The tests for the Radeon RX 6500 XT show how broken the graphics card market is

The first tests for the RX 6500 XT from AMD are now online. But the reviewers are sobered by the graphics card. And yet the release of the RX 6500 XT shows what is currently going wrong on the market.

That’s what it’s about: Today, January 19, 2022, AMD released the smallest official Radeon graphics card, the RX 6500 XT. The first independent reviews of the graphics card are now online.

But enthusiasm for the smallest Radeon model is limited, to say the least. Here we explain what the problems with the graphics card are and what that means for potential buyers.

The RX 6500 XT is said to be AMD’s smallest and cheapest graphics card

What kind of graphics card is that anyway? AMD presented the cheapest RX 6000 graphics card at CES 2022 with the RX 6500 XT. In terms of performance, it is also at the bottom end of the model range.

Our colleagues from GameStar had already reported that AMD wants to protect the RX 6500 XT from extreme pricesby only equipping the graphics card with 4 GB of video memory. This means that the graphics card is pretty uninteresting for miners, since the VRAM is too small.

But many users believe that 4 GB of video memory could also be too little for gaming in 2022. The release and the tests for the RX 6500 XT now show that this is exactly one of the many problems with the graphics card.

The performance of the 6500 XT barely compares to the previous generation

We are used to the fact that new hardware such as graphics cards or processors also means more performance. Because manufacturers like AMD or Nvidia install better chips or rely on other technical tricks to generate more power.

However, something happened with the RX 6500 XT that left many perplexed faces among the testers. Because the RX 6500 XT hardly comes close to the RX 5500 XT from 2019 in terms of performance and fights in many rankings with the GeForce GTX 1650. After all, this is a 3-year-old graphics card. This is reported by the online magazine HardwareLuxx (via hardwareluxx.de).

The colleagues from PC Games Hardware see it similarly (via pcgameshardware.de). In the test benchmarks, the RX 6500 XT hardly comes close to the RX 570 in games like Anno 1800 and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla – and it’s almost 6 years old.

The online magazine Techspot is also sober (via techspot.cif). The introduction already says “a really bad graphics card.” Older accelerators like the RX 470 offer fewer limitations than the RX 6500 XT and also deliver better performance in the benchmarks.

What is the problem of the graphics card? In most tests, the RX 6500 XT does not manage to display modern games with full details. In order to make the graphics card cheap and, above all, easily available, AMD has made some compromises.

• AMD deliberately limited the video memory to 4 GB to make the card unattractive for miners.
• To save money, the Radeon RX 6500 XT only offers hardware-based H.264 and H.265 decoding, but no encoding. As a result, certain AMD features such as ShadowPlay and ReLive cannot be used. However, the 6-year-old RX 470/570 offers these features.
• The PCIe interface is limited to version 4.0 and ×4 (four so-called lanes), while new cards such as the RTX 3080 offer PCIe-4.0 x16, which provides a significantly higher, although not essential, bandwidth. A small memory interface can become a problem, especially with large amounts of data.

Before the Corona crisis, there would never have been such a graphics card

This is why the situation is so dramatic: In my opinion, before the corona pandemic and the scarcity of resources, such a graphics card would probably never have come onto the market. It simply would not have been competitive and customers would have instead used the similarly expensive but better equipped predecessor graphics card or an alternative from the competition.

In the current situation, however, this is not possible because most users want to get a graphics card at a reasonable price. Because the current situation means that gamers hardly have a chance to buy a graphics card:

• Due to the corona pandemic, too few semiconductors are currently being manufactured. For this reason, there are currently too few semiconductors for graphics cards, consoles and many other devices.
• The little hardware that is currently available for purchase is really expensive. Because either dealers are already demanding a lot of money or so-called scalpers add a hefty surcharge for a graphics card to the purchase price. After all, they want to earn money themselves.
• The third problem is crypto miners, who are also targeting graphics cards. Because cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are currently worth a lot. It is worth investing here for many.

With the possible compromises, AMD makes the graphics cards unattractive for miners. On the other hand, the chip of the smallest graphics card fits on a single wafer (via computerbase.de). Wafers are the disks in semiconductor production on which the microchips are manufactured. This step could at least mean that the offer is better than previous models.

Nevertheless, there is still hope for gamers: Other manufacturers also want to offer cheap graphics cards from 2022 and they could still offer a few surprises. There is a manufacturer that hardly anyone in Germany should know. MeinMMO explains in the following article whether this can be a possible insider tip:

Gamers are now hoping for a cheap graphics card – but it doesn’t come from AMD or Nvidia