Expanding its GPU offerings, AMD announced a new graphics card today, although not one that anyone with a 4K monitor will be interested in. The AMD Radeon RX 6500, a new addition to the company’s RX 6000 Series, was shown off at CES 2022 today, with the tech company positioning the new card as yet another solution for 1080p gaming.
According to AMD, the small GPU can sustain a boost clock of 2.6GHz and comes with 16 compute units and ray accelerators, as well as 16MB of infinity cache. However, that doesn’t all translate into high-end performance.
The GPU is aimed squarely at the 1080p gaming market, with AMD claiming the 6500 XT, which comes with just 4GB of GDDR6 memory, can beat out Nvidia’s GTX 1650 in most scenarios by 35%. However, it’s not clear what testing conditions that statistic comes from, including whether or not the GPU is benefitting from AMD’s Smart Access Memory technology.
On the 6500 XT’s product page, AMD boasts that the tiny GPU can make modern games run at over 60fps on high settings. Without any other details, the company claims that Halo Infinite can run at up to 78fps, Resident Evil Village can hit 108fps, and Call of Duty: Vanguard can reach up to 61fps.
What leaves the 6500 XT as a great competitor for AMD in the 1080p gaming market is the card’s extremely low MSRP. Costing just $200, the card is remarkably cheap, although it’s unlikely to stay that way. Customers will already have to pay a small markup from OEM manufacturers, and that’s before prices rise further due to overwhelming demand. The RX 6500 XT is set to launch on January 19.
