Let me get one thing out of the way:
I'm not a fanboy.
I've been a happy AMD user for almost 4 years now, and I think the 6000 series is doing pretty well with its more expensive options, but to say the 6500XT was a huge let-down is an understatement.
As Kliksphillip put it, we need a $200 hero, and when the 6500XT was first announced, it seemed like it could fill that role.
But from some baffling decisions from Nvidia, it did not, and now the cheapest, most viable option, is a card that's $50 more expensive.
$50 is a good amount of money, specially in markets where cards like these are even more desirable such as Southeast Asia or Latin America, but sometimes, saving up is still the smarter decision.
The current chip shortage has absolutely destroyed our hopes of getting new more powerful GPUs for reasonable prices, so for now, the 3050 is the best we've got, why?
This is the 6500XT, and it loses in every meaningful way to the RX 580 I got in 2019 for less than $180 NEW.
Whilst its GPU clock is higher, it still loses because of its most terrible design flaw: Bandwidth.
A 64 bit memory interface is already terrible enough, but the fact this card runs on just 4 PCI lanes makes it absolutely useless for anyone with a Gen 3 motherboard, and even at Gen 4, it still loses to the RTX 3050 in Gen 3 mode, in fact, it loses out to my 580, which can only do Gen 3.
Again, the 3050 much like my 580 is slower in clocks, but what it gains from just simply having more bandwidth is more than enough to justify its $50 premium, not to mention that it's an 8GB card, with AMD itself saying a couple of years ago that 4GBs would not be enough to game in the future... Which was a complete lie, I'm still doing fine with my 4GB 580, but I do hit some walls sometimes and having an extra 4 would help immensely.
Okay, less power comsuption, a more efficient manufacturing process at a rather impressive 6nm and a relatively lower price, but is it really worth it for someone that wants to game? Is it $50 and slightly less power really worth trading for a much faster card?
I really don't understand what AMD was thinking when marketing this as a gaming card, knowing full well they could've done better and that Nvidia would do better.
Here are some recent titles running on both, from VentureBeat's website.
All these games were run at 1080p on the very high preset and this is honestly embarassing.
My 580 sits somewhere between them, but knowing seeing how well the 3050 is doing on God of War even at those settings makes me really want to upgrade, seeing as how even on Original settings I still get some bad frame drops.
And the last issue for me are the ports.
I mean, sure, not everyone is rocking that many displays, but having as many ports as you can put on the backplate has just been standard for gaming cards, seeing something like this make me sincerely think this was not supposed to be one.
If AMD had released this at a lower cost and marketed it as an office GPU, I wouldn't be mad at all, in fact, it'd be a really good office GPU.
But the hype they tried to generate makes me disappointed and I just fail to understand the logic behind it.
If you can't release something that's cheap and good, don't pretend that you can, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
Depending on how things go, I might need to go with a budget GPU, and the 3050 seems like the best option right now...
That is of course if you can find them at MSRP.
God help us all.
Sources:
VentureBeat: RTX 3050 vs. 6500 XT: Can they handle God of War and more?
Technical City: AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB