AMD announces the official debut of the Radeon RX 6500 XT, the latest addition to its RDNA2 series unveiled at CES 2022, which is positioned in the entry-level consumer segment. Designed for unpretentious FHD gaming, with a focus on AAA and eSports titles, the board aims for low power consumption and low noise, while delivering high clock frequencies.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT utilises a GPU built on a TSMC 6nm manufacturing process, with all the features that made the Radeon RX 6000 famous, including hardware ray tracing (DXR) support, Infinity Cache (16MB), Smart Access Memory, AMD SFR and Radeon Anti-Lag.

The AMD GPU has 16 Compute Units and 1,204 Stream Processors (11.5 TFLOPS), not a powerhouse, but it makes up for it with a gaming frequency of 2,610 MHz and Boost to 2,815 MHz. Not bad for an entry-level card, but it comes up against a slightly underpowered VRAM department for 2022. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is equipped with only 4GB GDDR6, which is very fast (18Gbps) but on a 64bit BUS that limits the overall bandwidth.

However, AMD's Infinity Cache technology compensates for this by increasing the bandwidth from 144 GB/s to 232 GB/s, according to AMD. This card has a TDP of 107 watts (PCI-E 6pin), supports HDMI 2.1 and H265/HEVC decoding (no AV1), while the ports side features a Display Port 1.4a and HDMI 2.1. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is available from today in custom partner variants at a suggested retail price of €215. Here's the full spec sheet.

Written by: Joshua Wilson