Following a teaser on Twitter, AMD has announced a slew of new products in conjunction with CES 2022, which kicks off on Wednesday. This includes the seventh gaming desktop graphics card in its RX 6000 series, the RX 6500 XT, which releases later this month.
The RX 6500 XT features a 2.6Ghz game clock, with 16 compute units and ray accelerators, and an infinity cache of 16MB. Like the RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 graphics cards, AMD's latest GPU is marketed as a graphics card that can run the highest settings at a 1080p resolution.
AMD touts that the RX 6500 XT can perform up to 1.6 times better on the highest 1080p settings than Nvidia's GTX 1650 and its own RX 570 GPU (pictured below). Though, AMD did not share any data on how it stacks up to Nvidia's RTX 2060, which recently saw a re-release in an attempt to circumvent the supply strain issues surrounding the RTX 30 series, though even the RTX 2060 is still hard to find itself.
Like the other graphics cards in the Radeon RX 6000 family, the RX 6500 XT uses RDNA 2 technology, a graphical architecture that provides hardware-based ray tracing. RDNA 2 is also the same graphical architecture that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles use, in addition to Valve's forthcoming portable gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Additionally, the GPU will also support FidelityFX Super Resolution, AMD's open-sourced supersampling tech that can boost image quality or performance in supported games.
The announcement comes at an interesting time as AMD's competitor, Nvidia, is slated to hold a GeForce Event today, where it is rumored Nvidia will unveil a new desktop GPU. Additionally, chipmaker Intel announced last year that it is entering the GPU market to take on both AMD and Nvidia, with the first iteration of Intel's Arc GPUs arriving sometime in Q1 of this year.
AMD is planning to release the RX 6500 XT on January 19, priced at $199.
Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.