The wave of negative reviews (including ours) that swept over the Radeon RX 6500 XT AMD could only leave some legacy for a product that in addition to having really stripped-down specifications – 64-bit bus, 4 GB of memory, only four PCIe lanes, no AV1 encoding and decoding, as well as H.265 decoding and only two video releases – it comes at a time when the real price penalizes it enormously.
AMD hasn’t officially retorted the reviews, perhaps because there’s little to say, but a comment about the new product arrived (sul forum on Phoronix) gives John Bridgman, a prominent member of the AMD’s Linux Driver Team, according to which “the primary use of Navi 24 will be in laptops in conjunction with the Rembrandt APU, which features full video and PCIe Gen 4 “features.
Put simply, AMD created Navi 24 thinking that the limit of 4 PCIe lanes was not a problem, as it is intended for solutions with PCIe 4.0 connectivity. It also chose to omit several decoding and encoding capabilities that are pretty standard in modern products today, relying on the fact that the Ryzen 6000 APUs would make up for it.
The problem is that the desktop world is open, totally different, and if you propose a PCIe 4.0 x4 card it does not necessarily have to be connected to a compatible platform, especially at a time when PCIe 4.0 is not widely spread if you takes into account that Intel only embraced it with 11th generation Core Rocket Lake CPUs. Installation on a PCIe 3.0 platform, as seen in the review, further degrades performance.
This, combined with the very limited specifications such as the 64-bit bus and the 4 GB of memory (which in 2020 AMD boiled as insufficient), led AMD to propose a product that if on notebooks could have a reason for being in the range. low (as long as it is paired with the Ryzen 6000), on desktop it represents the worst video card in years, taking into account that there are older solutions that perform better. AMD explained that the choices were dictated by the desire to contain the price and make the product uninteresting to miners, but in this way it ended up disappointing everyone.
In short, if the primary use of the Navi 24 GPU was the mobile sector, perhaps AMD should have limited it to that area, but this did not happen: as reported in the past few hours, the chip has not only arrived on consumer desktop PCs, but also in the professional world, both in laptops and on desktop workstations.