AMD's $199 Radeon Rx 6500 Xt Tested: 5 Things You Need to Know

"Performance, memory intricacies, feature sets, and more."

- By Brad Chacos

AMD’s $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT is here, bringing both real-time ray tracing and affordable graphics cards back to the masses—if it can stay well-stocked enough to remain on store shelves for close to its suggested pricing, that is. This ain’t your average graphics card, though. AMD needed to tweak and tune the Radeon RX 6500 XT to (hopefully) keep cryptocurrency miners at bay and hit the coveted, crucial sub-$200 price point.

Putting this GPU through its paces took quite a bit more effort and explaining than usual. Head over to our comprehensive Radeon RX 6500 XT review (fave.co/32rh0JT) for the complete rundown, but for folks who don’t feel like wading through thousands of words and dozens of charts worth of analysis, here are five key facts you need to know about the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

1. THIS IS A GREAT GRAPHICS CARD FOR BEGINNING PC GAMERS…

PC gaming picked up serious steam over the pandemic, but newcomers haven’t had a shot at investing in affordable new gear, with most graphics cards going for double MSRP or more thanks to a mixture of a chip crunch, logistics woes, booming demand from cryptocurrency miners seeking profits, and more (fave.co/3pkV3oL). We’ve resorted to suggesting a CPU with good integrated graphics as the best budget “graphics card” for gaming (fave.co/3DOEuWk). Ugh.