Friday, January 7th 2022
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Limited To PCIe 4.0 x4 Interface
The recently announced AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT only features a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface according to specifications and images of the card published on the ASRock site. This is equivalent to a PCIe 3.0 x8 link or a PCIe 2.0 x16 connection and is a step down from the Radeon 6600 XT which features a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface and the Radeon 6700 XT with a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface. This fact is only specified by ASRock with AMD, Gigabyte, ASUS, and MSI not mentioning the PCIe interface on their respective pages. The RX 6500 XT also lacks some of the video processing capabilities of other RX 6000 series cards including the exclusion of H264/HEVC encoding and AV1 decoding.
Sources:
ASRock (via VideoCardz), 3DCenter
118 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Limited To PCIe 4.0 x4 Interface
The GTX 980 loses 5% of its performance when run at PCIe 3.0 x4
It's fair to say that the 6500XT stands to lose at least 5% of its performance when used in a PCIe 3.0 system as it's likely to fall somewhere between the range of those two cards.
If you have a PCIe 3.0 system you plan to put a 6500XT into it's worth bearing in mind that you're not getting the advertised performance, but 92-95% of what you'd otherwise get is still good enough that it's not a deal-breaker.
I just trust AMD engineers know what they are doing there and will base my decision on final performance numbers and ofc pricing/availability (so almost certainly nope due to latter :roll: )
"The RX 6500 XT also lacks some of the video processing capabilities of other RX 6000 series cards including the exclusion of H264/HEVC encoding and AV1 decoding."
If so that's a major ding against it right there. Smaller cards like this should be strong with codecs to offset the mediocre gaming performance. I was considering this for my HTPC, but if it's true about the codecs, then nope, sorry, I will keep my money. But the memory bandwidth is almost 1/4 due to the 64-bit memory interface vs the 256-bit interface of the RX470. One thing is probably certain, miners won't be buying it, and probably neither with anyone else lol (except oems) And with the possible omission of hardware codecs, it's looking like a waste of silicon and a PCB.
I'd be surprised if Nvidia don't eventually release a desktop variant of GA107, which at it's fully-enabled spec is called the "Laptop 3050 Ti". In laptops it is configurable from 35-80W, so presumably it would make a good candidate for a low-profile, slot-powered HTPC card.
To the best of my knowledge GA107 has all the features of the Ampere lineup with nothing cut.
The 6500XT is half the performance, but PCI 3.0 x4 is also half the bandwidth, implying that the 6500XT will very likely saturate the bus.
The performance drop caused by putting a 6500XT into a PCIe 3.0 slot could easily be the 98% drop to 93% drop in the chart above if everything scales linearly (it doesn't, but the factors that scale non-linearly might cancel each other out - we'll have to wait for real-world PCIe scaling tests like the above test to know for sure).
I don't expect the 75W HTPC cards to return anymore. AMD's current APUs (and future Intel) are good enough and made that segment obsolete.
I tested a PC with AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G APU and it's really good for everything except hi-res AAA gaming. Any person that's happy with FHD at medium-low settings can skip the old $100-$200 GPU range because the APUs are good enough.
My solution is to get a more expensive card than necessary and then massively reduce the TDP. The 3060 I have restricted to around 120W and whilst I'm obviously losing some performance it's near-silent whilst still being moderately capable.
*yeah, I'm not sure what Microsoft was thinking this generation.
www.zotac.com/jp/product/graphics_card/geforce%C2%AE-gt-730-pcie-x1
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?mobile=No&interface=PCIe%202.0%20x1&sort=generation
Oh wait, how about some "modern" GPUs on the 133MHz PCI interface?
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gt-610-pci.c914
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-hd-7350-oem-pci.c2365
And this was with x8. 6500XT is x4
Now I really wanna see how this card performs in a 3.0 VS 4.0 comparison. I doubt infinity cache will help it that much 6400 is oem only. 6500XT is not.
I jest but of the four computers I have ATM two Intel three and and all released in the last two years None have pciex 3 main slots?!.
So
The GPU seems to be exceptionally frugal in all the import ways, lowering die space and even smd (=Surface Mounted Device, think of things like capacitors, resistors, power regulators) part count, of which many are in short supply as well.
This will allow them make the absolute most of their resources and get as many cards into peoples hands as possible. I'm quite certain most people in this segment would rather choose a card with it's features slightly gimped over no card at all.
It's probably gonna be quite a big success, even with it's somewhat gimped features, especially since they'll probably be sold the most combined with a new PC/Laptop which will have PCI-E 4.0 anyway. Furthermore, the lack of encoding/decoding hardware can usually be negated by software decoding, something desktop PC's should have no problem with, while laptops will have decoding hardware in the iGPU anyway.
AMD got PCIe 4.0 over 2 years ago but it existed only on high-end boards (X570) that make up a pretty small proportion of AMD's overall market. It only really arrived for mainstream buyers with Zen3 and the B550 which is barely a year ago (Nov 2020) and even then the cheapest point of entry was the 5600X which is a good $140 more expensive than the equvalent Zen2 or Comet Lake configuration.
Given that there are a lot more Intel machines out there than AMD machines, I think it's fair to assume that there are a huge number of modern PCIe 3.0 motherboards that will be wanting a GPU update before they're retired.
Let's face it, if you're in the market for a 6500XT you're probably not rocking a recent flagship motherboard and CPU, making its PCIe 3.0 performance even more important!
What a joke.
And after thinking about it one of mine is pciex 3 I forgot pre x570s were that for a moment there.
I think the people should be told, most of these will be in entry level OEM gaming rigs and for those x4 pciex4 will be fine.
Others might have something to complain about, though some here are definitely being way too dramatic, tests show x4 pciex 4 has enough bandwidth.
Lots of engineers these days on these forums, in where their skills obviously exceeds that of AMD mosts professional out there.