AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT performance may be greatly affected on PCIe 3.0 platforms
The Radeon RX 6500 XT is AMD’s latest graphics card for the consumer market. It is based on Navi 24 core, manufactured with 6nm process, equipped with 16 CUs, has 1024 stream processors, and 16MB of infinite cache, equipped with 4GB of GDDR6 video memory, and the video memory bit width is 64 bits. It will be available on January 19.
Although the Radeon RX 6500 XT is not yet on the market and is only a relatively low-end product, there has been a lot of news about the Radeon RX 6500 XT since its release at CES 2022. For example, previous reports pointed out that the PCIe 4.0 interface of the Radeon RX 6500 XT is only four channels, and does not support 4K H.264/H.265 encoding and AV1 decoding.
The PCIe 4.0 interface is only four-lane and theoretically has the same bandwidth as the eight-lane PCIe 3.0 interface. In the period when PCIe 4.0 is commonly used on new platforms, this does not seem to be a problem. It’s just that this type of relatively low-end graphics card is one of the choices for many old users to upgrade their systems. Then the platform using the Radeon RX 6500 XT is likely to still use the PCIe 3.0 interface, which means that the actual use is only a four-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, so the performance may be greatly reduced.
HardwareUnboxed said that since the Radeon RX 6500 XT has not been unblocked, the relevant test results cannot be released, but the Radeon RX 5500 XT can be used as a reference. The Radeon RX 5500 XT is available in 8GB and 4GB versions with only eight PCIe lanes. The results show that video memory has a greater impact on the bandwidth problem. If the interface bandwidth is further limited, it will have a greater impact on the game. The situation with the Radeon RX 6500 XT is likely to be similar to that of the Radeon RX 5500 XT.
