AMD May Be Working on New Budget Gaming Graphics Cards

After more than a year of the devastating GPU shortage, the market has been left bare, with nothing except overpriced graphics cards for aspiring PC builders to turn to. But now it seems that AMD may have a solution in the works.

Rumors say that the manufacturer is planning to release two new graphics cards aimed at the budget gaming sector: The AMD Radeon RX 6500XT and the RX 6400.

Promotional image of an AMD Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card.

According to the newly released information, listings have been found featuring a new Radeon RX 6500XT card alongside the RX 6400. Both the cards have just 4GB of GDDR6 memory. If this proves to be true, these cards would be the first RDNA2 AMD GPUs with less than 8GB GDDR6 memory.

The new cards are said to run on the Navi 24 GPU, a budget graphics processor. They will also have up to 16 compute units and 1,024 stream processors. Compared to Navi 23 graphics cards, this doesn’t promise outstanding performance — AMD’s new GPUs will have 50% of the cores included in Navi 23 graphics cards. The graphics processor is rumored to run on a 64-bit memory bus.

No other information about the cards has been leaked as of yet. It’s likely that the 6500XT would be the full version of the card, and the RX 6400 would be a cut-down model. One thing is for certain — they will definitely be on the entry-level side of things, suitable for light gaming and home theater as opposed to playing AAA titles on max settings.

For the less-demanding gamer, the RX 6500XT and RX 6400 could prove to be sufficient. Older games should run without a hitch, and if you’re upgrading from a card released years ago, you’ll still see improvement. Newer titles may require some compromise in terms of graphics settings, but popular MOBAs and shooters should still run smoothly on medium settings.

The new Navi 24 GPU was already spotted in Linux patches and dubbed “Beige Goby.” It would make sense for AMD to include these cards in budget gaming laptops. While many people are waiting for more announcements about Nvidia’s RTX 3050, it would certainly be a good time for Team Red to strike and target the entry-level market. Intel seems to have the same idea, as new leaks suggest that Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards may be surprisingly affordable.

The leak was first posted by @KOMACHI_ENSAKA on Twitter and later elaborated on by Videocardz. Although Komachi mentioned that listings of the card were found, they provided no links, so the information is difficult to verify. Komachi is a known source for graphics card-related leaks and has a good track record, but like any other rumor, it’s best to take this information with some skepticism.

Although these new Radeon cards may not fill the gaping hole in the best graphics cards market left by the GPU shortage, they would certainly help. Gamers in need of a GPU may settle for any port in a storm and go down the budget road until the prices eventually normalize.