[Hardware] The $199 RX 6500 XT looks worse on paper than AMD's $199 GPU from six years ago

[L-MOK7H]

https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-rx-6500-xt-worse-than-rx-480/

One of the most interesting things to happen at CES 2022 from a PC gaming perspective was that both AMD and Nvidia finally revealed this generation's sub-$250 graphics cards. While we're still waiting for more specs and performance details about Nvidia's RTX 3050, there are some depressing things to note about AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT, most especially when you compare it with the $199 Radeon RX 480 AMD launched back in 2016.

The performance increases we've seen in graphics cards over the last few years has been astonishing. We've been treated to the most powerful GPUs ever to grace a PC, slices of graphical silicon capable of pixel-pushing feats we could hitherto only dream of. But that's come at the expense of affordability with even today's third-tier graphics cards costing upwards of $700.

When you put the twin mood-killers of a global pandemic and a global chip shortage into the equation you also get a situation where it's not financially prudent to create lower-priced GPUs that will be in high demand. Not when you can just make expensive products, which are in just as high demand, and watch those fly off the shelves anyway.
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So we've had to suffer higher-priced GPUs and an obvious lack of mainstream graphics cards for the normal humans unable to spend their entire bank balance on a new card.
But now we're finally getting new, affordable RX 600-series and RTX 3000-series graphics cards. Though, while it's great to see both the GPU makers finally releasing budget graphics cards, it's painful to see just what that means in terms of their specs. These look to be every bit the pandemic GPUs of our worst nightmares, I just hope I'm wrong about them.

What we always want to see is higher performance and higher specs compared with the same price GPUs of the last generation, and that is tangibly not the case with the RX 6500 XT. Okay, so the jury is still out on actual gaming frame rates from the new Radeon until we get it in our test bench, but our experiences with the RX 6600 XT—essentially an RX 5700 XT for the same price—and a read of the RX 6500 XT specs sheet don't fill us with confidence.