The Radeon RX 6500 XT is so bad I don’t even know where to begin, and I know I’m kind of doing this review in reverse, but damn it I’m just flawed by AMD here. The 6500 XT is a combination of bad decisions that all point to AMD just taking advantage of the current market and therefore abusing ingenuous gamers in the process.
The 107mm2 Navi 24 die that the 6500 XT is based on was originally intended for use in laptops. In normal circumstances it probably wouldn’t make its way to desktop cards, and if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be a $200 product. Think more like sub-$100 RX 550 replacement. But due to current market conditions, AMD has decided to cash in with a product that makes no sense on the desktop. Worse still, it's in most ways worse than products that have occupied this price point for half a decade.
The shortcomings with the 6500 XT include:
1) It’s limited to PCI Express x4 bandwidth.
2) It only comes with 4GB of VRAM, there’s no 8GB model.
3) Hardware encoding isn’t supported, so you can’t use ReLive to capture gameplay, which is a deal breaker, and
4) Because it was intended for use in laptops, only two display outputs are supported. This for $200... which could transform to $300+ after the initial run on MSRP cards disappear.
Steven Walton / TechSpot
