When AMD announced its finances-helpful RX 6500 XT graphics card at CES early this thirty day period, the organization proposed that the solution had been designed with limitations that would make it unappealing to the cryptocurrency miners who have been exacerbating the ongoing GPU scarcity for more than a year now. But now that reviews of the card have commenced to strike, it’s crystal clear that its gaming effectiveness is the collateral damage of people constraints.
Assessments from Tom’s Hardware, PCGamer, TechSpot, Players Nexus, and a litany of other Computer system gaming YouTube channels are unanimous: the RX 6500 XT is regularly outperformed by previous-era graphics cards, and it comes with other caveats over and above efficiency that restrict its attractiveness even further more. (Ars has not been supplied with a evaluation unit.)
The main of the trouble is a 64-bit memory interface that limitations the quantity of memory bandwidth the card has to get the job done with. Moreover, the card has only 4GB of RAM, which is commencing to be a restricting aspect in contemporary games, in particular at resolutions over 1080p. Many exams observed the RX 6500 XT outperformed by the 8GB variant of the RX 5500 XT, which released at the tail end of 2019 for the very same $199 (and you could in fact discover and obtain it for that cost).
The components restrictions also make the GPU’s assist for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing almost useless. Tom’s Hardware says that in the titles that are playable at all with ray-tracing enabled, the configurations have to be turned down minimal adequate that game titles really don’t in fact seem that a lot greater. The RX 6000-series’ ray-tracing functionality lags powering the Nvidia RTX 3000 sequence throughout the lineup, but it really is specifically disappointing in this article.
The card’s four-lane PCI Categorical 4. interface also poses a dilemma. When it has a PCIe 4. connection to get the job done with, the RX 6500 XT appears to be great, and even high-stop playing cards really don’t frequently need to have all the bandwidth that the typical 16-lane link offers. But it brings about difficulties for PCs that use PCI Express 3. TechSpot’s review identified that making use of a PCIe 3. connection with the RX 6500 XT knocked off 10–15 percent of the card’s by now lackluster efficiency. And PCIe 3. programs are not historic record: Intel’s 10th-era Main chips, any Ryzen processors however running in a 300- or 400-series motherboard, and the Ryzen 5000G processors with integrated graphics all use PCI Specific 3. and are still being bought at most merchants. These are particularly the varieties of more mature and more cost-effective PCs that spending plan-minded gamers are much