AMD Radeon RDNA2 Navi (RX 6500, 6600, 6700, 6800, 6900 XT)

It's not just that. You need a common baseline, a non-moving goalpost to compare performance to. Where and foremost based on which metric do you draw the line for not using maximum details?
Compute throughput? Bandwidth? Price? Relative price (to what?).

Sure, you don't have to answer or even think about this, but reviewers have to. So, what if... reviews for this card would have used medium to high settings all of a sudden? Unfair, because, say, a GTX 1650 was tested with high to ultra? Would you need to test RX 5500 XT 4G in other settings than the 8G version? Or what if you based it on price? 300 Euro (market-aligend pricing after initial batch of "price supported stock") is what was a fairly uppest-midrange card before the price craze.

Can I throw in a car comparison? Would test top speed of a small car on inner-city roads only? 50 km/h (~30 mph) - check, it's fast enough? I don't think you would.

And yes, I know, this would be opening a can of worms.

 

It's not. Texture detail adds visual fidelity with little to no cost, as long as you have enough graphics memory. And we're not in the sub 75$ market here, were a few bucks for 4 GByte of memory is making a real dent into your profitability calculation.

 

According to some sources VRAM costs is one of the major issues in current market

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/radeon-6500xt-and-6400.2599196/post-40677077

with some clarification here

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/radeon-6500xt-and-6400.2599196/post-40677217

(not knowing how much trust you can put on these numbers, but, if true, these may explain a lot. And btw, yes, shipping costs are up 6x and above at present compared to the past, This I can tell by personal experiences)

 

Many games don't allow you to select higher texture details unless you have the VRAM for them.

 

Yes, memory prices are up. But we're not talking about a Sub-75$ card here, but price tags north of 300 Euro/US-$ as per AIB MSRPs, mind you. And I cannot tell what kind of prices they cite there: Is it spot market?
And in which amounts? 1K, 1M?

Shipping I would count as a secondary problem, because most of it is the portion out of the asian manufacturing plants into the US and other overseas markets. And them boxes don't care whether theres 4 or 8 GByte chips on the cards. You'd only notice for the intra-china shipping portion, which probably is done via truck or train anyway.

 

Surely you know there are other requirements than memory capacity to process the textures fast enough.
We are in very different market indeed. 4 GB might be what will save the card from being another mining trophy.

 

Surely I do: Caching works a bit better with lower res textures.

 

Yes, we are not talking about 75$ cards, but the point is that in a econmically profitable 75$ card today you cannot have 4Gbytes of GDDR6 VRAM, because according to that source you need 48$ for that amount of RAM alone (I'd assume these are the prices for AIB, thus, in volumes). That breakdown, if true, is simply saying a $199 MSRP for the 6500XT is impossible to achieve if not at a loss (and board makers as well as AMD/Nvidia need to make a profit on these, not a loss).I don't know why you count the shipping as a "secondary problem", because it's not a problem only if you live in China but if you live in Europe like me on in the US it matters a lot, as shipping a container costs easily over 20K€, very often in the 30K€ range instead of the 4-5K€ of two years ago. And even shipping by train over long distances costs a lot and takes a lot of time.

 

That is disappointing. Even if you avoid the bandwidth costs you still need sampling power.

 

Sampling Power is mainly a function of output or nowadays rendering resolution. Number of texture layers notwithstanding, but that's not texture resolution.
edit: to be clear, I mean texture resolution only, not additional detail layers etc., in practice, this does not degrade fps notably for cards that can accomodate the data in local VRAM.

The 199 $ MSRP is a subsidized MSRP, see Jawed links to OCUKs forums. Real pricing is close to or above 300 EUR/US$. Yes, sure, with lower BOM your profits are greater.

I disregard shipping, because it does not differ between a 4 and 8 GByte card, it's a fixed amount and thus a completely different topic.

 

I agree.

Yes to all that.

So the hypocrisy relates specifically to "what product can you buy instead" in the current environment and the answer is there's a 1650 4GB for slightly more money. That's the competitor. And the performance with PCI Express 3.0 is the same. With PCI Express 4.0, 6500XT is faster.

Actually, we don't know the performance of 1650 with PCI Express 3.0 (current drivers, current motherboards, current CPUs). Do we?

 

Yes, i know. My posts also try to explain why is this, nobody wants to sell cards at a loss (without counting that the cost breakdown does not take in account the markup of the shop which is actually selling it to you, which is normally above 20%, again for profitability reasons).

Yes, it is not related to RAM but it's related to the general price increase on this kind of good, and it's a problem espacially for these low-end cards when the volume they take in the container is almost the same as the higher end card but with selling prices and absolute margins are way lower. My post was not directly tied to RAM only, it was more directed to the general price increase, which is also due to BOM cost increase, where RAM is one of the main issues.

 

Inverse function? I am trying to determine what you mean.

 

An inverse function is also a function, just inverse.

Ok, I'll try. In a classic 3D Game like Quake, you basically apply at least one texture for every pixel on screen (single texturing). With early 3D acceleration, you usually look up four adresses (locations) from a texture map (texture samplers sampling) and filter them down to one pixel (bilinear texture filtering). For an early version of Quake running in 640 x 480, you would need 307200 pixels being textured this way which equates to 1228800 texture lookups, provided there's no caching.

 

Right, but it is as if you still think memory and its bandwidth is all you need to push more textures.

 

Just random "bits" -

Isn't the 4GB VRAM is a bit of a by product of the 64 bit bus? They'd need to double side clamshell as we're still limited by 2GB chips. This from what I understand adds other issues/considerations, besides just paying for 2x more chips, which is why it's typically not used for consumer cards if possible.

We're seeing a bit on a issue with respect to the overall lack of memory scaling in the industry for almost the last decade now. It's not like the past where due to cost/capacity scaling vendors could just basically "no brainer" double VRAM each generation or 1.5 generations through out the entire product line. Still not moving away from power of 2 capacity amounts, even though the spec has made provisions for it, isn't helping either.

As such we see with both AMD and Nvidia we have situations in which some products can have "too much" VRAM while others have "too little."

My understanding also is VRAM production is also in a bit of a transitory phase at the moment. Manufactures are shifting more capacity to higher density lines for 2GB chips away from 1GB chips. This has created an interesting situation now in that 1GB chips actually have significantly higher bit cost than 2GB due to the amount of products still on 1GB.

My opinion of AMD is historically they've shown more of a tendency to be fluid in terms of pricing. As in they're more willingly to price to what they feel the market will bear, to the high side, and "price cut" if needed. This means the 6500XT's configuration might need to hold in a situation in which mining demand collapses. The margins might be there for a 8GB clamshell in todays market, but at actual $200 or lower pricing?

Lastly we're really going to need some in depth investigations into the VRAM situation. I also have a feeling a lot of opinions on this might be too subjectively affected. What would be great if there was a tool possible to essentially simulate VRAM. As for user investigations this is several limited by the tools, basically GPUs, available. From a media perspective there is a time cost and awareness problem in my opinion. I've seen some outlets look into this and have consistency issues and miss some considerations.

 

Nope. No room for argument. 64-bit bus is silly and 4GB isn't enough, this card sucks donkey balls and is an embarrassment and a travesty.

 

The RT performance makes me think of the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. Just because it has a feature, doesn't mean you will ever be able to do anything with it. It's just a $100-150 card that is benefiting from the market situation.

 

what is worst, $999 card that cost nowadays $2000, or $150 card that cost $300 ?
in absolute numbers )

 

How about $20 cards that cost >$100 like the entry level stuff.