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
In all seriousness, though, I take it for your usage bandwidth doesn't matter much?
videocardz.com/newz/amds-199-radeon-rx-6500xt-officially-gets-e300-324-msrp-from-asus
On the other hand, I've heard of ASUS as a more expensive brand? So maybe there's hope other manufacturers' products will be less expensive. Though I don't really expect anything anymore.
Mind you, it does have two fans that go weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Also, if that's true, then that implies very good 6nm yields.
GAMING = DEAD
And holy crap, it's awful.
In fact in many games even AMD's intended PCI-E 4.0 x4 configuration cripples performance significantly, nevermind 3.0 x4.
Between this, gimped decoding options, and undoubted overpricing, only one conclusion: it's garbo. AMD is taking a piss.
There is probably a reason AMD didn't cripple the 5500XT to PCIE 4.0 x4 and video certainly highlights that, but the underlying hardware is a fair bit different. There is also a reason AMD didn't make the 6500XT 8GB VRAM as well which is you look at the hardware between both there are other reasons behind that it would be quite anemic if they had done so at least w/o even faster GDDR memory and even then hardware itself would struggle more in other import area's in regard to scaling performance towards higher image quality settings and resolutions.
6500XT is just a card fill a part of the product stack that's never very exciting and at the same time short of the pandemic and crypto wouldn't have been launched as a discrete GPU offering in the first place or with a even cheaper MSRP if it had.
Thanks
But, if you have the money for two 6500 XT, get a 6600 XT. The 6600 XT has double the cores, double the VRAM, and uses 8 PCIE lanes. Less complications that way.
Or look at Nvidia's offerings. That's an option too.
If AMD goes ahead with an MCM approach for a future GPU, it would likely implement some sort of Infinity Fabric, which would avoid some potential issues of going over PCIE (IF can provide more bandwidth, though it would depend on the implementation, plus reduced latency)