GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6500 XT EAGLE 4G Graphics Card
Earlier this year, AMD introduced a new GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, that could explicitly help the on-going GPU shortage and also bring the company’s latest RDNA 2 architecture to a mainstream price point with a suggested price of $199. Looking at initial reviews at launch, there were several reviews that failed to understand the part and its position in the market. I had a chance to evaluate the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6500 XT Eagle 4G card and ran it through a number of real-world scenarios where this chip can make a real difference. At the time of this writing, Radeon RX 6500 XT cards are available for “street prices” of $225 to $300+ depending on vendors and cooler solution, which is reasonable. The closest Nvidia card with similar capabilities, is the GeForce RTX 3050 with a street price of over $400.
The RDNA 2 graphics architecture brings a lot of technology to a new price point. With Infinity Cache, the RDNA 2 GPU and Ryzen CPUs can share memory for a larger virtual cache. RDNA 2 also supports ray tracing acceleration and AMD’s advanced visual upscaling technologies. AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution and FidelityFX Super Resolution capabilities will keep getting better over time and improve the gaming the experience of the 6500 XT. The RX 6500 XT chip was originally used for laptop GPUs and has been adapted for use in desktop graphics cards.
The 6500 XT has 5.4B transistors and is manufactured in TSMC’s N6 process. With the high-volume TSMC process and only 107mm2 die size, AMD can get more than twice the chips (die) from the TSMC wafer allocation compared with the bigger (237mm2) Radeon RX 6600 chip and help fill some of the GPU supply void. The chip is also lower power than other RDNA 2 graphic chips which means the add-in boards can be smaller, fitting into space and power constrained systems. With the small, more power efficient die, AMD also increased clock speeds to a base clock of 2310 MHz and a boost clock of 2815 MHz, which are the fastest GPU clock speeds for improved performance.
To hit the lower price points with a smaller chip, some features had to be sacrificed. For one, there’s no video encode engine for streaming videos from the card. At 64-bits, the memory bus is half the size of the other GPUs and only supports 4GB of memory. While this is considered by some to be too little memory for a gaming GPU, it’s plenty for 1080p gaming, including eSport titles. The 4GB buffer also reduces space and reduces the board costs. In addition, with only 4GB of memory, the RX 6500 XT will not be attractive for crypto mining. The counter to the smaller memory buffer is the use of 16MB RDNA 2 Infinity Cache to improve overall memory bandwidth.
The other trade off in the smaller chip design is that it only has four PCIe Gen 4 lanes, which is less than other RDA 2 desktop GPUs. But with a focus on 1080p mainstream content, the PCIe bus connection to the CPU should not be a crippling bottleneck.
To test the Radeon RX 6500 XT, I chose three scenarios for the card on several systems configurations available to me. All tests were using 1080p (FHD) monitors. In general, I chose reasonable graphics settings for tests. The software I chose to use for the tests were 3DMark, F1 2019, Borderlands 3, and some Battlefield 4 game play. I could not run every software on every system due to time and storage constraints. I also ran CyberPunk 2077 on the final system to see the impact of AMD Radeon Super Resolution on performance and image quality.
Radeon RX 6500 XT is great for constrained systems
The first test system was a small form-factor mini-ITX PC with a mini-ITX motherboard. The 6500 XT provided an upgrade to the integrated Vega 8 graphics in the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G processor (four Zen cores @ 3.5GHz) in the system I’ve had for several years. The system has 16GB of DDR4 memory and the Windows 10 operating system.
On the original system configuration, the DirectX 12 benchmark Time Spy from 3DMark, the average of two runs was a score of 721 with a graphics score of 640 (CPU score of 2592). For the DirectX 11 Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, the average score was 783, Graphics score of 792, and Physics score of 6758. While I don’t know how accurate the estimated game performance indicator is in 3DMark benchmarks, it predicted Battlefield V gameplay would be under 20fps, which is unacceptably slow.
The Radeon RX 6500 XT dropped into the single PCIe 3.0 slot in the ITX motherboard. The fit into the CoolerMaster Elite 110 chassis was snug but had sufficient clearance and air flow. Once the card was installed, the performance levels improved dramatically. Games went from an unplayable slideshow to playable games and 3DMark resulted in reasonable benchmark scores.
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT card in a SFF PC
Above Image: Radeon RX 6500 XT snugly situated in the CoolerMaster ITX chassis. (Note: PCIe power disconnected)
Time Spy scores now jumped to 4159 (averaged), over five times faster! The average graphics score was 4719 and the CPU score 2488. The DX11 scores in Fire Strike Extreme were also sharply improved producing an averaged result of 5730, over seven times faster than the score of the internal graphics. The average Graphics score was 6522 and the Physics score was 6680.
The system was now a capable 1080p gaming system in a small, power efficient package!
Breathing New life into an Old PC
The second test system was an older tower desktop PC with an Intel i7-4790K (four cores at 4.0GHz) with PCIe3. The system has 16GB of DDR3 memory and the Windows 10 operating system. This comparison was more challenging as the graphics card was an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti, one of the best cards from 2015. But as an older card it required a lot of power and did not support the latest technology like ray tracing. Still, the old system produces an average 3DMark Time Spy Extreme score of 3682.
After replacing the Nvidia card with the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT card, the average score improved 29% to 4732 – a significant upgrade in performance and capabilities. Even hobbled by only four lanes of PCIe3, the games performance was better, and the Radeon card adds new capabilities.
Building a Balanced Modern System
The final test system was also a tower PC with a more modern AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU with 8 cores and PCIe gen4. The motherboard is an ASUS Prime B550M-A. The BIOS was upgraded from version 1216 to 2604 prior to the tests to support the latest Infinity Cache feature. The system has 16GB of DDR4 memory and the Windows 11 operating system.
I tested this system with the recently released Adrenalin Edition 2022 Release drivers. The new driver release has the AMD Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) upscaling technology. With RSR enabled, the gamer can choose to trade off some visual quality for faster frame rates.
In addition, AMD has incorporated FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) for game developers. AMD will release FSR 2.0 that will use temporal data and optimized anti-aliasing to improve framerates in supported games – a significant upgrade from FSR 1.0. AMD claims that FSR 2.0 will offer similar or better image quality than native resolution and does not require dedicated machine learning hardware like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
AMD Smart Access Memory works with AMD Ryzen 5000 Series (and some 3000 Series) processors and with AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards to improve gaming performance by giving the CPU direct access to the GPU memory over PCIe. (To enable AMD’s SmartAccess Memory, set Resize BAR = On in the BIOS.)
The 6500 XT can support many games, but it has limitations. Running Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing on was unacceptably slow (even a Radeon RX 6600 XT ran slow). Turning off ray tracing improved performance to about 28fps.
With FSR 1.0 set to “balanced” and FSF = On, frame rates were about 50fps with some visual quality issues around rough edges (like palm trees). With FXF SR 1.0 set to “Ultraquality” frame rate dropped to 42, but image quality improved. Both Borderlands3 (DirectX12) and F1-2019 had frame rates over 100.
Conclusion
The Radeon RX 6500 XT has received a bad rap. The RX 6500 XT is well suited for many 1080p games and can bring the latest AMD RDNA 2 capabilities to a PC gaming system for a low cost. With its low power and smaller size, it can fit into smaller systems where many other graphic cards cannot. And this card will only get better over time as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 technology is supported by games. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is a relative bargain and a good investment for 1080p gaming.
Tirias Research tracks and consults for companies throughout the electronics ecosystem from semiconductors to systems and sensors to the cloud. Members of the Tirias Research team have consulted for AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and other companies throughout the PC ecosystems.
