AMD’s New Budget Radeon RX 6500 XT Is Here

AMD gave us solely a sneaokay peek of the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 when the chipmaker revealed the desktop graphics playing cards at CES earlier this 12 months, however now that they’re formally accessible—for what is going to doubtless be an extraordinarily brief time (at retail costs, not less than)—we’re lastly seeing the whole image.

According to AMD, these playing cards are one of the best substitute on your growing older Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 or RX 570 GPUs. The Nvidia rival argues the RX 6500 XT can obtain sturdy 1080p gaming outcomes and helps ray tracing, trendy necessities that make it a compelling possibility at its $199 advised value.

We acquired an RX 6500 XT to assessment however aren’t but able to share outcomes. For now, we’ll go over the benchmarks AMD supplied, and add our regular “take these with a grain of salt” disclosure beforehand. But first, let’s discuss specs—and for now, we’ll focus completely on the extra highly effective RX 6500 XT.

This entry-level GPU primarily based on TSMC’s 6-nanometer node has 5.4 billion transistors, 16 compute models, 16 ray accelerators, 16GB of Infinity Cache, and 4GB of GDDR6 RAM (at 18 GBps) on a 64-bit interface. A presumably extreme limitation is assist for under 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes in comparison with the 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 on the RX 570. That ought to be wonderful for 1080p gaming in the event you’re utilizing a motherboard with PCI 4.0 assist, however boards restricted to PCI 3.0 shall be restricted to 4GBps of bandwidth. Clock speeds attain 2.6GHz and board energy necessities begin at 107W with a minimal really helpful PSU of 400W.

Onto the benchmarks: AMD says the Radeon RX 6500 XT is 41% sooner than the GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 570 when taking part in—look ahead to it—Farming Simulator 22. Shifting to a barely extra common recreation, Halo Infinite, the RX 6500 XT topped the GTX 1650 by 12%, reaching 80 frames per second at 1080p. That is a small enhance over Nvidia’s 2-year-old mid-range card, however bear in mind, the 6500 XT is supposed to value solely $200 (do notice, although, that the bottom GTX 1650 launched at $150).

Overall, AMD claims the RX 6500 XT is, on common, 33% sooner than the GTX 1650 throughout varied video games, together with Age of Empire 4 (1.2x sooner), Far Cry 6 (1.3x), Forza Horizon 4 (1.4x), Horizon Zero Dawn (1.4x), Resident Evil: Village (1.6x), and Apex Legends (1.3x). Just a few different noteworthy titles to spotlight embody Overwatch (1.3x), PUBG (1.2x), and Fortnite (1.4x). We’re within the strategy of confirming these outcomes, but when they’re correct, the RX 6500XT persistently outperforms the GTX 1650 by an honest, if wanting groundbreaking, margin.

Assisting the brand new graphics card is AMD FidelityRFX Super Resolution (FSR), which might enhance body charges by 30% or extra in video games like Call of Duty: Vanguard, Far Cry 6, and Deathloop with out critically impacting picture high quality. The chip additionally helps Radeon Anti-Lag, which AMD claims reduces latency by as much as 33%. AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution, the upcoming in-driver upscaling characteristic for video games that don’t assist FSR, is one other RX 6500 XT perk.

Looking at these numbers in a vacuum would certainly point out that the RX 6500 XT is a brilliant improve to older mid-range playing cards, and may play among the newest video games at medium-to-high settings at 1080p graphics or at decrease settings at over 100fps.

If solely issues have been this easy. It’s solely a matter of time earlier than retail models get snatched up by scalpers and relisted at greater costs (the RX 6500 XT has already been noticed at 2x its MSRP in France), an inevitability that undermines AMD’s messaging of this duo being accessible to players who’re on a good finances. If you’re in that section, exit out of this text ASAP (or, even higher: open a brand new tab) and begin searching for OEM models from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, and the opposite regular suspects.

I’ll swallow my phrases if AMD finds a strategy to hold these in inventory, however till then, the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 XT appear to be they’d be nice finances graphics playing cards…two years in both path from immediately.