Sapphire Radeon RX 6500 XT Pulse

[Valantar]

Good suggestion. Maybe once I'm finished with 2x RTX 3080 12 GB, 4x RTX 3050, RTX 3090 Ti (unknown # of samples yet), 3x Alder Lake non-K (might buy 2 more) and 4x SSD

... so, some time in 2023?

 

[W1zzard]

... so, some time in 2023? XD

Rather February, because then: more launches

 

[Roph]

A $200 card that's not worth even $70, that can't beat 6 year old $200 cards and yet will sell for $400+.

What sad times.

 

[wolf]

@W1zzard how do you feel about the 6500XT's name as the XT variant? imo this is a key area where the cards critical reception might have at least been partly better because it carried an expectation. The two other like for like series RDNA2 vs 1 cards offered quite a performance leap, which I think people would reasonably expect the 6500 to follow suit.

But instead we get a card that's pretty much equal to the 5500XT, sometimes worse, and certainly worse on pci-e gen3.

Even if for reasons, the card had to be $199 MSRP to be viable to produce and put on shelves, I think being named as say RX 6500 or even RX 6500LE would make more sense and have aided reception, as it sets an expectation about the cards performance that would much more closely match how it actually performs in the real world.

 

[Roph]

This thing is a 6300 at absolute best.

 

[chrcoluk]

89W of power isnt impressive to me, although the author did realise that when they looked at performance per watt, I would expect circa 50W for the spec of the card. I can get my 3080 below 100w with under volting and capping to 60fps, and I consider it a power hungry card.

Priced way too high.

 

[kanecvr]

This 6500xt clearly needed a 128bit memory bus. With a 64bit bus and resulting performance levels it's more suited to being called a 6300XT like @Roph said above. Shame.

 

[mechtech]

I wonder what the 6400 is going to look like after this? Same speed as integrated graphics??

 

[dalekdukesboy]

I wonder what the 6400 is going to look like after this? Same speed as integrated graphics??

Wow...so the 6400 is going to be significantly faster???

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Currently, the 6500 XT Is going for between $240 and $300 at Microcenter (limited stock), while ye ol’ RX 560 is selling for that lofty $200 price point. At least the OEMs are slapping massive coolers on them so you can still tell yourself that you’re getting what you paid for. Go for the triple fan 5600 XT!

 

[mb194dc]

A card so bad there is actually stock of it in the UK for £199.99...

Could we see this as the start for things to move more towards pre Covid normal?

 

[kruk]

@W1zzard Article suggestion: investigating low-power performance on the 6500 XT, with underclocking (and possibly undervolting). Why? Because this GPU is pretty clearly built to be a 25-50W mobile GPU, judging by both the narrow PCIe bus and the narrow VRAM bus. (That's the power range of the 6400M (25W) and 6500M (35-50W).) This desktop SKU is clearly pushed stupidly high to sell as an x5xx SKU rather than where it belongs, as a (~$100) x4xx SKU. Hence why an article like this would be interesting: how does it perform at various power levels (assuming it can be made to run at them), especially 75W and 50W, but lower too if possible. And what clocks can it maintain at those power levels? I would expect it to hit >2GHz at pretty low power, without losing that much performance overall.

I get that this would be a noticeable amount of extra work for a niche article, but it could be a great investigative piece shedding light on how this missed the mark in balancing product segmentation, marketing and performance expectations.

CapFrameX already done some work. Basically, they wasted a lot of efficiency for minor performance gains.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1485211874182447107

@W1zzard : if you still have an Ryzen APU lying around, could you please check if ReLive recording works when this GPU is used with an APU? Because currently, there is no official way to turn on ReLive when using an Ryzen APU only (GUI is missing), and the 6500 XT obviously lacks the encoders, but ... the combination of both might work. Thanks.

 

[Valantar]

CapFrameX already done some work. Basically, they wasted a lot of efficiency for minor performance gains.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1485211874182447107

@W1zzard : if you still have an Ryzen APU lying around, could you please check if ReLive recording works when this GPU is used with an APU? Because currently, there is no official way to turn on ReLive when using an Ryzen APU only (GUI is missing), and the 6500 XT obviously lacks the encoders, but ... the combination of both might work. Thanks.

Thanks for the tip! Looks like this will perform quite well in its intended 25-50W range in mobile. Couple this with a R5 6600H(S) or 28W 6x00U and you'll have a pretty potent thin-and-light low end gaming laptop. And those APUs at least deliver all the encode/decode that this misses (which is likely why it was omitted in the first place - for the intended use it's just a duplicate feature and a waste of die area). Sadly I have no idea about the ReLive question, hope it gets enabled though.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

89W of power isnt impressive to me, although the author did realise that when they looked at performance per watt, I would expect circa 50W for the spec of the card. I can get my 3080 below 100w with under volting and capping to 60fps, and I consider it a power hungry card.

Priced way too high.

It's really bad, considering you could buy 560s that ran on just 75w bus power (see also MSI's low profile 560). The move from 14nm to 7nm, from polaris to rDNA 2, and AMD's perf/watt has barely moved. Just....utter garbage.

This 6500xt clearly needed a 128bit memory bus. With a 64bit bus and resulting performance levels it's more suited to being called a 6300XT like @Roph said above. Shame.

Ideally with the 18Gbps GDDR6 they wasted on thsi attrocity a 6GB 96 bit bus would have both provided significantly more bandwidth and also alleviated the 4GB limit that plagues the slower 560. One of these cards, with a 96 bit 6GB bus (maybe with 16Gbps to save some money and get the price down) clocked at a more sane 2.4-2.5 GHz with a 75 watt TDP would have made for a much better low power upgrade card. As it stands this thing is an abomination of silicon.

 

[Anymal]

316 eur in Germany eretailer

 

[LabRat 891]

Any info or way to gather info on the PCIe Slot Power Draw alone? I want to throw one of these in an m.2 adapter, but the slot current draw will be the difference between fiery failure and success.

 

[Kanan]

I don't think the power consumption in this review resembles the cards true efficiency. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultra doesn't run well on this card for obvious reasons, it's a worst case scenario. In games where this card runs good, or with settings this card likes, it should be very efficient, comparable to 6600 XT. It's a halved 6600 XT in every regard, this includes power consumption.

 

[omerfak]

Wait, it's slower than 5500 XT?????

 

[Sirleirbag]

I had to chose between this card and a 970 or 570 at same price, so i chose this card, even when i did not upgrade to pcie gen 4 still.
A used 5 year old card could be a lot more of a bet than this one. I will flip it for a 1650 if i can.

 

[HD64G]

Sapphire just announced with a tweet that the 6500XT is also available with 8GB of VRAM. And this imho will diminish the deficit in preformance when paired with a PCIE3 board. The same happened with 5500XT 5GB back then.

 

[LabRat 891]

Sapphire just announced with a tweet that the 6500XT is also available with 8GB of VRAM. And this imho will diminish the deficit in preformance when paired with a PCIE3 board. The same happened with 5500XT 5GB back then.

Wonder how much the limited bus width will cripple it?
Somehow, my 6500XT manages superior performance to my RX 580, until it hits a VRAM wall. CP'77 is the only game I've tried that at 1080p, where it hits that wall regularly (and *hard* at that).
Very interested, if only to have an oddball card in my collection.