Radeon RX 6500 XT review - Introduction

Radeon RX 6500 XT review  

The release of the Radeon RX 6500 XT is now official and the graphics cards are available. The item was originally listed at 199 dollars / 215 EUR, but at street price fetching close to $250-300. Never in history has entry-level performance been more costly. These cards are fitted with merely 4GB graphics memory, based on a 64-bit wide bus and a sniff of Inifinity Cache (16MB L3). Tied towards a PCIe Gen x4 link (3.0/4.0) this card performs at RX 570/580 performance levels as long as you stick to Full HD. The card are thus positioned as a max 1920x1080 offering and will include a GPU based on NAVI24.  The Navi 24 GPU-based graphics cards are manufactured on a 6nm process and have a maximum of 4 GB of gddr6 memory and yeah; are connected through a very restricted 64-bit memory interface. The 4 GB GDDR6 RAM is buffered by a small 16 MB Infinity Cache though. The series card is projected to perform at the performance marker of the RX 570 XT  (Polaris) and GeForce GTX 1060. The RX 6500 XT features 1024 stream processors. Numerous board partners have stated their own variants and setups of the card. We've mapped the major specs below to help you see what to expect.

NAVI24

The Navi GPU 24 is manufactured using TSMC's 6 nm process, just as rumors had suggested. The Navi 24 chip should be the last of this generation's chipsets. While doing so, the chip also serves as AMD's first consumer product to be manufactured on a node smaller than 7 nanometers. Navi 24 has a chip area of approximately 107 square millimeters, which is sufficient room for "up to 16" compute units to be turned on at the same time. This would result in a total of 1024 computational cores or shader processors. Compared to the size of Navi 23, which powers the Radeon RX 6600 cards, Navi 24 is roughly half the size of Navi 23. For their part, the Navi 24 video cards should be viewed as an inexpensive way to get started with AMD's RDNA2 graphics architecture, however as stated, the asking price is 199 USD, with the market indication 300 USD. A 16 MB Infinity Cache, as well as up to 4 GB of GDDR6 RAM, will be available on a 64-bit memory bus. Thus, the GPU concentrates its efforts on low-cost PCs and games in 1080p resolution.

   

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series
	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800XT	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT	RX 6600 XT	RX 6500
GPU	Navi 21 XT(XH)	Navi 21 XT	Navi 21 XL	Navi 22 XT	Navi 23 XT	Navi 24 XT
Cores	5120	4608	3840	2560	2048	1024
TMUs	320	288	240	160	128	64
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64	32
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB	96 MB	32 MB	16 MB
Boost Clock	2250 MHz	2250 MHz	2105 MHz	2581 MHz	2359 MHz	2825
Memory Clock	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps
Memory	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	12 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit	64-bit
Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	384 GB/s	256 GB/s	128 GB/s
TBP	300W	300W	250W	230W	160W	107 / 120W
MSRP	999 USD	649 USD	579 USD	479 USD	379 USD	199 USD
Launch Date	December 2021	November 2021	November 2021	March 2021	August 2021	January 2022