It’s been about two years since the health crisis started. But until now, there’s still a substantial amount of shortage in computer components, especially GPUs.
Making things worse are crypto miners and scalpers who are sweeping any of the few GPUs available in the market. NVIDIA tried to mend this with its LHR (Low Hash Rate) GPUs, and apparently, AMD is doing the same, too.
Recently, AMD released the RX 6500 XT, a quite powerful GPU for only USD199 (around Php10,200). You’d think that a graphics card at this price will appeal to miners — well, no, as the card was apparently designed to repel them.
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VP Laura Smith of AMD Radeon revealed to journalists that the 6500 XT is “optimized” for games.
Smith said that they “have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market,” and added that “you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. That’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type activities or mining activities.”
Looking at the specs sheet, the 6500 XT doesn’t come with an 8GB version compared to last gen’s RX 5500 XT. It also utilizes a 64-bit memory interface, which is rare in most recent graphics cards.
These features mean that the card will not be good for mining Ethereum as it requires more video RAM and is always hungry for memory bandwidth.
To still make it powerful, AMD has increased the clock speed of the RX 6500 XT. It has a boost clock of 2815MHz, versus last gen’s 1845MHz.
Since the limitations came from the hardware itself, bypassing it is almost impossible, unlike NVIDIA’s LHR technology.
Via: Ars Technica