AMD’s RX 6500 XT provides $199 entry point for desktop GPU line on Jan. 19

At a CES press conference this morning, AMD announced the RX 6500 XT, a budget version of the 6000-series line of desktop gaming GPUs launched in 2020. The new card will be available on January 19 starting at $199—if you can find it amid continuing chip shortages, that is.

 

AMD is touting the 6500 XT's "fastest sustained GPU clock rates ever" at 2.6 GHz, the inclusion of 16 compute units with ray accelerators, and the card's 16MB of Infinity Cache, which can provide faster effective bandwidth to other components. Other 6000-series cards sport anywhere from 32 to 80 compute units and 32 to 128 MB of Infinity Cache, making the 6500 XT a decidedly low-end option (as if the price wasn't enough of a clue). Still, the card should provide frame-rate boosts of 23 to 59 percent over the aging RX 570 on popular games running at 1080p, according to AMD's presentation.

 

AMD also announced a new line of RX 6000S chips specifically focused on "light and thin" gaming laptops (i.e., those weighing less than 4.5 pounds). The three chips in this line are being optimized with efficiency in mind and should be able to provide 80 to 100 fps gameplay at "high" detail settings for recent "AAA and esports titles," according to AMD.

 

The existing 6000M series, for bigger laptops, is being revamped with 6 nm technology and slight boosts in memory and clock speeds. The RX 6850M XT is 7 percent faster than the existing RX 6600M, for instance, while the 6650M (and an XT variation) will deliver "up to 20 percent more performance" than the 6600M.