This week AMD launched launched the first “budget friendly” RX 6000-series GPU with its RDNA2 technology, the RX 6500 XT. The launch was not without controversy however, as in order for AMD to hit its desired $199 price point it neutered the Navi24 GPU to the point where it is missing a lot of features that are considered necessary on a modern GPU, even for an entry-level model. For example, the card ships with just 4GB of VRAM, which the company said was a decision it made to discourage crypto mining. Potentially more impactful is the decision by AMD to ship the card with a PCI Express 4.0 (PCIe 4.0) interface with only four PCIe lanes to the CPU.
Now, a four-lane interface (x4) by itself isn’t necessarily bad, but since the card is designed to be an upgrade to an older system by way of its price point and overall performance, it’s highly likely that anyone buying a GPU like the 6500 XT has an older PC. That means this potential upgrader also has an older motherboard, which likely has the previous PCI Express 3.0 interface, which offers half the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0. Also, there have been many GPUs in this price range over the years with 16 PCIe lanes, including the $149 (at launch, $400 currently) Nvidia GTX 1650. Sure, AMD has reduced the number of PCIe lanes on previous entry-level cards, but not by this much. For example the similarly outfitted Radeon RX 5500 XT from 2019 also had 4GB of VRAM, but came with eight PCIe lanes.
Test results show that if you run the RX 6500 XT on an older PCIe 3.0 system, it’s totally fine at Medium quality settings. However, when you crank up the detail settings to Ultra levels, even at 1080p, performance can crater in certain titles thanks to the one-two punch of insufficient VRAM and not enough bandwidth
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