The Radeon RX 6500 XT is a nasty card and not even AMD’s explanations explain it

On January 19, the Radeon RX 6500 XT card made its market premiere, as the weakest link of the entire Radeon RX 6000 family available on the consumer market. However, it is not without reason that I warned you that the purchase of this model may end badly. I wasn’t the only one, but we finally got to know the reason why the Radeon RX 6500 XT is a nasty card.

The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is a controversial model, because its main purpose is completely different

In short, the Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a unique card in the AMD lineup, as its Navi 24 GPU was created using 6-nm technology, and its 4 GB GDDR6 covers a speed of 18 Gb / s. At the same time, its problem is the limitation to 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes (or 3.0 in the absence of a suitable platform), only 4 GB of VRAM memory, the limitation of outputs to only two and the complete lack of support for H264 / H265 and AV1 encoding.

While 4 GB of GDDR6 memory can be explained by the fact that AMD wanted to simply prevent mining on this card, in practice such a significant limitation and bet on a 64-bit bus causes a significant problem with gaming performance. Not to mention playing with Ray-Tracing turned on. The performance of this model is equivalent to that of the last generation RX 5500 XT 4GB and lower than its 8GB variant. Not very well for something newer well over two years.

Also read: RTX 3090 for PLN 400? This is what lootboxes with graphics cards promise

So finally, available at the price of PLN 1400-1600 in Poland, the Radeon RX 6500 XT is a good model for both players and people looking for a card for their computer as a multimedia center. The official reason for this state of affairs is that AMD allows miners to show the middle finger, but it turned out (revealed by John Bridgman from AMD) that the RX 6500 XT should never hit the market, because it and other Navi 24 cards (Radeon Pro W6400, W6500M and W6300M) were to be delivered only to laptops next to the Ryzen 6000 APU processors, which make up for their shortcomings (support the aforementioned encoding) and provide the appropriate foundations (PCIe 4.0).