AMD hides 2020 blogpost claiming 4GB VRAM is ‘not enough for today’s games’

Update, Jan 22 15:16 GMT: The original blogpost is now live (again). It was offline for at least four hours (as of when we spotted it) but possibly longer. We do not accept the timing was coincidental. Every other blog post we opened at the time from community.amd.com remained accessible and multiple media outlets have confirmed our story.

AMD has hidden a blog post from its own website that, in June 2020, claimed ‘4GB of VRAM… is evidently not enough for todays games.' This comes ahead of the RX 6500 XT launch at 2pm today, a graphics card with just 4GB of video memory, that has already received heavy criticism online.

The blog, which was previously accessible via this URL, was public as recently as yesterday – which I know because I accessed it and took the below screenshot. When re-visiting the blog today, I was met with an initial login window which was not there yesterday, asking me to enter my AMD Community details. I registered an account, entered the login details, and was then met with an ‘Access Denied' message. Another team member independently tried the same process and we were able to replicate the denial of access.

If you try and find this blog on Google, it appears as the top result, with the full URL showing as ‘https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/game-beyond-4gb/ba-p/414776'. Today, the words ‘private-archive-blog' have now been added to the URL, while it is no longer visible on the author's AMD Community profile, confirming to us that AMD has hidden it from public view.

This does not look good for AMD, at all. We can't comment on the RX 6500 XT, but it simply cannot be a coincidence that on the same day AMD is launching a 4GB graphics card, a previous blog post from the company saying ‘4GB of VRAM… is evidently not enough for todays games' is hidden from the public.

The blog, written by Adit Bhutani, Product Marketing Specialist for Radeon and Gaming, also makes reference to ‘AMD… leading the industry at providing gamers with high VRAM graphics solutions across the entire product offering,' which obviously doesn't apply to the 4GB RX 6500 XT when the RTX 3050 will ship with 8GB VRAM, while it also points out that ‘gamers might expect several issues' when playing with ‘insufficient levels of Graphics Memory, even at 1080p.'

This is in sharp contrast to the dialogue around the RX 6500 XT, with Radeon Vice President Laura Smith claiming that ‘the four gigs of frame buffer, that’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of triple-A games,' with Smith also suggesting a ‘gamer-first' mentality around this card.

Unfortunately for AMD, the article is preserved on Wayback Machine and was widely covered by the press at the time (see Tweaktown, OC3D, ExtremeTech), which only makes this attempt to hide the blog post even more baffling. If this really is an underhand attempt to hide comments AMD made about 4GB GPUs ahead of the RX 6500 XT launch, it really speaks volumes and is honestly shocking behaviour from the company.

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KitGuru says: What do you make of AMD's decision to hide the blog post from 2020? It is not going to reflect on them well, I think.

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