Introducing the new Radeon™ RX 6500 XT graphics card, featuring the breakthrough AMD RDNA™ 2 architecture and engineered to deliver great gaming performance and remarkable efficiency.

Radeon RX 6500 XT

Price and performance details for the Radeon RX 6500 XT can be found below. This is made using thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated daily.

Simply put, 4GB is not enough for gaming in 2022. The RTX 3050 comes with 8GB, and a step up to the RX 6600 will get you that same amount. Worse, the limited memory is squeezed through a microscopic bus, creating a nasty bottleneck that nearly halves the memory bandwidth of the RX 6600 XT.

For the PCIe interface, I’m just asking: Why? The RX 6500 XT supports PCIe 4.0, but it’s limited to four lanes. The RX 6600 supports eight lanes without any issue, as does the RTX 3050. There’s no reason to limit the RX 6500 XT to four lanes. Most buyers will still be using PCIe 3.0, and my testing shows some significant bottlenecks due to the four-lane configuration.

Just so it’s clear, the results above are at 1080p with the highest graphics preset. I ran my tests with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory. This is supposed to be a 1080p graphics card, but even then, it struggles.

The performance is rough, occasionally falling behind even the RX 580 (which launched nearly five years ago for the same price). More importantly, the gameplay experience is rough. In Battlefield V, I experienced consistent stuttering when transitioning into gameplay, and on multiple occasions, I saw models visibly stream in after the game had already loaded.

n several cases, I saw flickering issues, too. In Battlefield V, the models would flicker for a few seconds while they loaded in. In Control, the entire screen would flicker between white and black for about 20 seconds before launching. Those suffering from epilepsy have yet another reason to stay away from the RX 6500 XT.

The visual bugs don’t come close to touching the memory issues. My results are in 1080p, but I ran the RX 6500 XT through the spectrum of common resolutions. I wasn’t able to run the 1440p or 4K tests in Red Dead Redemption 2 because the game includes a built-in memory limiter. It’s not the only one, and the RX 6500 XT will run into memory issues in other games.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a prime example of that. At 1080p, the game called for 6GB of video memory, 2GB over what the RX 6500 XT has. Your frame rate in these situations is locked to how quickly the card can fill and flush memory, creating a bottleneck that locks your frame rate in a single spot.