The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .
RDNA is far more efficient at gaming. GCN was compute-focused (higher TFLOPs, but weaker in practice). Case in point, micro-benchmarks show that VRAM latency is ~100 nanoseconds on RDNA, but ~300 nanoseconds on GCN.
RX 6500 XT is aimed at roughly the same specs as the RX480, but should perform slightly faster in practice, along with Raytracing support, Infinity Cache and therefore faster VRAM latency (probably faster fill-rates and other microbenchmarks important to gaming), all at 107W instead of 150W.
---------
As such, Rx 480 would be a better mining card, while 6500 XT would be a worse mining card, but better video game card.
Its still stupid for AMD to market their cards like this, but they're not lying... (and whatever argument marketing wants to make... well... that's their job. It all looks stupid to me but I can't honestly call them out on it since it is true...)
-------
Turns out that video-gamers who want more uniformity and less jitter between frames want higher-clock speeds (notice the 2000+ MHz clock speed on 6500 XT) rather than raw TFLOPs (Rx 480 ran a slow clock of ~1000MHz but had many more compute units / SIMD units computing in parallel).
Width of GPU leads to more variance, because its harder to load-balance your parallelism. If you have a narrower GPU (fewer compute units) at higher speeds, its easier to reach more consistent frame times / less jitter.
1. It sucks from big picture perspective, as we are "back where we were 5 years ago"
but
2. It's great from pragmatic perspective, as we are otherwise today in "Wish I could afford a card from 5 years ago" / "there's no such thing as a budget GPU" stage.
Do you not see the difference between GCN, RDNA, and RDNA 2?
At a minimum, this RDNA 2 6500 XT has raytracing cores that the two previous versions do not have. I'd assume that most video gamers care more about the raytracing feature (especially as more and more games are using it) than H265 encoding.
Remember: Raytracing instructions were invented on RDNA2. The 5500 doesn't have it, and the 480 doesn't have it.
-------
I mean, seriously. Would you rather have the existence of this card? Or the non-existence? If you want something faster, that's why the 6800 exists. This 6500 XT is for people who want a barely-gaming ready card at the cheapest possible price. If that's not your use case, then don't buy the card.
But every now and then, I build a computer for a child who doesn't play many video games, or for some uncle/aunt who doesn't know much about computers. I never like the idea of going iGPU only, because these people inevitably find at least one weird game that they like to play. So I like to put in a $100 to $200-class card in there. Not expensive enough to break the budget, but high enough that it'd perform decently on 10-year-old games and maybe a few indie-games.
Yes?
Minecraft Raytracing and Quake Raytracing are rather low-specs and probably would run on an RX 6500 XT. You might have to drop down to 720p but it probably would run.
[citation needed]
Strictly speaking, it will "run", but if it run well that's another thing entirely.
It was the reason why the meme for heavy game morphed to "but can it run Minecraft RT?" for a while.
They may have frankensteined the engines to support ray tracing but these are not modern games at all.
2x the clock speed is crazy.
First partners selling the part in Europe already have a hefty 50% surcharge [0].
[0] https://videocardz.com/newz/amds-199-radeon-rx-6500xt-offici...