Avoiding the PCIe 3.0 performance hit or significantly reducing it will be relatively easy in most games, just opt to use low quality textures. But is that really the point? I know some people are going to make this argument, so we'll head it off by saying why? Why would you compromise on the most important visual quality setting to head off an unnecessary performance hit when used in a PCIe 3.0 system? But hey, maybe power consumption has something special for us. After all, this is the first 6nm GPU and AMD bragged to us how small and power efficient they've managed to make the 6500 XT. Tyson, Mark (June 13, 2022). "AMD Clears Up Sapphire Radeon 6700 Confusion: It's Definitely an RX". Tom's Hardware . Retrieved June 15, 2022.

The Radeon RX 6000 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by AMD, based on their RDNA 2 architecture. [2] It was announced on October 28, 2020 [3] and is the successor to the Radeon RX 5000 series. It consists of the entry-level RX 6400, mid-range RX 6500 XT, high-end RX 6600, RX 6600 XT, RX 6650 XT, RX 6700, RX 6700 XT, upper high-end RX 6750 XT, RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and enthusiast RX 6900 XT and RX 6950 XT for desktop computers; and the RX 6600M, RX 6700M, and RX 6800M for laptops. [4] [5] A sub-series for mobile, Radeon RX 6000S (consisting of RX 6600S, RX 6700S, and RX 6800S), was announced in CES 2022, targeting thin and light laptop designs. As for memory configurations, pending AMD’s confirmation, I’m expecting this card to have a 64-bit memory bus. This would be in line with halving the other resources on the card, as well as consistent with AMD’s design goals to use smaller memory busses on Navi 2x parts than their Navi 1x predecessors. In that case we’re looking at just 128GB/second or so of external memory bandwidth, assuming AMD is using standard 16Gbps GDDR6 here. And as previously mentioned, the Infinity Cache has been cut down to 16MB as well. So the RX 6500 XT is going to be in the interesting position of trying to make the most of its small-but-fast Infinity Cache before bandwidth drops off significantly when going off-die. Even with so many compute resources halved, it will be interesting to see if 6500 XT can be properly fed with such a small memory bus. Tyson, Mark (February 4, 2021). "Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT range registered with the EEC". Hexus . Retrieved February 10, 2021. That x4 connection is the equivalent of a x8 PCIe 3.0 slot, which is more than enough bandwidth for 1080p gaming. Cutting that in half, however, might be more of an issue. So, while this might be an affordable upgrade (at MSRP) for a new GPU, it may necessitate a complete PC platform change to get anything like a decent level of performance out of it. Games like Metro Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077 are the big examples here, and you’re probably going to end up closer to the Medium preset than the Ultra preset in games like that. This is reflected in our testing, as well.

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For additional information, see https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx. GD-172. It's obvious this was not released with AAA-titles in mind. It was obviously released for esports games such as CS:GO / OW / DotA. Hence you excluding resolutions from the review for games that run excellently even with much less VRAM makes absolutely no sense. Looking at other potential matchups starts to show the weaker aspects of the RX 6500 XT, however. As noted, it's basically tied with the GTX 1650 Super at 1080p medium/high gaming performance. We tested with a few other cards, and it's actually slower than the previous generation AMD RX 5500 XT 8GB and tied with the 5500 XT 4GB that it's supposed to replace. Oops. I dipped into the performance numbers Jacob and I grabbed from the old RX 5500 XT and RX 580 cards in a previous life and they don't look like great reading. Effectively you're getting RX 580 performance, sometimes lower because of having half the VRAM. Hardware encoding isn't supported, so you can't use ReLive to capture gameplay, which is a deal breaker, and

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game that ran terribly using PCIe 3.0 relative to what we saw with 4.0, though I was using the highest quality preset. This saw 4.0 deliver 38% greater performance and that margin was heavily reduced to 18% with the high preset, then 9% with medium and then 6% with low. Still, the issue is that the game looks and runs great using the highest and high quality presets with PCIe 4.0, so dropping so much performance when using PCIe 3.0 simply isn't acceptable. Who Is It For? And so we've tried to make some real gamer-first transitions for the things that we don’t control but we have influence over to optimize that card to be as accessible as possible to that use of gamers." With the 6500 XT you're forced into doing just that, but with the GTX 1650 Super, for example, you don't have to despite also featuring a small 4GB VRAM buffer. This is because it supports the full PCIe x16 bandwidth. As a result, it's able to deliver perfectly playable performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p using the highest quality preset, with 67 fps on average. AMD Teases Radeon RX 6000 Card Performance Numbers: Aiming For 3080?". anandtech.com. AnandTech. October 8, 2020 . Retrieved October 25, 2020. No fancy Founders Edition cooling systems, no AMD-specific red branding; just a couple of sub-8-inch, dual-slot GPUs... Gigabyte Radeon RX 6500 XT Eagle 4G: Also two fansTo be fair, you're not going to want to play with maxed-out settings in more demanding games on these GPUs, but that's mostly because it's simply not a viable option. If you had a different GPU, or if the RX 6500 XT had included a 96-bit interface and 6GB of VRAM, you'd be able to improve the image quality without hurting performance quite so much. What About RX 6500 XT Ray Tracing? The visual bugs don’t come close to touching the memory issues. My results are in 1080p, but I ran the RX 6500 XT through the spectrum of common resolutions. I wasn’t able to run the 1440p or 4K tests in Red Dead Redemption 2because the game includes a built-in memory limiter. It’s not the only one, and the RX 6500 XT will run into memory issues in other games. The 6500 XT is able to just edge out the 5500 XT in Horizon Zero Dawn using the 'favor quality' preset, delivering 7% more performance than the 4GB 5500 XT, so not amazing but certainly one of the better results. It was also much faster than the RX 590, offering around 20% more performance in this example. Though there is a 'but' here, using PCIe 3.0 crippled the 6500 XT, dropping the average frame rate to 53 fps, meaning it was 36% faster using PCIe 4.0.

One area of potential interest is how the RX 6500 XT performs when it's not paired with the latest and greatest hardware. Now granted, we're not looking at an old and slow test bed, but we did run both the RX 6500 XT and the GTX 1650 Super through our new test suite on both our old (Core i9-9900K) and new (Core i9-12900K) test PCs. The results are... interesting. Were you aware you can run the most popular esports titles listed above on 2k resolution paired with a 165 Hz monitor comfortably with a decade old 2GB GPU such as GTX770? Apparently not.

This is about the only way the 6500 XT makes sense and even then if you're not using PCIe 4.0, it's not a given that you'd go for AMD's laptop GPU on a PCIe card. The PCIe 4.0 performance makes it by far the best value option, assuming you don't need a feature like hardware encoding. a b c d Goslin, Austen; Sarkar, Samit (October 28, 2020). "AMD announces Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs". Polygon . Retrieved January 22, 2021. The Radeon RX 6500 XT has 16 RDNA 2 Compute Units, which makes for 1,024 Stream Processors (SPs) and 16 ray accelerators. The closest card in AMD’s current lineup would be the Radeon RX 6600, which has 28 Compute Units, or 1,792 SPs. That’s a pretty substantial step down here, and combined with the lower memory bandwidth means that the RX 6500 XT is a much weaker card. The Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT were released on November 18, 2020, and the RX 6900 XT was released on December 8, 2020. [9] [10]