At the moment is the launch day of the Radeon RX 6500 XT, AMD’s newest finances graphics card. It is at the moment within the PC Gamer take a look at bench for testing and evaluation forward of our full assessment, although within the meantime it has been dropped at my consideration that this card’s 4GB of GDDR6 reminiscence falls foul of AMD’s personal blanket advertising and marketing statements.
In Might 2020, AMD revealed a weblog submit titled ‘Game Beyond 4GB‘, through which it laid out why 4GB of VRAM was “not sufficient for at the moment’s video games.” Now that was fairly an announcement on the time, contemplating AMD supplied the RX 5500 XT in 4GB trim, although at the least AMD supplied an 8GB model of that graphics card must you see match to heed its warning.
These days, that very same weblog submit is inflicting a headache for the RX 6500 XT, which is fitted with simply 4GB of VRAM and has no choice for 8GB.
Dom Moass over at KitGuru was the primary to revisit the weblog submit, and he later reported that the weblog submit was briefly unavailable for a interval at the moment, January 19, and the RX 6500 XT’s launch date. The phrases ‘private-archive-blog’ have been appended to the URL throughout this time, and the submit was nonetheless seen on Google although now not accessible on the location.
The weblog submit has since resurfaced and is once more dwell on the AMD group web site. The explanation for its disappearing act will not be clear, although the timing of the web page’s downtime is kind of the coincidence.
As for the RX 6500 XT’s 4GB reminiscence capability, AMD’s Radeon VP Laura Smith claims this is because of this card’s “gamer first” approach, and is purposefully slim as a technique to thwart cryptocurrency miners.
That is clearly not the excellent news for players that AMD feels it to be, although. We find yourself being supplied a card with a reminiscence specification that does not stand as much as AMD’s requirements again in 2020—not to mention 2022—and seems far worse off for it in gaming benchmarks.
There is no doubt that AMD is in a predicament, nonetheless, and Nvidia too. AMD can not meet demand with its provide chain the way in which it’s, and there is not any simple out. A decrease reminiscence specification might certainly find yourself growing the cardboard’s general availability, but it surely’s showing an increasing number of like a card that nobody truly needs.
We’re nonetheless working the numbers for our RX 6500 XT assessment, so I will reserve full judgement till we’re utterly happy they are a good illustration. That stated, the preliminary numbers we noticed throughout testing are the explanation for this card’s prolonged benchmarking, and that it seems this card affords zero enchancment over a lot older AMD graphics playing cards, together with the RX 580 and RX 5500 4GB.
To drive that time dwelling, the RX 5500 4GB was out there for $170 at launch. That is $30 cheaper than the RX 6500 XT launching at the moment.
And that is if yow will discover the RX 6500 XT at MSRP, which has been doable at launch although might show difficult as cheaper playing cards make means for dearer third-party designs.
Trying again at 2020, it is clear that AMD felt 4GB was now not appropriate for contemporary gaming. Now, over a 12 months and a half later, it is releasing a 4GB finances graphics card with no trace of irony. There’s maybe no higher indictment of the graphics card market’s dire standing over the previous few years than that.
