The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is, in many ways, exactly what we’ve been waiting for: an inexpensive $200 GPU designed to deliver solid 1080p gaming performance. Unfortunately, the reality is slightly different — the card isn’t widely available at that enticing price point, and early reports indicate that performance isn’t as consistent as it should be, even for this class of card.
One potential reason for this erratic performance is AMD’s choice to include only four PCIe lanes in the RX 6500 XT, as opposed to the more common 8 or 16. This makes sense for modern PCIe 4.0, where each lane can provide an impressive amount of bandwidth, but what happens when you use the 6500 XT on a PCIe 3.0 system with half the bandwidth per lane?
That’s what many potential buyers of the RX 6500 XT will experience, and that’s what we’ve tested—because our standardized GPU testbed is one such PCIe 3.0 system. We also ran similar PCIe 3.0 vs. 4.0 tests to see exactly how much performance was left on the desktop.
Our GPU tests include comparisons to the lower echelons of AMD and Nvidia’s current-generation lineups, as well as a classic graphics card of yesteryear: the RX 580 8GB. This GPU debuted in 2018 at $249 before dropping below $200 prior to The Great Upmarking, putting it in roughly the same weight class as the 6500 XT.
There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get started — starting with a quick look at this card and its specs so we can get a better idea of what we’re dealing with here.
Interestingly, the RX 6500 XT is AMD’s first 6nm design, despite using the same RDNA2 architecture as other RX 6000 series graphics cards. We don’t expect this change to significantly improve efficiency, but it may have contributed to the design’s very high game clocks. It’s rated at 2610MHz on the spec sheet, but we often see GPU core frequencies hovering around 2844MHz — impressive. Power consumption is also extremely low considering the frequency, with a rated TDP of 107W compared to 160W for the RX 6600 XT. That means this should be one of the easiest boards to include in a low-power system, while still including features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Elsewhere, the card is basically half the specs of the RX 6600 XT. There’s half as much compute – 16 compute units vs 32 – and 4GB of GDDR6 and 16MB of infinite cache instead of 8GB of GDDR6 and 32MB of infinite cache. The memory system uses only a 64-bit bus compared to the 128-bit bus on the RX 6600 XT. PCIe connectivity has also been cut in half, from PCIe 4.0 x8 on the 6600 and 6600 XT to PCIe 4.0 x4 on the 6500 XT, which, as we mentioned above, has a performance impact.
| AMD GPU Specifications | CU | game clock | video memory | memory interface | TDP | price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX 6900XT | 80 | 2015MHz | 16GB GDDR6 | 256-bit + 128MB IC | 300W | $999 |
| RX 6800XT | 72 | 2015MHz | 16GB GDDR6 | 256-bit + 128MB IC | 300W | $649 |
| RX 6800 | 60 | 1815MHz | 16GB GDDR6 | 256-bit + 128MB IC | 250W | $579 |
| RX 6700XT | 40 | 2424MHz | 12GB GDDR6 | 192-bit + 96MB IC | 230W | $479 |
| RX 6600XT | 32 | 2359MHz | 8GB GDDR6 | 128-bit + 32MB IC | 160W | $379 |
| RX 6600 | 28 | 2044MHz | 8GB GDDR6 | 128-bit + 32MB IC | 132W | $329 |
| RX 6500XT | 16 | 2610MHz | 4GB GDDR6 | 64-bit + 16MB IC | 107W | $199 |
| RX 5700XT | 40 | 1755MHz | 8GB GDDR6 | 256 bits | 225W | $399 |
| RX 5700 | 36 | 1625MHz | 8GB GDDR6 | 256 bits | 180W | $349 |
| RX 5600XT | 36 | 1375MHz | 6GB GDDR6 | 192 bits | 150W | $279 |
| RX 5500XT | twenty two | 1717MHz | 8GB GDDR6 | 128 bits | 130W | $199 |
Our particular review unit is the Powercolor Fighter, the Taiwanese company’s entry-level GPU design. It still looks and feels good, with a dual-slot design, dual fans, and a six-pin auxiliary power input, but connections are limited to one HDMI 2.1 port and one DisplayPort 1.4 port. HDMI 2.1 is great for connecting to a modern TV or monitor, supporting 4K 120Hz and 10-bit HDR over a single cable, but while many RX 570 and RX 580 models boast DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort.
Internally, AMD’s RX 6500 design lacks some of the media features available on the RX 6600 and later — no AV1 decoding and H.264/H.265 hardware video encoders. The former is annoying because AV1 is a future-proof, data-efficient way to stream video from sites like Netflix and YouTube, while the latter is more annoying because it means you need to rely on software encoding to record gameplay or Stream to Twitch.
Our test rig was in line with our review of the RX 6600 and 6600 XT. We use a Core i9 10900K system because when the current-gen GPU launches in 2020, it offers great gaming performance with an Asus Maximus 13 Hero Z590 motherboard, dual-channel G.Skill Trident-Z Royal DDR4-3600 CL16 memory and Box’s 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe drive. To keep our CPU performance stable, we clocked all cores to 5GHz and kept them cool with a 240mm Eisbaer Aurora liquid cooler. Everything is powered by a reliable 1000W Corsair RM1000x PSU from Infinite Computing.
Now that you’re familiar with the premise, hardware, and our test equipment, let’s take a look at the results!
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Analysis
- Introduction and Hardware Analysis [This Page]
- Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Gaming Benchmarks Part 1
- Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – Gaming Benchmarks Part 2
- Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin’s Creed Unity – Gaming Benchmarks Part 3
- Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 – RT Gaming Benchmarks
- PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0 – How Does Bandwidth Affect Frame Rates?
- AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT – Digital Foundry’s Verdict
