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Dorsum at CES a few weeks ago, AMD invited people to "pace upwards your game" with its upcoming Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card. Information technology was marketed as the first "entry level" RDNA2 GPU from the company, and that condition was confirmed by its low-ish request cost of just $199. The prospect of a budget-friendly GPU with advanced features is certainly appetizing, and quite welcome right at present given the current GPU shortage. However, it seems the launch isn't going very well, for one simple reason: the company graced the GPU with a measly 4GB of VRAM. Information technology's a chip embarrassing for AMD, given that it has railed against such low RAM loadouts in the by. The Radeon 6500 XT launch has not gone well.

Of course, in that location's other reasons for the card receiving sideways glances in online reviews. It has a minuscule 64-bit retention bus while offering 16 ray tracing cores, which seems totally pointless. Ray tracing would admittedly crush a carte du jour with this corporeality of horsepower, so information technology's more of a marketing gimmick than a feature gamers would actually employ. AMD did endow the card with 16MB of Infinity Cache, which does help with memory bandwidth, but with such a narrow pipe it's actually an uphill battle. Information technology'due south also limited to simply four PCIe 4.0 lanes, which means if the card is dropped into an older system that merely has PCIe 3.0, available bandwidth is cut in half, going from 8GB/southward to 4GB/south. PCGamer writes: "Effectively yous're getting RX 580 performance, sometimes lower because of having half the VRAM."

However, the biggest event AMD is dealing with is its alleged attempt to conceal a blog mail written in June of 2020, which argued that 4GB of RAM was insufficient for the the latest titles (which we covered here at the fourth dimension). Kitguru noticed the post had been scrubbed from AMD's website, which seemingly prompted the company to repost it in all its glory, only Kitguru noted that the post was missing for approximately four hours or and then.

In the original post AMD declares, "Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is patently non enough for todays games. Go Across 4GB of Video Retentiveness to Crank Upwardly your settings." Despite its before proclamations, in Jan PCWorld interviewed AMD CEO Lisa Su and Radeon vice president Laura Smith about the carte du jour, and one of them exclaimed, "We accept really optimized this i to be gaming first… You can see that with the style nosotros've configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer, that's a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of triple-A games…" To be fair to AMD though, the postal service was written by a Radeon Production Marketing Specialist named Adit Bhutani, and the blog mail features this disclaimer at the lesser: "His postings are his own opinions and may not correspond AMD'south positions, strategies or opinions." Rightttttt.

Here's AMD's argument for why 8GB of RAM is ameliorate than 4GB. (Image: AMD)

The other issue with the carte is that like any GPU released in the past two years or and then, nobody really believes it volition sell for its $199 MSRP due to the GPU shortage. This means gamers who are interested in the card will probable end up paying $300+ for a 1080p GPU that runs AAA titles at medium settings, which just seems incorrect. Though AMD's 4GB RAM resource allotment might dissuade miners from scooping upward all the available cards, looking at Newegg this morning there's not a single card in stock, and some of them such every bit the the Asus TUF model are existence offered for an insane $359 sticker price, but almost of them are really listed at $199, with a few hovering in the $269 region.

This is launch twenty-four hours availability on Newegg for a GPU designed to specifically be in-stock.

Though text-based review verdicts are mostly mixed, summarizing the situation equally "information technology's non that bad if you can find it for MSRP, which you probably tin can't," YouTubers seem to have their knives out for the newest member of the Radeon family. Hardware Unboxed labels its review, "Worst GPU," calling the carte the "Corner Cutting Edition," while Gamers Nexus describes information technology as "Worse than 2016'south GPUs." Hardware Canucks summarized the situation succinctly by merely asking, "WTF AMD!?"

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