PC Gamer: RX 6500 XT looks worse on paper than AMD's $199 GPU from six years ago

[Uriel]

I've seen a few comments from people that said it looks like things are going backwards in the GPU market. On the plus side, power consumption is down. Otherwise - this makes for rather depressing reading I think...

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/amd-rx-6500-xt-worse-than-rx-480/

 

[Uriel]

Lots of tech tubers are saying this will be a 3ghz card which will more than make up for the rest? Remember bus speed isnt everything (looking at you R9 290x)

If that was the case the flops would be higher.

 

[Uriel]

This may be the most disappointing graphics card since the Geforce FX 5200.

On the other hand performance is probably not going to be that far off an Xbox Series S. If it can manage to run new titles on par with that console at 1080p and costs a bit less than the console, it'll do the job for a few people.

 

[Uriel]

Tomshardware making a good point. At PCI-E 3.0 the bus bandwidth is going to be halved, which may present a significant enough bottleneck to affect performance on older motherboards. PCI-E 3.0 at X4 is limited to 4GB/s.

So this really may not be the best card for an affordable upgrade. Even if they did manage to find a decent spot on the price/performance curve.

 

[Uriel]

So AMD are claiming that 4GB GDDR6 was an intentional choice to ensure that mining appeal is limited: https://www.pcworld.com/article/563...in-amd-and-nvidias-new-budget-gpu-battle.html

 

[Uriel]

If you'd shown me the spec and asked me to guess a price I'd have said closer to $100 than $200.

I wonder how much profit AMD will make on these? I suspect they are taking advantage of the current GPU market mess and bringing in a product they can both shift in volume and make a high margin on.

Edit: for meaningless comparison my 3DFx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI had a 128 bit bus and a RRP of $99 back at the tail end of 1999...

 

[Uriel]

I don't see why a 4GB RX 5500 should behave any different than a 4GB RX 6500 when on PCI-E 3.0 x4. It's the same bottleneck. If your game wants to use system memory to compensate for the lack of VRAM, your limit is the PCIE bus. 4GB means you hit that bottleneck more frequently.

This is another RX 5500 test. https://www.techspot.com/review/2396-pcie-bandwidth-test/

If you're on PCI-E 3.0 it's a major limitation and there is no reason whatsoever why the RX 6500 is going to be any different. The combination of 4GB and PCIE 3.0 x4 knackers it in a way that wouldn't happen if you had either a x8 bus, a PCIE 4.0 bus or 8GB VRAM.

 

[Uriel]

I wonder if the x4 is a GPU limitation or board limitation? As in, could AIBs exercise a bit of freedom and engineer a much better graphics card out of these? It looks like either moving up to 8GB or making it a x8 card would massively improve things, in cases the pci-e bus bottleneck is being hit.

 

[Uriel]

I miss the days when mid-range graphics cards were slightly cut down high end things. I seem to recall the 9500 Pro was a $199 card and basically you messed with a resistor, flashed the bios and a 9700 (or was it the pro?) was yours.

Oh yeah, and the fastest graphics card you could buy at the time was $399. OK, it's a long time ago and inflation, and whatnot...

 

[Uriel]

I think part of the issue I have here is that I have trouble believing that this cost anywhere near $199 to manufacture. Everything about this card screams entry level and cost cutting to me.

The complication is the GPU is on a 6nm node. TBH I have no idea what that means for manufacturing costs because there's not much else to compare it to at the moment.

GPU core self reporting to GPU-Z that it's a PCI-E 4.0 x16 (before it's corrected). It's not quite clear to me exactly where on the card the x4 bottleneck physically is from what techpowerup are reporting. Do they mean it's on the chip (but not the its core) or just that it's a limitation of the card PCB?

 

[Uriel]

Yes - and I appreciate that AMD need to make their money for design fees etc. However compared to recent years if you showed me those specs and asked me to guess a price I'd have it somewhere in the region of £100. AMD themselves are comparing it to GTX 1050 and GTX 1650. Those cards launched at RRP not much more than that.

 

[Uriel]

It gets better. From the Kitguru review "In other words, on a PCIe 3.0 interface, the RX 6500 XT is worse than AMD’s $169/£165 product from 2017."

