AMD’s $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT is right here, bringing each real-time ray tracing and reasonably priced graphics playing cards again to the lots—if it may keep well-stocked sufficient to stay on retailer cabinets for near its instructed pricing, that’s. This ain’t your common graphics card although. AMD wanted to tweak and tune the Radeon RX 6500 XT to (hopefully) hold cryptocurrency miners at bay and hit the coveted, essential sub-$200 worth level.
Putting this GPU via its paces took fairly a bit extra effort and explaining than regular. Head over to our comprehensive Radeon RX 6500 XT review for the entire rundown, however for people who don’t really feel like wading via 1000’s of phrases and dozens of charts price of research, listed below are 5 key information you might want to know concerning the Radeon RX 6500 XT.
1. This is a good graphics card for starting PC players…
PC gaming picked up critical steam over the pandemic, however newcomers haven’t had a shot at investing in reasonably priced new gear, with most graphics playing cards going for double MSRP or extra due to a mix of a chip crunch, logistics woes, booming demand from cryptocurrency miners looking for earnings, and more. We’ve resorted to suggesting a CPU with good built-in graphics because the best budget “graphics card” for gaming. Ugh.
That modifications with the Radeon RX 6500 XT. Not solely is that this card reasonably priced at $199, it should completely chew via aggressive e-sports titles at excessive body charges, and play trendy triple-A video games at a quick tempo utilizing Medium to High settings at 1080p decision. It additionally helps trendy options like ray tracing, AMD’s Smart Access Memory, FidelityFX Super Resolution, Radeon Anti-Lag, and Radeon Boost, and all however ray tracing may also help make this graphics card run even sooner. Groovy.
If you have already got a graphics card just like the GeForce GTX 1650 Super or Radeon RX 580, although, the Radeon RX 6500 XT doesn’t present sufficient of a efficiency uplift to be a compelling improve (until you need entry to these options).
2. …in the event you stick with what it’s good at
Crafting a sub-$200 graphics card in these attempting occasions required AMD to show to some unorthodox design choices. The Radeon RX 6500 XT packs a scant 4GB of GDDR6 reminiscence over a minute 64-bit bus unheard-of in trendy gaming GPUs, although these reminiscence chips are clocked at a blazing-fast 18Gbps and are available augmented by AMD’s radical Infinity Cache technology. It additionally, considerably shockingly, solely helps 4 PCIe lanes slightly than the same old 16.
Those choices imply that whereas the Radeon RX 6500 XT excels at what it’s designed for—e-sports, and triple-A gaming at Mid to High settings at 1080p decision—in the event you crank the attention sweet to Ultra or jack up the decision past 1440p, you could possibly run into efficiency points (like gradual body charges or lag spikes). Start at 1080p Medium graphics presets in your favourite video games and nudge knobs up from there in the event you’re in a position.
3. It’s constructed to evade crypto miners
AMD additionally introduced a Radeon RX 6400 graphics card unique to prebuilt methods, with slower clock speeds and a a lot decrease energy draw.
AMD
While a lot of AMD’s design selections had been little question made to hit the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s juicy $199 instructed pricing, it’s a bit extra sophisticated than that on the subject of the reminiscence system. If the GPU world wasn’t so loopy proper now, releasing a 1080p graphics card with simply 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit bus in 2022 would get AMD laughed out of city. But in right now’s wild graphics card market, these restricted specs are virtually real options, because the reminiscence configuration will make the Radeon RX 6500 XT unappealing for mining Ethereum, the favored cryptocurrency fueling numerous the sky-high graphics card demand. Ethereum thrives on reminiscence bandwidth, and mining it requires your graphics card to have greater than 4GB of reminiscence.
“There’s a lot of dynamics that are involved in the availability of the GPUs we have,” Radeon vice chairman Laura Smith mentioned to PCWorld as a part of a small roundtable with journalists throughout CES. “We have really optimized this one to be gaming first….You can see that with the way we’ve configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer, that’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of triple-A games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type or mining activities. We’ve tried to make some gamer-first transitions for the things we don’t control, but we have influence over, to optimize that card to be as accessible as possible to the use of gamers.”
We’ll see if that interprets into precise widespread availability at its $199 instructed worth, however the Radeon RX 6500 XT has a greater shot than most trendy graphics playing cards at truly being obtainable—together with Nvidia’s imminent $250 GeForce RTX 3050. Fingers crossed. For extra information, take a look at our explainer on why less memory could mean more in AMD and Nvidia’s budget GPU battle.
4. Don’t fear about utilizing the Radeon RX 6500 XT in an older PC
After its reveal, players fearful that the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s 4 restricted PCIe lanes would translate to horrible efficiency on any gaming PC various years previous. That’s as a result of these lanes work greatest on trendy computer systems that includes the much-faster PCIe 4.0 interface. Older PCs have PCIe 3.0, and folks feared that element, blended with the minimal variety of out there lanes, would choke off body charges.
Using the Radeon RX 6500 XT in PCIe 3.0 mode doesn’t devastate efficiency like some players feared, in the event you’re utilizing affordable graphics settings for this GPU.
Brad Chacos/IDG
Spoiler: It does, however to not a level price worrying about in most video games, due to the serving to hand supplied by AMD’s quick 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 carried out identically on each PCIe 3 and 4, whereas Total War: Troy suffered a significant 18.4 p.c loss on PCIe 3.0—however in any other case, video games had been solely a mean of 6.4 p.c slower in PCIe 3.0 mode. That’s noteworthy however doesn’t considerably alter the worth proposition of the graphics card. It’s nonetheless normally in the identical efficiency ballpark as GPUs just like the Radeon RX 580 and 5500 XT, or Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1650, no matter which model of PCIe getting used.
That mentioned, you might want to hold the Radeon RX 6500 XT’s supposed utilization in thoughts. Stick to these Medium to High graphics settings at 1080p and solely nudge issues up as you’ll be able to. If you attempt to play on Ultra settings in intense video games, or at 1440p decision, you’re more likely to exceed the 4GB body buffer on this card and if that occurs over PCIe 3.0, lag spikes and efficiency slowdowns may get actual nasty, actual quick.
5. Other lacking options
AMD additionally stripped out another options in its quest to hit the $199 worth level, albeit ones the corporate claims that most individuals don’t use on this pricing bracket. The Radeon RX 6500 XT lacks AV1 decoding in addition to H.264 and H.265/HEVC encoding capabilities. (There are H.264 and H.265 decode, although.) AMD additionally solely slapped singular HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort connections on this GPU. The mixture signifies that the Radeon RX 6500 XT received’t be a fantastic alternative for house theater PCs, and folks trying to stream their gaming adventures will most likely need to look elsewhere as nicely.
That’s it for our roundup of must-know information. For a lot, way more information, you’ll want to take a look at our full comprehensive Radeon RX 6500 XT review.