Sapphire's Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT 8GB, which recently released, is now available for $229.99. The Navi 24-powered graphics card is only $20 more expensive than the vanilla Radeon RX 6500 XT, one of the best graphics cards around if you're on a serious budget.
One of the more questionable aspects of the Radeon RX 6500 XT was the 4GB of GDDR6 memory. In a blog post titled "Game Beyond 4GB," published in 2020, AMD argued that 4GB simple wasn't enough for modern gaming. Therefore, AMD's decision to incorporate only 4GB of memory into the Radeon RX 6500 XT still makes many scratch their heads. However, Sapphire's Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT 8GB solves the Radeon RX 6500 XT's memory deficiency. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't officially list a Radeon RX 6500 XT 8GB on its website, so it would appear Sapphire produced the 8GB version out of its own volition, and we may not see other vendors follow suit.
The Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT 8GB clocks in slightly faster than the Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT 4GB. The 8GB model features a 2,695 MHz game clock and 2,855 MHz, whereas the 4GB variant comes with a 2,685 MHz game clock and a 2,825 MHz boost clock. That's less than a 2% difference. The most significant upgrade lies in the memory system.
Sapphire's new model comes with double the memory as the original. However, the memory still operates at 18 Gbps across a 64-bit memory interface. Therefore, the Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT 8GB offers the same memory bandwidth of 143.9 GBps as any other Radeon RX 6500 XT.
