AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT May Not Launch at MSRP As Card Reportedly Costs 299 Euros in France

It looks like AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card would be unable to launch at MSRP pricing as a report from CowCotland claims.

AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT was announced just a few days ago for $199 US and AMD has been very confident that it would be the most accessible graphics card ever made in the past two years & they have taken several steps to make sure it is just that. We have detailed some of these measures in an article here that has interviews from AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, Head of Technical Marketing, Robert Hallock, and Gaming Chief, Frank Azor that were published over at PCWorld & HotHardware.

To keep it simple, the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT has a 4 GB GDDR6 memory since it targets the entry-level & sweet-spot 1080p gaming segment, it features a PCIe Gen 4.0 x4 interface & has cut-down encoding/decoding capabilities compared to other RDNA 2 GPUs. The first two have been specifically put in place to make sure that this card is the least attractive option for crypto miners but the last one is a questionable move.  Just a day ago, AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, also confirmed that their $199 US price isn't just on paper but it will actually be what you'd expect the card to come at.

Dr. Lisa Su: I think the overarching message for gamers is, we really look at this as a portfolio where we want to support the full range of gamers from top of stack to more mainstream. We understand that there haven’t been enough GPUs out there in 2021. We did actually ship a lot more desktop GPUs in the second half of 21, than we did in the first half. So not everyone has gotten them, but more people have definitely gotten them in the second half of ’21. And you’re going to see many more in 2022. We’re positioning the launch such that—and I know, you guys always say, ’Well, yeah, they’re just saying that’—but we really are positioning the launch at a $199 price point. It is sort of affordable to the mainstream. You know, we intend to have a lot of product out there.

Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO via PCWorld

But it looks like retailers and distributors across the globe have other plans for the entry-level card. As reported by CowCotland (Via Videocardz), the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT will have a price of 299 Euros in France (including taxes). That is a 50% increase over the MSRP & is pretty much in line with the inflated rates of other cards such as the RX 6600 & RX 6600 XT in the retail GPU segment. While this is just from one retailer, it looks like that most users if not all will not get the card at the advertised MSRP of $199 US / 199 Euros.

Other than that, users over at AMD's Reddit have spotted how the Radeon RX 6500 XT offers the same TFLOPs with less encoding/decoding capabilities than the 2016's Radeon RX 480, which launched at $199 US for the 4 GB variant too and was actually available at that price unlike the current generation of cards.

Also, some users running non-Gen 4 platforms may end up with a bandwidth bottleneck as the PCIe interface is only x4 lanes, and while that means Gen 3.0 x8 bandwidth on a Gen 4 motherboard, a Gen 3 motherboard will be limited to just x4 lanes so that's half the bandwidth of the Gen 4 interface (4 GB/s vs 8 GB/s). 3DCenter put together the list of features included and excluded from the Navi 24 GPUs in a nicely put chart that you can see below:

While the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is based on a brand new 6nm GPU architecture and comes with advanced driver and feature support such as RSR and FSR, it will be interesting to see how the card actually fares against the competition such as the RTX 3050 which has a +$50 US MSRP (again not going to see it on that price). So far, the numbers shown by AMD put the RX 6500 XT ahead of the GTX 1650, and the same is the case with NVIDIA's RTX 3050. Both companies didn't showcase detailed results which means consumers should definitely wait for final reviews and retail prices to decide which is the better entry-level option for them.