AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th.
The retail price is $199, but the current shortage of graphics cards, which was partly caused by the crazy mining of cryptocurrencies, but also by resellers who want to make money, made purchasing any graphics card at its intended price an almost impossible mission last year.
Now, as AMD says, their new card will be intentionally bad at cryptocurrency mining.
AMD has designed this card in a way that would intentionally make it less attractive to crypto miners, while still being useful as an entry-level graphics card.
We optimized it for gaming. You can see that in the configuration, four gigabytes of frame buffers is good enough for most AAA games, but it is not particularly attractive if you work on a blockchain or engage in some crypto mining activities – said Laura Smith, vice president of AMD Radeon.
Indeed, if you look at the specification of the 6500 XT model, you will notice a few things that stand out compared to the latest generation RX 5500 XT.
For starters, there is no 8GB version of the 6500 XT.
The 6500 XT also uses a 64-bit memory interface, which is extremely rare in modern GPUs – you’ll sometimes see it in dedicated GPUs for lower-end laptops such as the GeForce MX 450.
GPUs released in the last few generations mostly adhere to minimum 128-bit memory interfaces.
Both of these design changes make the 6500 XT bad for Ethereum mining, as it requires more than 4GB of video RAM.
To compensate for the slower memory interface and help the card compete with RX 570 cards, AMD has increased the speed of this model.
To make up for the slower memory interface and help the card compete with the RKS 570 cards that AMD wants to replace, AMD has increased the clock speed of the RX 6500 XT card.
The maximum gain speed is 2815 MHz, compared to 1845 MHz in the RX 5500 XT.
Even the premium 6900 XT has a gain speed of only up to 2250 MHz.
Nvidia has also taken steps to limit the mining capabilities of its GPUs, especially when it reissued “LHR”(or Low Hash Rate) versions of the RTX 3000 series cards in mid-2021.
But the basic hardware remains capable of better hash rates, and determined miners have used everything from alternative BIOSes to special software to buggy drivers to restore all or part of the mining performance of those cards.
The 6500 XT shouldn’t have these problems – it’s generally not possible to hack more video RAM onto a graphics card.
What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that make the 6500 XT card suboptimal for mining will make this GPU also suboptimal for gaming.