AMD has just announced a brand new budget video card for tech-starved PC gamers. The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT was announced at CES 2022 today promising high-end performance at 1080p for a very low price.
The Radeon RX 6500 XT boasts a sustained clock speed of 2.6Ghz, 16 compute units, and 16 ray accelerators to support ray tracing. It also supports Windows 11 AutoHDR, DirectX 12, and AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution. Built on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, the 6500 XT will have 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and some impressive framerates on modern titles.
On the AMD website, the manufacturer said they were able to achieve 108 fps on Resident Evil Village, 95 fps on Age of Empires 4, and 78 fps on Halo Infinite. All games were reportedly played at 1080p and "high" settings, although no further details were provided in terms of graphical settings or the rig that these games were played on.
During AMD's presentation, however, a spokesperson said that these frame rates were only possible using FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is AMD's response to Nvidia's AI-powered DLSS tech. It basically plays the game at a lower resolution and then uses AI to upscale the resolution higher. This trick allows for far better performance and graphical fidelity using far less power. However, not every game supports FidelityFX Super Resolution, so expect other titles to produce far lower frame rates.
That said, AMD is pushing the RX 6500 XT as a value proposition. The same presentation promised up to 35% better performance than the comparable Nvidia GTX 1650 while also offering modern graphic tech like ray tracing. It's also priced to move at just $200, but don't expect the price to stay at $200 for long. The current GPU shortage has pretty much every new graphics card going for double or even triple the price at most retailers, and that's if you can find one at all.
The RX 6500 XT launches on January 19. My advice? Call your local PC parts retailer and see if you can reserve one for MSRP.