AMD today via its CES livestream announced a couple of new graphics cards to be added to its desktop Radeon lineup. The Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 slot in just below the already-released RX 6600 graphics card and its virtual MSRP of $329, and bring RDNA2 and ray tracing support to a much more affordable $199 MSRP. Both cards are manufactured in TSMC's 6 nm process, bringing about a reduction in die area and improved power consumption characteristics. According to AMD, these target high settings AAA and eSports gaming on 1080p resolution, and would be most interesting for gamers still packing a GeForce GTX 1650 or Radeon RX 470 graphics card (or lower performance options). This is also made possible on account of AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR) and the newly-announced RSR, with these image upscaling technologies severely increasing pure performance output of these relatively small discrete GPUs.

The RX 6500 XT with its $199 price tag has been confirmed for a January 19th release via AIB partner cards only (of which the company showed as many as 14 different models from a range of partners, which you can see after the break). For $199, the RX 6500 XT offers an exact halving of the RX 6600 XT, packing 16 RDNA2 CUs, 4 GB of GDDR6 RAM, a 2,610 MHz game clock, and a 2,815 MHz boosted clock, while drawing 107 W of power. The 4 GB memory pool may seem limiting, but may be a smart decision from AMD, effectively cutting off these cards from Ethereum mining workloads (these require 8 GB of VRAM). And 16 RDNA2 CUs gives us 1,024 shading units and only 16 RT cores: it's likely the card would run out of shader performance before it would be able to properly take advantage of a larger VRAM pool. No word yet on when should we expect the RX 6400.The usage of a more advanced 6 nm manufacturing process in these graphics cards could mean that refreshes of AMD's RX 6000 series may be coming to the technology eventually. It may also indicate that AMD chose to manufacture these relatively small and inexpensive graphics cards first so as to aid TSMC in improving yields and to better understand what challenges the new process brings. At the same time, AMD is now effectively able to distribute GPUs across two distinct semiconductor manufacturing nodes, which should have a respectable impact on how many GPUs AMD can deliver per quarter, thus allowing for a hypothetical easing of sorts on the demand side. Perhaps AMD is now planning on staggering updates for 6 nm of its already-released RX 6000 series cards.

All in all, there are 14 RX 6500 XT models being launched on January 19th, from partner brands such as AsRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, Yeston, and XFX. Pictures of each of these graphics cards follow.