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Nvidia and AMD unveiled their respective low-end video cards at CES in Las Vegas. The RTX 3050 GPU offers ray tracing and DLSS for limited budgets, while the Radeon RX 6500 XT at the (theoretical) price of $200 would be the cheapest upgrade available to all gamers stuck by the current market situation with video cards of obsolete generations.

NVIDIA RTX 3050

As with other RTX GPUs, the RTX 3050 is based on Nvidia's Ampere architecture and promises to offer the company's most affordable entry to ray-tracing gaming at 60 FPS (at 1080p resolution), along with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. The RTX 3050 also offers Nvidia's third-generation Tensor cores to enable features like AI-powered DLSS upscaling.

As with the RTX 3060, there will be no Founder's Edition model produced by Nvidia, but they will only be available from Nvidia's partners. Asus will launch three RTX 3050 models, including ROG Strix, Dual and Phoenix variants. PNY unveiled three RTX 3050 models, including the Uprising and Revel families. The Revel range comes with a single and dual fan configuration, while the Uprising is an exclusive dual fan. Zotac has only released one model called Twin Edge, but with two official SKUs: one with a factory OC model and the other with reference clock speeds of the 3050. EVGA will have only two variants, XC and XC Black. Finally, Gigabyte presented three new RTX 3050 SKUs in its current range: RTX 3050 Gaming OC, Eagle and Eagle OC.

While Nvidia promises that the RTX 3050 will theoretically start from the price of $249, but it will be difficult to think that you can realistically find them at that price on the market.

The RTX 3050 will go on sale starting January 27th, 2022.

In addition to these cheap GPUs, Nvidia has also leaked the existence of a new flagship model: the RTX 3090 Ti, but has not yet provided details about it.

AMD RX 6500 XT

On the side of AMD instead we find the new RX 6500 XT that sees the technical specifications halved compared to the more expensive RX 6600 XT sibling, offering 16 computing units, 4 GB of GDDR6 RAM, a gaming clock at 2,610 MHz and a boost clock at 2,815 MHz, absorbing 107 W of power.

AMD also announced a new RX 6400 GPU, which fits below the RX 6500 XT in terms of overall performance, but at the moment the model will be limited to pre-assembled OEM systems and not as a consumer product on free sale.

Notably, both the RX 6500 XT GPU and the RX 6400 are the first AMD cards to use a 6 nanometers manufacturing process: the other more powerful RX 6000 series GPUs that AMD has previously released still use an older 7 nm process.

 

  AMD Radeon RX 6600 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT AMD Radeon RX 6400 AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT
Stream Processors 1792
(28 CUs)		 1024
(16 CUs)		 768
(12 CUs)		 1408
(22 CUs)
ROPs 64 32 32 32
Game Clock 2044MHz 2610MHz 2039MHz 1717MHz
Boost Clock 2491MHz 2815MHz 2321MHz 1845MHz
Throughput 7.3 TFLOPS 5.3 TFLOPS 3.1 TFLOPS 5.2 TFLOPS
Memory Clock 14 Gbps GDDR6 18 Gbps GDDR6 16 Gbps GDDR6 14 Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus Width 128-bit 64-bit 64-bit 128-bit
VRAM 8GB 4GB 4GB 8GB
Infinity Cache 32MB 16MB 16MB -
Total Board Power 132W 107W 53W 130W
Manufacturing Process TSMC 7nm TSMC 6nm TSMC 6nm TSMC 7nm
Transistor Count 11.06B 5.4B 5.4B 6.4B
Architecture RDNA2 RDNA2 RDNA2 RDNA
GPU Navi 23 Navi 24 Navi 24 Navi 14
Launch Date 10/13/2021 01/19/2022 2022 12/12/2019
Launch Price $329 $199 OEM $199

The RX 6500 XT will go on sale January 19th for a suggested retail price of $199. AMD will not produce its own version of the RX 6500 XT, which means they will only be available through AMD's partners.

  • By Pangoly,