AMD Radeon RX 6500XT gets negative reviews
AMD’s latest low-end GPU launch has been painted by limited performance, lack of encoding capabilities, and issues with limited PCIe lanes.
The GPU maker’s decision to launch a low-end mobile GPU as the desktop had a disastrous effect. Reviewers have commonly expressed their negative conclusions on AMD’s 199 USD desktop card. Not only was the card hardly available at MSRP outside of the US, but it also somehow went out of stock.
By far the most commented issues with RX 6500XT were non-existent ray tracing performance or subpar performance on the PCIe Gen3 platform. Intel has only shifted to Gen4 last year, so there is a great number of gamers on a budget not ready to invest in the new platform. Those gamers should expect double-digit performance loss on their systems.
Moving on to video encoding and decoding capabilities. AMD also launched Navi 24 GPUs under its workstation cards: PRO W6400, W6500M, and W6300M. All these cards will lack H264/265/AV1 encoding. The reason why is simple, this GPU was primarily to be used in laptops alongside AMD Rembrandt APU (Ryzen 6000). This processor features both PCIe Gen4 as well has encoding support (it even supports AV1 decoding).
This observation has been confirmed by John Bridgman (Linux NPI SW Architect at AMD):
AMD Navi 24 primary use in laptops, Source: Phoronix
AMD Navi 24 is a low-end GPU with 5.4 billion transistors on a 107mm² die. This GPU offers up to 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Units, 32 ROPs, and 16 Ray Accelerators. The RX 6500XT is now available on sale, while Radeon PRO W6400W is to launch soon. AMD Navi 24 GPUs should make their way to laptops starting February when Rembrandt-based systems finally become available.
Source: Phoronix forums
