SAPPHIRE

Brand launches RX 6500 XT graphics accelerator with 8GB of GDDR6 memory

Sapphire is the first AMD partner to officially release the 8GB GDDR6 version of the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card. The manufacturer announced this via its Twitter page. The regular Radeon RX 6500 XT has 4GB of memory. AMD has not yet announced the release of new items with twice the memory. It's entirely possible that Sapphire made the announcement prematurely.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is based on the AMD Navi 24 GPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture, which is produced according to TSMC's 6nm process technology. The chip contains 16 execution units with 1024 stream processors and 16 ray tracing hardware acceleration units.

The graphics processor on the video card supports a 64-bit memory bus. GDDR6 memory itself runs at 18 Gb/s per pin, resulting in a memory subsystem with a bandwidth of 144 GB/s. The new product apparently uses two 4GB (32Gb) memory chips, while the original version had two 2GB (16Gb) chips. The novelty, as well as the 4 GB version, also has 16 MB of high-speed Infinity Cache buffer.

The 4GB version of the accelerator has a gaming GPU clock of 2610MHz and a maximum of 2815MHz. On the 8GB model, the gaming frequency of the processor is increased to 2685 MHz and the maximum is up to 2825 MHz. In other words, a significant increase in performance, even despite the presence of twice as much memory, is not expected here.

The power consumption of Radeon RX 6500 XT Pulse with 4GB and 8GB of memory is 130W, 23W above the reference value. According to Sapphire, the 8GB version of the card is now on sale. However, the company did not specify its cost. In comparison, the 4GB Radeon RX 6500 XT is currently available for under $200 in the US.

Image source: Sapphire