When comparing the 6500 xt vs rx 580, it's important to consider the key specifications, benchmark tests and power consumption. This will help you identify which card is the better option for your needs.
The 6500 XT offers decent performance for a budget card and is able to match older GPUs from 2016 at least on medium settings in games like Watch Dogs Legion and Gears Tactics. However, pushing visual settings beyond that will result in worse performance. The 6500 XT is a good choice for those who are strictly 1080p gamers and aren't interested in other features like more monitor support or content creation capabilities.
Unfortunately, the 6500 XT isn't as competitive when it comes to PCIe 4.0 performance. In our test in Assassin's Creed Valhalla on the medium quality preset, the 6500 XT is only able to match an RX 580 from just a few years ago, not something you'd expect from a new GPU. Furthermore, switching to PCIe 3.0 cripples the performance even further, causing it to be significantly slower than the RX 590 and an overclocked RX 480 from just under five years ago.
The 6500 XT isn't a terrible card by any means but it's not as impressive as you might have hoped for considering its $199 MSRP and regular eBay sale prices. The fact that the 6500 XT can't be used with a single display output and doesn't offer hardware encoding may also be a turn off for some gamers. If you're looking for a more powerful card that can be used with dual displays and supports hardware encoding, you might be better off with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which can often be found for less than $300.