RADEON’S RDNA2 GOES BUDGET

Cut-down card cut down

AMD HAS RELEASED the first of its budgetorientated graphics cards sporting RDNA2 silicon, the RX 6500 XT, which was quickly followed by the RX 6400. Both use the new Navi 24, which was designed with laptops in mind. This helps explain some of the missing features, including media coding and decoding, and only two display controllers. The RX 6500 XT sports 4GB of GDDR6 RAM, and costs $199.

The GPU packs 16 Compute Units, 1,024 Stream processors, 16MB of AMD’s Infinity cache, and a ‘ game’ clock of 2,610MHz. That’s half of what you get on an RX 6600 XT, and the quoted fill rates and FLOPS numbers neatly match that. There are only four PCIe lanes, as the rest aren’t wired-up. That wouldn’t be too bad if you had a system with PCIe 4.0, but for anyone running PCIe 3.0, it will hurt as anything that hits the main memory will be pushed for bandwidth. The RX 6400 is the same, but with GPU power cut by another 25 percent. It’s expected to sell for $149.

When testers got hold of the card, they weren’t impressed, and things got spiky. At 1080p gaming, the RX 5600 XT is barely a match for AMD’s RX 580, which had a similar price at launch five years ago. At 1440p, it gets worse. Last spring, AMD claimed 4GB was “evidently not enough for today’s games”. It was right then and it’s still right now. Given more PCIe lanes, you might get away with it, but not here. The RX 6500 XT appears to be an improvised design, coupled with dubious cost-cutting.

The ray-tracing cores are next to useless, vital features are missing, and by every metric it’s mediocre. The recommended price may be regarded as budget by the market, but it isn’t cheap. AMD has delivered a cheaper RDNA2 card, but not the one we wanted. Of course, given the current market, where any card is a good card, the initial shipments sold out almost immediately.