Reviews: The AMD RX 6500 XT, which is not prone to mining, is also not very good in games.

When AMD announced its low-cost RX 6500 XT graphics card at CES earlier this month, the company suggested that the product was designed with limitations that would make it unattractive to cryptocurrency miners, who have been exacerbating an ongoing GPU shortage for more than a year. currently. But now that reviews of the card have surfaced, it’s clear that its gaming performance is a collateral damage from those limitations.

Reviews from Tom’s Hardware, PCGamer, TechSpot, Gamers Nexus, and a host of other gaming-focused YouTube channels are unanimous: The RX 6500 XT often underperforms previous generation graphics cards, and aside from performance, it has other caveats that limit its appeal.

The crux of the problem lies in the 64-bit memory interface, which limits the memory bandwidth that the card must work with. Plus, the card only has 4GB of RAM, which is starting to be a limiting factor in modern games, especially at resolutions above 1080p. Many tests have shown the RX 6500 XT to outperform the 8GB variant of the RX 5500 XT that launched in late 2019 for the same $199 (and you could actually find and buy it for that price).

Hardware limitations also make GPU support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing almost useless. Tom’s Hardware says that in games that can be played at all with ray tracing turned on, the settings should be low enough that the games don’t actually look much better. The ray tracing performance of the RX 6000 series lags behind Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series across the line, but it’s particularly disappointing here.

The card’s quad-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface is also a problem. When it has a PCIe 4.0 connection to work with, the RX 6500 XT looks fine, and even high-end cards usually don’t need all the bandwidth that a typical 16-lane connection provides. But this causes problems for PCs using PCI Express 3.0;

A TechSpot review found that using a PCIe 3.0 connection with the RX 6500 XT reduced 10 to 15 percent of the card’s already underwhelming performance. And PCIe 3.0 systems are not ancient history: 10th Gen Intel Core chips, any Ryzen processors that still run on 300 or 400 series motherboards, and Ryzen 5000G processors with integrated graphics use PCI Express 3.0 and are still being sold. from most retailers.

Even for people who don’t play games, the RX 6500 XT cuts some corners that make it less useful. The GPU only supports two displays instead of the usual four. The GPU’s video encoding and decoding capabilities have also been cut – the card can’t decode AV1 video streams, meaning it won’t be able to handle 4K video streams from a growing number of streaming services (AV1 support is one of the issues at the heart of the recent skirmish between Roku and Google). And the card cannot encode H.264 or H.265 video streams, features that help reduce the load on your processor if you’re streaming live video.

For clarification, an AMD employee pointed out that the Navi 24 GPU at the heart of the RX 6500 XT is intended for use in laptops where smaller video memory, 64-bit memory interfaces and other limitations are still common; these laptops also almost always include an integrated Intel or AMD GPU that can handle the missing video encoding and decoding capabilities. But Navi 24 has been redesigned for desktop release, where its limitations have become more apparent.

Unfortunately, the reality of today’s GPU market is that the $200 list price RX 6500 XT could still be a worthwhile purchase for someone on a budget or who can live with mediocre performance until the GPU market cools off (whenever that happens, the GPU manufacturers themselves misjudged the problem so many times that it became clear that no one really knows for sure). Nvidia’s old, inexpensive GeForce GTX 1650 is around $300 when you can find it, and the RX 6500 XT beats it by a wide margin most of the time.

Of course, it’s currently not possible to find the RX 6500 XT at retail unless you live near Micro Center or another general store that doesn’t sell GPUs online. Such are the things.