AMD will start selling its latest budget Radeon RX 6500 XT GPU on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing shortage of GPUs, fueled in part by cryptocurrency miners and speculators who buy up every card they can get, has made it almost impossible to get any graphics card on the list for the past year.
Whether the 6500 XT will be different depends partly on the offering, but AMD has also apparently designed the card to make it less attractive to miners while still retaining its usefulness as an entry-level graphics card. Speaking to reporters at a press roundtable earlier this week, AMD Radeon VP Laura Smith talked about how the 6500 XT was “optimized”for gaming (the transcript from the now apparently deleted PCWorld article is retained here) .
“We really optimized it to be a gaming first for that target market,” Smith said. “And you can see it in the way we set up this part. Even with four gigabytes of framebuffer. That’s a really good framebuffer size for most AAA games, but it’s not particularly appealing if you’re doing a blockchain-type activity or a mining activity.”
Indeed, if you look at the 6500 XT spec sheet, you’ll notice a few things that stand out compared to the last generation RX 5500 XT. First, there is no 8GB version of the 6500 XT. The 6500 XT also uses a 64-bit memory interface, which is extremely rare in today’s GPUs – you can sometimes see it in inexpensive dedicated laptop GPUs like the GeForce MX 450, but discrete GPUs released within the last two generations, mostly stuck to at least 128-bit memory interfaces. Both of these solutions make the 6500 XT bad for Ethereum mining in particular, as it requires over 4GB of VRAM andreally like the memory bandwidth.
To compensate for the slower memory interface and help the card compete with the RX 570-class cards that AMD wants to replace, AMD increased the clock speed of the RX 6500 XT. Its maximum boost frequency is 2815 MHz compared to 1845 MHz for the RX 5500 XT. Even the top-end 6900 XT only overclocks to 2250MHz – it just has a lot more GPU and a lot more memory bandwidth to work with.
Nvidia has also taken steps to limit the mining capabilities of its GPUs, especially when it re-released the “LHR”(or Low Hash Rate) versions of its RTX 3000 series cards in mid-2021. But the underlying hardware is still capable of higher hash rates, and determined miners have used everything from alternative BIOSes to custom software and buggy drivers .to fully or partially restore the mining performance of these cards. The 6500 XT shouldn’t have these problems – it’s usually not possible to add more video memory to a video card. It remains to be seen if the design decisions that make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal for gaming.