AMD RX 6500 XT Review ft. Gigabyte Eagle

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RX 6500 XT Eagle3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. Assassin's Creed Valhalla6. Cyberpunk 20777. Death Stranding8. Far Cry 69. Forza Horizon 510. Hitman 311. Horizon Zero Dawn12. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy13. Red Dead Redemption 214. Resident Evil Village15. Total War Saga: Troy16. Watch Dogs: Legion17. PCIe 4.0 vs PCIe 3.0 Investigation18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Ray Tracing20. Cost Per Frame Analysis21. Clock Speed22. GPU Temperatures23. Acoustics24. Power Draw: 1080p25. Power Draw: 1440p26. Performance per Watt: 1080p27. Performance per Watt: 1440p28. Total System Power Draw29. Overclocking30. Closing Thoughts31. View All Pages

Following on from the RX 6600 that hit the market back in October, today sees the launch of AMD's lowest-end RDNA 2 GPU, the RX 6500 XT. Designed to offer a solid 1080p gaming experience for $199, or £180, can a GPU with just 4GB VRAM, a 64-bit memory bus and a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface really prove a success? As it turns out, the answer is ‘no', and quite an emphatic one at that.

Announced as part of AMD's keynote at CES 2022, the RX 6500 XT sits at the bottom of the RDNA 2 stack. Using brand new Navi 24 silicon, fabbed on a new 6nm process from TSMC, this is likely the lowest-end – and last – RDNA 2 GPU, completing the family which first appeared with the RX 6800 XT in November 2020.

That means it is also set to be the most affordable, with an MSRP of $199 announced during the CES keynote. Meanwhile, we are told UK pricing will start at £179.99, which is also the price the Gigabyte RX 6500 XT Eagle card in for testing today is expected to launch at.

For that cash, AMD has aimed the RX 6500 XT squarely for 1080p gaming, and at lower than Ultra settings, too. That's an interesting move considering previous cards at this price-point were designed to be 1080p Ultra gaming champs, and both the RX 480 and RX 580 hold up exceptionally well, even today. Let's get into it.

	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT	RX 6600 XT	RX 6600	RX 6500 XT
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	6nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	17.2 billion	11.1 billion	11.1 billion	5.4 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	336 mm²	237 mm²	237 mm²	107 mm²
Ray Accelerators	60	40	32	28	16
Compute Units	60	40	32	28	16
Stream Processors	3840	2560	2048	1792	1024
Game GPU Clock	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 2424MHz	Up to 2359MHz	Up to 2044 MHz	Up to 2685 MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 2581MHz	Up to 2589MHz	Up to 2491MHz	Up to 2825MHz
ROPs	96	64	64	64	32
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	96MB	32MB	32MB	16MB
Memory	16GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	4GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	384 GB/s	256 GB/s	224 GB/s	144 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit	64-bit
Board Power	250W	230W	160W	132W	107W

Let’s first look over the key specifications of the GPU. Using the new Navi 24 GPU, measuring an incredibly small 107 mm², the RX 6500 XT is – more or less – half of the RX 6600 XT. It sports 16 Compute Units, for a total of 1024 stream processors.

RDNA 2 houses one ray accelerator per CU, so there’s a total of 16 with the RX 6500 XT. Four texture units per CU gives a total of 64, while there’s also 32 ROPs. Likely thanks to the new 6nm node, clock speed has been increased to its highest level yet for RDNA 2, with a rated boost clock of 2825 MHz.

As for the memory configuration, this is the hardest pill to swallow, with an exceptionally narrow 64-bit memory interface paired with just 4GB of GDDR6 memory. The memory itself is clocked slower at 18Gbps, resulting in total memory bandwidth hitting 144GB/s, though AMD claims an ‘effective' memory bandwidth of 231.6GB/s thanks to 16MB of Infinity Cache. Crucially, the PCIe interface is limited to x4, which will reduce bandwidth further when used on a PCIe 3.0 platform.

Lastly, total board power (TBP) is rated at 107W, a reduction of 25W, or 19%, compared to the RX 6600. We are using our new GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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