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AMD Radeon RX 6500M

AMD Radeon RX 6500M: Review and Analysis for Gamers and Professionals in 2025

April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon RX 6500M remains a popular choice for budget gaming laptops even three years post-launch. This mobile graphics card, designed to balance price and performance, continues to attract users who value mobility without significant compromises. In this article, we will explore its architecture, performance, strengths and weaknesses, as well as its relevance in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The RX 6500M is built on the RDNA 2 microarchitecture, which debuted in 2020. Despite its age, this platform provides respectable energy efficiency thanks to the 6nm TSMC manufacturing process.

Unique Features:

- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 3.0): Support for the latest version of AMD FSR allows for increased FPS in games through intelligent image scaling. In 2025, the technology is implemented in over 150 projects, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield.

- Ray Tracing: Hardware ray tracing is implemented via 12 RT cores, but their performance is limited. Enabling ray tracing reduces FPS by 30-50%, making this feature less useful for this model.

- Smart Access Memory (SAM): Optimization for CPU and GPU interaction is available in systems with Ryzen 5000/7000 processors.

Conclusion: The RDNA 2 architecture remains relevant for the budget segment but falls behind newer solutions like RDNA 4.

2. Memory: Type, Size, and Impact on Performance

- Memory Type: GDDR6.

- Size: 4 GB—this is the card's main drawback. By 2025, many games (GTA VI, The Elder Scrolls VI) require a minimum of 6 GB of VRAM for high-quality textures.

- Bus and Bandwidth: A 64-bit bus provides 144 GB/s. This is sufficient for 1080p at medium settings, but in highly detailed scenes, there are "drops" due to insufficient memory.

Tip: Disable Ultra textures and lower shadow quality to minimize VRAM load.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p (Medium Settings):

- Apex Legends: 75-90 FPS.

- Fortnite (without RT): 60-70 FPS; with FSR 3.0—up to 90 FPS.

- Hogwarts Legacy: 40-50 FPS (FSR 3.0 is required).

1440p and 4K: Not recommended. Even with FSR, the card only achieves 25-35 FPS at 1440p.

Ray Tracing: Practically useless. In Cyberpunk 2077 with RT set to Medium, FPS drops to 20-25 frames.

Relevance in 2025: Suitable for esports games (CS2, Valorant) and titles from 2020-2023. For newer releases, settings will need to be reduced to Low.

4. Professional Tasks

- Video Editing: In DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro, the RX 6500M handles 1080p video rendering, but 4K timelines will be laggy. Use hardware acceleration via AMD AMF.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender, rendering on OpenCL is slower than on NVIDIA CUDA. For simple tasks, it's adequate, but for complex scenes, it's better to choose a card with more memory.

- Scientific Calculations: OpenCL support allows the GPU to be used in MATLAB or SPECviewperf, but performance is modest.

Conclusion: This card is geared towards basic professional tasks, not heavy workloads.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Management

- TDP: 50 W.

- Cooling: Laptops with the RX 6500M often come with modest coolers. To ensure stable operation, avoid long gaming sessions without additional cooling (a fan-based cooling pad can help lower temperatures by 5-8°C).

- Case Recommendations: In desktop PCs (using an external eGPU enclosure), ensure good ventilation.

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 Mobile (2023):

- Pros: NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5, better ray tracing performance, 8 GB of GDDR6.

- Cons: Higher price ($700+ vs. $600 for laptops with RX 6500M).

Intel Arc A550M:

- Pros: Intel's XeSS, 8 GB of memory.

- Cons: Less stable drivers, lower performance in older games.

Conclusion: The RX 6500M excels in the budget segment but lags behind future-oriented technologies.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: A standard 120-150 W adapter is sufficient for laptops with the RX 6500M.

- Compatibility: The card works on PCIe 4.0 x4. Ensure your CPU and motherboard support this version.

- Drivers: Regularly update the Adrenalin Edition—AMD has improved stability in 2024-2025.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Affordable price (laptops starting at $600).

- Support for FSR 3.0.

Cons:

- Only 4 GB of VRAM.

- Weak ray tracing capabilities.

- Narrow memory bus.

9. Final Verdict: Who is the RX 6500M For?

This graphics card is suitable for:

- Students who need a laptop for study and occasional gaming.

- Gamers playing less demanding or older titles.

- Budget-conscious users not willing to pay for an RTX 3050.

2025 Alternatives: If your budget allows, consider laptops with the RX 7600M (8 GB, RDNA 3) or RTX 4050 Mobile. However, for basic tasks, the RX 6500M is still relevant.

Price: Laptops with the RX 6500M in 2025 range from $600 to $800 for new models. We recommend looking at models from Lenovo, ASUS TUF, and HP Victus with a quality cooling system.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

January 2022

Model Name

Radeon RX 6500M

Generation

Mobility Radeon

Base Clock

2000MHz

Boost Clock

2400MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x4

Transistors

5,400 million

RT Cores

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

6 nm

Architecture

RDNA 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

64bit

Memory Clock

2250MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

144.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

76.80 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

153.6 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

9.830 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

307.2 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

5.013 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1024

L1 Cache

128 KB per Array

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

50W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

2.2

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.