In the current GPU shortage that has caused a disturbance in space-time, gamers are having to look to the used market for some decent options at reasonable prices. The battle worn AMD RX 580 and Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB can often be found in the $200-$300 range and provide gaming performance that’s acceptable at medium settings. However, both these cards have their limitations.
Enter the brand new AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has entered the landscape at $199 and is offering a more modern GPU experience without insanely inflated pricing. Unfortunately, it also comes with a few technological compromises.
We pit the brand new RX 6500 XT against the older RX 580 and GTX 1060 on some fairly demanding games to see how it performs. In games like Watch Dogs Legion and Gears Tactics, we find the RX 6500 XT is able to edge out the older GPUs in most cases at medium settings. However, it starts to struggle at higher settings and the 4GB of VRAM will have its drawbacks for content creators.
We compare the performance, key specifications and value for money of two Desktop platform graphics cards: MSI Radeon RX 6500 XT MECH 2X OC against AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5. We take into account their CPU core clock speeds, benchmark test results, power consumption and more.