Can I change the thread title?

https://www.kitguru.net/components/dominic-moass/amd-rx-6500-xt-review-ft-gigabyte-eagle/30/

 

[Uriel]

Of all the terrible things this card is, a cash grab is not it

Actually yes, flatly I believe this card is a cash grab. I don't believe manufacturing price increases or logistic difficulties are anywhere near close to explaining the price this has launched at. This is a dirt cheap card to produce and AMD want to rake in more profit than usual while they can, aiming for the kind of % margin per unit that is normally only seen on higher end cards.

Really want Intel and nVIDIA to hurry up and get their upcoming cards near this price bracket launched. Actually ideally with some cheaper versions at 4GB (more vRAM versions too of course, but maybe there is something in 4GB keeping the miners at bay) to show up what a stupid design decision limiting this to an x4 PCIe bus was. The one thing likely to bring down prices at this level is competition.

Edit: I still haven't quite worked out whether it would be possible to release a 128 bit or more PCIe lanes version of this card with the same GPU. If it's technically possible, I wouldn't be entirely surpirsed to see a 128 bit or x8 version released in future.

 

[Uriel]

Can't wait to see everyone's excuses when both NVIDIA and Intel come in at higher than expected prices as well.

To an extent, if nVIDIA and Intel just release cards where they haven't so obviously cheaped out on manufacturing, that's a different matter. I honestly would not be whinging if this didn't have such fundamental design flaws. I know there's no time to go pouring over my previous posts, but I've never complained about any AMD card launch before. This is just a terrible card, with fundamental design flaws meaning it won't reach what modest potential it might have had in a a lot of systems.

 

[Uriel]

Would AMD's card be worth £300 if it had a better PCIe bus?

Cards are 'worth' whatever people are willing to pay for them. I would simply not be willing to buy a card with these compromised specifications as an 'upgrade' for an older system. It's worth very little to me. I'd get a different card that performs on par instead.

I might consider it if building a new system with an AMD APU, and PCIe 4.0, which gets round its major limitations limitations. In that case it currently fits in the £200-250 range based on performance of cards at currently similar prices. But honestly, if this is for a PC that can play newer games I just wouldn't. My advice would be if you must game on a PC, would be get a pre-built laptop with a reasonable GPU. If you want to game but the platform doesn't matter - get an Xbox Series S instead.

As for the RTX 3050 - it looks like it's on par with a GTX 1660 or thereabouts and supports newer features. But the prices are just painful for standalone GPUs now. That class of GPU is just hilariously expensive (would be lovely if they made £239, as nVIDIA are still suggesting) My advice would be go pre-built (laptop or desktop) or get a console for gaming. If you're an upgrading gamer stick to 2nd hand at the moment.

 

[Uriel]

Could you imagine if Microsoft allowed loading windows on the Series X. Actually it's scary to think about because stock would be 10 times worse

I was thinking this actually. Microsoft allowing Windows on both Series X and S. Of course, you'd need to pay for a license - but in terms of value for money at the moment it would be staggering.

 

[Uriel]

Is this GPU as disappointing as FX 5200?

I'd say comparable to that. It's a more similar situation to the FX 5200 than the Geforce 4 MX series, in that it's effectively too weak to run its generational features, rather than an older architecture being given a misleading name.

Edit: I would really like to see some in game comparisons with this and the Xbox Series S running the same new generation game at similar settings at 1080p. I think this card could be reasonably successful of it can manage that and the price stays near to the Series S price or below.

 

[Uriel]

Something I will concede to AMD here is that, if they did put some out at a significantly reduced RRP, scalpers would be on to them, and they would soon find their selling value being sold on in existing market conditions. From that perspective, I would rather AMD had a bigger slice than random people profiteering.

It would be even better if they put enough volume into the market there was a chance of prices staying reasonable, but that's a big ask.

 

[Uriel]

I note that these were designed to go alongside mobile Ryzen 6000 series APUs. I wonder what the chances are that could be in some sort of crossfire-like configuration, where the RDNA 2 based graphics of the APU could be used alongside this GPU to improve rendering performance.