AMD has just announced the budget Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card. At just $199, it will inevitably be pitted against its rival from Nvidia which is the $249 RTX 3050. While specifications on paper don’t necessarily directly translate to real-world performance, let’s take a look at what this newcomer has to offer.
Photos courtesy of AMD at CES 2022
The Radeon RX 6500 XT comes with the latest 6nm Navi 24 GPU from AMD, meaning that the company claims this card is more efficient than its predecessors while providing an exponential boost in performance. The 64-bit memory interface and Infinity Cache feature allow users to maximize the budget hardware onboard.
It runs at a base clock of 2.6 GHz which is considerably impressive given the price point at which the card is offered. New features come packed with it as well, which includes FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) which could be comparable to NVIDIA’s DLSS technology. Anti-lag software also comes included, although rather than increasing frame rates, it targets input lag which is detrimental to competitive gaming.
We can see that the biggest bottleneck to performance will be the 4GB of VRAM onboard the card. This is lacking by 2022 standards and could prove to be the Achilles Heel, holding everything else back. However, some folks at AMD mentioned that this is an intentional move to prevent the use of the card in crypto mining which has wiped out stocks and driven up prices. If so, then by not meeting the hardware requirements for that task do they keep demand exclusively for gamers and limit the price increases.
