AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Linux Performance

As mentioned there was no working GPU power monitoring support with the AMDGPU driver for the RX 6500 XT, but at least here are some GPU thermal numbers if curious for this particular Sapphire graphics card used for testing...

Across all the graphics/gaming benchmarks carried out on the Radeon RX 6500 XT at 1080p, the performance of this "$!99" USD graphics card was behind that of the prior Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB graphics card and just ahead of the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER. See all of my RX 6500 XT Linux benchmarks carried out so far over on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Unfortunately due to these difficult market times, the Radeon RX 6500 XT isn't compelling. Even at $199 USD it's tough considering the RX 480 / RX 580 years ago initially launched at $199 USD (or slightly more for the 8GB variant) but considering the graphics cards in stock as of writing are $269+ make the RX 6500 XT even worse for its value proposition. It's unfortunate the Radeon RX 6500 XT has just 4GB of vRAM, limited to PCIe x4, and lacks AV1 decoding like the larger RDNA2 GPUs. But given the state of the industry, that's how things look at the moment. The card can work for 1080p gaming as shown by the Linux gaming numbers in this review, but comparatively against the other graphics cards and for its price, it's not really appealing.

At least if you do find your hands on the Radeon RX 6500 XT, it is backed by fully open-source Linux graphics driver support that is working well for both OpenGL and Vulkan workloads.