AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Linux Performance

AMD recently launched the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card for the $199 USD price point. While built on the current-generation RDNA2 architecture, this graphics card was widely panned for its price while only offering 4GB of video memory, limited to PCIe x4 bandwidth, and performance similar to the years-old Polaris GPUs. While all the major benchmarks online to this point have been under Windows, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is performing under Linux.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT launched earlier this month for $199 USD. This RDNA2 GPU has 16 compute units and 16 ray accelerators, 32 ROPs. 1024 stream processors, clocks up to a 2815MHz boost frequency, and has 4GB of GDDR6 video memory with a 64-bit memory interface.

The RX 6500 XT does offer H.264 decode support but sadly lacks AV1 decode as another strike against this low-end GPU. The Radeon RX 6500 XT AIB graphics cards tend to offer one DisplayPort 1.4a interface and HDMI 2.1.

Back on launch day I was able to purchase a Radeon RX 6500 XT for the $199 USD suggested retail price. That's what is being used for the testing today with AMD unfortunately not having provided any RX 6500 XT review sample for Linux testing. There are some Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics cards as of writing available from major Internet retailers, but all the ones listed are $269 USD at the low-end or even above $350~400 in some cases, given today's chip shortages and other squeezes on the market.

For those liking to support hardware vendors that acknowledge Linux, Sapphire continues to advertise Linux support on their Radeon graphics card packaging.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT does work with the current open-source Linux driver stack and its code is the Beige Goby driver path that has been present in the Linux kernel and Mesa since last year.