Introduction

AMD today debuted the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 entry-level graphics cards, and we have with us the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 6500 XT. This is AMD's first GPU based on the new 6 nm foundry-node by TSMC, allowing for up to 18% higher transistor density than the TSMC 7 nm process, and with more electrical headroom, so AMD could dial up clock speeds. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is based on the 6 nm "Navi 24" silicon, a tiny 107 mm² chip based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the rest of the RX 6000 series. It is feature-packed and comes with DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including real-time ray tracing and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).



When it came out, the previous-generation RX 5500 XT was pushed as a 1080p gaming product with good e-sports chops. This remains the mandate of the RX 6500 XT—to offer 1080p AAA gaming with medium-thru-high settings. You can leverage FSR to improve eye-candy, as the game is being rendered at lower resolutions so frame-rates are high.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is based on the full "Navi 24" silicon and features 1,024 GPU cores across 16 compute units. There are a couple of wacky design choices AMD made with this SKU compared to the RX 5500 XT. First, the memory bus width is narrowed to just 64-bit, compared to 128-bit on the RX 5500 XT. This sees the memory bandwidth drop from 224 GB/s to 144 GB/s (not in half due to slightly higher memory clocks). AMD is using 16 MB of L3 Infinity Cache memory to improve the memory sub-system. Second, AMD gave this chip a puny PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface that is even narrower than the PCI-Express 4.0 x8 on the RX 5500 XT & RX 6500 XT. This is fine and dandy when using it on a motherboard with functional Gen4 PCIe slots, but we're not sure what happens when those with older Gen3 or Gen2 PCIe slots try to use it. That's why we explored this in our AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT PCI-Express Scaling article.

The AMD RX 6500 XT is a partner-driven launch; as such, no reference-design cards are available in the retail channel. The TUF Gaming RX 6500 XT by ASUS pairs this tiny GPU with a triple-slot cooling solution consisting of an elaborate heat pipe-fed heatsink and a pair of Axial-Tech fans. You also get such goodies as RGB LED lighting elements.

Although the starting price for the RX 6500 XT is set at $199, real-world pricing of the cards is closer to $300 or beyond. Given today's market conditions, we expect this card to end up somewhere between $300 and $400.