RX 6500 XT vs GTX 1650 SUPER vs RX 5500 XT Comparison & Benchmarks

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is the world’s first 6 Nanometer (nm) GPU. It is also the smallest graphics card in the AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics card lineup and sits below Radeon RX 6600 in the series. The card is mainly targeted towards eSports and 1080p gaming and has lower power consumption. It is also a relatively smaller card and is well suited for small form factor (SFF) cases. The main competitors of RX 6500 XT are GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER from Nvidia and Radeon RX 5500 XT which the RX 6500 XT officially replaces. Here in this post, I am going to compare the RX 6500 XT against its major rivals so that you can know about its performance, features and whether you should prefer it over its competitors or not.

RX 6500 XT vs GTX 1650 SUPER vs RX 5500 XT Comparison

Below is the comparison between RX 6500 XT, GTX 1650 SUPER, and RX 5500 XT graphics cards based on their specifications, performance, pricing, power consumption, and features.

GPU Architecture

Radeon RX 6500 XT is the first graphics card in the world that is built on the 6nm manufacturing process. The card is powered by RDNA 2 GPU architecture and uses Navi 24 GPU. It comes with 1024 Stream Processors and 16 Ray Accelerators or RT Cores for Real-Time Ray Tracing. On the other hand, Radeon RX 5500 XT is built on a relatively older platform which is RDNA architecture. It uses Navi 14 GPU built on a 7nm fabrication process and comes with 1408 Stream Processors.

GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER is an Nvidia card and uses a completely different GPU architecture which is Turing. It uses TU116 GPU architecture on the 12nm manufacturing process and comes with 1280 CUDA Cores. The card does not have any RT Cores or Turing Cores. There is no way to compare Stream processors with CUDA Cores directly and you can learn how they are different from each other by going through the link given below.

Must Read: CUDA Cores vs Stream Processors Difference

Video RAM [VRAM]

All three cards come with 4GB GDDR6 memory but RX 5500 XT is the only card here that also comes in an 8GB memory configuration. Also, RX 5500 XT wins in the memory department here because it delivers the highest memory bandwidth because of its 128-bit wide memory bus interface. The card comes with 4GB/8GB GDDR6 memory (128-bit) that runs at 14Gbps and delivers a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s. On the contrary, RX 6500 XT delivers the least memory bandwidth which is 144 GB/s only because of its crippled memory interface of 64-bit. Like RX 5500 XT, GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER also comes with a 128-bit wide memory bus but has a lower memory speed of 12 Gbps translating into lower memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s.  

Features

When it comes to features then RX 6500 XT has the least of the three because the Navi 24 GPU was originally intended for use in laptops mainly in the budget segment. It lacks hardware encoding and there is no support for 4K H264 Encode, H265/HEVC Encode, and even AV1 Decode. This is quite surprising because even the much older cards like RX 570, RX 580, and RX 590 have those features present in them. Also, RX 6500 XT offers only two display/video outputs which can be an issue for some of the users. The only thing that RX 6500 XT has over its competitors is the Real-Time Ray Tracing support which I think is quite meaningless for a budget category card because of their lower performance. RX 5500 XT supports PCIe 4.0 but the bandwidth is limited to only 4 lanes (x4).

GTX 1650 SUPER and RX 5500 XT do support hardware encoding and AVI decode. They also offer three display outputs. GTX 1650 SUPER supports PCIe 3.0 x16 but RX 5500 XT includes PCIe Gen4 support limited to x8 bandwidth. The features that are commonly supported on the three cards include the support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, and G-Sync/FreeSync variable refresh rate technologies. Here the AMD Radeon cards RX 6500 XT and RX 5500 XT do come with HDMI 2.1 port that GTX 1650 SUPER lacks. So, when it comes to features then RX 5500 XT takes the lead closely followed by GTX 1650 SUPER.

Gaming Performance

As these cards are meant for 1080p gaming only so here are the benchmarks of these cards at 1080p resolution in the latest AAA games.

From the above benchmarks, you can see that RX 6500 XT does beat GTX 1650 SUPER and RX 5500 XT in some games but is beaten by both in the majority of the games when the PCIe interface is dropped to PCIe 3.0 for the RX 5500 XT. Moreover, the difference in the performance between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 for RX 5500 XT is quite significant because the card’s PCIe bandwidth is limited to x4 only no matter what the PCIe interface is i.e. PCIe 4.0, PCIe 3.0, or PCIe 2.0.  

Power Consumption

The card with the lowest power consumption is the GTX 1650 SUPER followed by RX 6500 XT. The card with the highest power consumption figure is the RX 5500 XT. So, in terms of power efficiency, GTX 1650 SUPER is clearly the winner.

Pricing & Availability

The cheapest card here is the GTX 1650 SUPER with a base MSRP of USD 160. The official MSRP for RX 5500 XT is USD 169 for the 4GB model and USD 199 for the 8GB model. The launch price of RX 6500 XT is USD 199. You can check the current prices of these cards from the links given below.

Check RX 6500 XT Price on Amazon

Check GTX 1650 SUPER Price on Amazon

Check RX 5500 XT Price on Amazon

RX 6500 XT vs GTX 1650 SUPER vs RX 5500 XT Specifications

See also:

• RX 6400 vs GTX 1650 Comparison & Benchmarks
• RTX 3050 vs GTX 1660 SUPER vs RX 6500 XT Comparison

Final Thoughts

I think RX 6500 XT is one of the worst graphics cards in the recent launches because it lacks performance and features for the price it sells. For the given price there are much better alternatives available in the market that include GTX 1650 SUPER, RX 5500 XT and even used RX 590, or RX 580. The card is crippled by its PCI Express bandwidth, lower memory bandwidth, and suffers a huge performance loss on PCIe 3.0 interface. I don’t think anyone spending money on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard and processor is going to buy a budget card like RX 6500 XT and the majority of the users for this card would be having PCIe 3.0 motherboard only. I think RX 6500 XT is a complete failure of a graphics card from AMD and there is no place for this card in the market because better alternatives are available with more capability and features at the same or lesser price. If you have opinions or queries then let me know in the comment section below.