Radeon RX 6500 XT: Only 4GB of memory to keep the price down and discourage miners

In just over ten days, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, AMD’s new RDNA 2 video card unveils at CES 2022. The new solution, priced at $ 199 tax-free, is aimed at the low-end of the market, especially those who want play in 1080p at around 60 fps with high details (not counting techniques like FSR and RSR).

During an interview with Hothardware, Frank Azor (AMD Gaming Chief) talked about the newcomer, the first featuring a 6 nanometer GPU and combined with only 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. According to Azor, the 4 GB of memory are the children of some considerations: the first concerns the price, that is, staying under $ 200 at a time when graphics memory and GPU prices are not among the most favorable.

“Our goal was to reach a disruptive price at a time when GPUs are very expensive and every GPU released in the last year or two has come in at, I believe, over $ 300 or at least $ 299 and beyond. […] We set the $ 199 goal and memory prices have skyrocketed. In all honesty it is extremely challenging if not impossible to reach $ 199 in today’s market with an 8GB graphics card“.

A choice from both a performance and longevity point of view could make many turn up their noses, but according to Azor with technologies like FSR and RSR that can allow the GPU to reach a higher number of fps, going to 4GB was the right choice.

“We think people will be really happy with the performance when they see the real performance of the card compared to what they perceive, especially when the 4 GB will be integrated by FSR and RSR. I am optimistic that people will appreciate the decisions we have made and I am very confident of the choices made, but I learn something new in this market every day, so we will see what happens. “

The 4GB of memory is also a deterrent for miners, greedy for high-speed graphics memory and this should play in favor of the availability of the video card which will be available according to Azor in large volumes, configuring it as the most accessible solution for two years now.

“I think so far most, if not all attempts to try to do things to ward off miners have not been very successful., the software solutions were very fast and easy to overcome. We are all trying to understand, this is an attempt, let’s see if it works. [I 4 GB] they are hardware related thing, it’s like a limitation, you can’t and I don’t even think you can reasonably mine Ethereum with 4GB of memory. If it works, if we’re right, this may actually be the perfect video card for gamers and gamers only“.

“It is very affordable, it has all the modern technologies, it has a memory configuration that hopefully miners will find unappealing, it is small and it is very aggressively priced and hopefully there will be many on the shelves. Every graphics card has been hated for the past couple of years, so I hope to hit the mark with this one and that people will love us for it. We will see”.

However, it is not to be excluded, Azor makes it clear that he could still arrive a version with 8 GB of memory, although it is not possible to know when at the moment. “It should not be assumed that 4GB will be the only configuration of the RX 6500 XT that will ever exist,” he said in a passage of the interview.

Meanwhile, more details about the card’s specifications have surfaced online. First of all, it looks like it will have a PCI Express 4.0 x4 interface (equivalent to a PCIe 3.0 x8). The information comes from ASRock site, but it shouldn’t be a problem in terms of performance. Another element concerns the video outputs: it appears that the GPU does not support more than two outputs (one DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1). Finally, and this may be the biggest problem, the card it shouldn’t support H264 / HEVC encoding and AV1 decoding: a pity for all colors already idealized it within an HTPC.