The rx 6500 xt is an entry-level GPU aimed at people who've hung on to two-generations-old CPUs or those upgrading from the Radeon RX 570. It's priced just below Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 Super, which is one of the most popular GPUs on the market today, and is intended for budget gaming at 1080p.
The 6500 XT has a few notable quirks that make it stand out from its competition. For starters, it has 4GB of GDDR6 memory compared to the typical 8GB found on competing cards. This limits the card's support for high-resolution textures and broad 3D models in games. Thankfully, AMD's Smart Access Memory technology is capable of reducing this bottleneck somewhat.
Another oddity is that the chip has just four PCIe 4.0 lanes, which is almost unheard of in a gaming graphics card. This limits the card's performance when paired with older systems that use PCIe 3.0 lanes. In modern systems with a PCIe 4.0-compatible motherboard and CPU, the 6500 XT should run at its intended medium to high graphics settings.
Finally, the 6500 XT isn't well-equipped to handle content creation workloads. Its weak performance in this area is particularly noticeable when compared to the RTX 3050, and it isn't much better than the more expensive RX 580. That's an unfortunate fact, considering that it's a graphics card designed to compete with Nvidia's GPUs in the $300 price-range and beyond. That's a market where Nvidia's hardware encoding has become increasingly important for users who record their gaming sessions or plan to stream them online.