AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Reviews Are Shameful

There are hardly any graphics cards when AMD comes around the corner with the Radeon RX 6500 XT at an “entry-level price”. Is this the salvation for desperate gamers? Judging by the first reviews, the company should be ashamed of this card.

“Make more out of your game”: With these nice words, AMD had introduced its new graphics card, which is supposed to make RDNA2 technology available in the “entry-level class” for the first time. With a recommended price of 200 US dollars – in Germany it’s about 280 Euros – Radeon RX 6500 XT can at least live up to this low-priced claim in terms of the price tag. Doesn’t everything sound promising in a time of absolute GPU shortage? The performance data shatters this hope with a loud bang.

AMD has made so many dubious decisions with its RX 6500 XT that you don’t quite know where to put your finger in the wound first. Obvious problem: Although AMD itself had railed against GPUs with little VRAM, they probably don’t see a problem to install only 4 GB here – exactly the amount that they themselves had called “no longer sufficient” for current titles in 2020. However, the connection via a tiny 64 bit memory bus also makes us wonder.
Also doubtful on the border of the laughable: The Radeon RX 6500 XT has 16 ray tracing cores. Here we can only assume that the marketing material did not want to do without the new technology, in everyday use almost every ray tracing application should clearly exceed the card’s possibilities.

PCI

Last but not least, AMD’s new entry-level card can only use four PCIe 4.0 lanes, which again leads to a problem in older systems. If the card is used in combination with PCIe 3.0, the available bandwidth is halved from 8 GB/s to 4 GB/s. “The bottom line is that you get the performance of the RX 580, sometimes less, because you only have half of the VRAM,” concludes PCGamer on this unfavorable constellation. A similarly damning verdict is also given by the respected experts from Gamers Nexus: “AMD RX 6500 XT is worse than 2016 GPUs”.