noticed two main outliers—Rainbow Six Siege performed identically on both PCIe 3 and 4, whereas Total War: Troy suffered a primary 18.4 p.c loss on PCIe 3.0—nevertheless otherwise, games were only a median of 6.4 p.c slower in PCIe 3.0 mode. That’s unprecedented nevertheless doesn’t greatly alter the associated fee proposition of the graphics card. It’s restful customarily in the identical performance ballpark as GPUs like the Radeon RX 580 and 5500 XT, or Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1650, no matter which model of PCIe being old.
That stated, you may want to protect the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s intended utilization in thoughts. Stick with those Medium to Excessive graphics settings at 1080p and only nudge things up as chances are high you’ll presumably possibly presumably. If you strive to play on Ultra settings in intense games, or at 1440p resolution, you’re probably to exceed the 4GB body buffer on this card and if that occurs over PCIe 3.0, bolt spikes and performance slowdowns could presumably possibly secure accurate corrupt, accurate mercurial.
5. Other lacking parts
AMD additionally stripped out another parts in its quest to hit the $199 stamp level, albeit ones the company claims that most of us don’t exercise on this pricing bracket. The Radeon RX 6500 XT lacks AV1 decoding as neatly as H.264 and H.265/HEVC encoding capabilities. (There are H.264 and H.265 decode, although.) AMD additionally only slapped singular HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort connections on this GPU. The combo methodology that the Radeon RX 6500 XT won’t be a huge want for dwelling theater PCs, and of us having a peep to movement their gaming adventures will doubtlessly desire to stare in different locations as neatly.
That’s it for our roundup of must-know details. For rather a lot, noteworthy extra details, make sure that to try our beefy comprehensive Radeon RX 6500 XT overview.
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