Sapphire doubles the memory of the Radeon RX 6500 XT: here is a Pulse with 8GB of VRAM

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is the lowest-end card of the current generation, AMD’s attempt to offer a new RDNA 2 GPU (originally meant for notebooks) and place it at a more affordable price level than the crazy prices that prevailed until the beginning of this year.

We, like other magazines, found ourselves rejecting it for the reduced performance especially on the PCI Express 3.0 platforms, widely diffused and natural habitat of a model aimed at gamers on a tight budget. a PCI Express 4.0 x4 interfacewhile on board we find 4GB of memory GDDR6 su bus a 64 bit.

These three specifications, put together, impact the performance of the RX 6500 XT noticeably when installed on a system with a PCIe 3.0 slot because the standard halves the available bandwidth. In addition, the small amount of VRAM memory could not compensate for this behavior.

Finally, at least on paper, there seems to be a partial solution to the asphyxiated performance of AMD’s solution: equipping it with 8GB of memory. Sapphire has announced a variant with the double the VRAM memory of its custom Pulse implementation. We don’t know if other realities will follow, but it could be a way for AMD and its partners to “take out” excess GDDR6 chips and GPUs.

The newcomer is factory overclocked to 2695 MHz for the Game Clock and 2855 MHz for the Boost Clock, frequencies of 10 and 30 MHz higher than the 4GB Pulse model, already overclocked at the factory. The rest of the spec is unchanged, so we have 1024 stream processors, 16 Ray Accelerators and 32 ROPs.

Doubling the memory probably will not completely solve the performance deficit found using the 4GB card on the PCIe 3.0 platform, however it should have some effect and above all allow the 6500 XT to play modern titles smoothly: 4GB of memory is now very few, some games don’t even start with that amount of memory. And to say that AMD was the first to say it clearly, only to back down.