Radeon RX 6500 XT, GeForce RTX 3050 And Intel Arc A380 On Track For A Budget GPU Brawl
Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 6400 will use the same GPU in slightly cut-down format; sporting six WGPs instead of eight, it will thus have 768 stream processors. Otherwise it will be the same, including the 4GB of GDDR6 memory and 64-bit bus width, although according to Videocardz' unnamed source, it will not require a peripheral power connector like its bigger brother.
These will probably be the cheapest video cards to date with hardware acceleration for DirectX Ray-tracing (DXR). It will be interesting to observe DXR performance on these cards; with just two ray acceleration units per WGP, RDNA2's ray-tracing performance isn't outstanding, and such small GPUs with limited memory bandwidth may not be able to make much use of the feature at all. Both of these cards are apparently due in Q1 2022.
That puts the GeForce RTX 3050 well ahead of its budget gaming competition from the red and blue teams, at least in terms of specifications. Thanks to the GA106 upgrade, we expect the RTX 3050 to come in with some 3,072 shader processors (ahem, "CUDA cores"), as well as a 128-bit memory bus connected to fully 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. As a result, we reckon the new baby GeForce will be priced well ahead of its supposed competition when it arrives a bit later, in Q2 of next year.
It's not clear whether this is intended to be a mobile or desktop GPU, but with a relatively high GPU clock rate of 2.45 GHz we'd be surprised to see this part in laptops. Indeed, it seems more like an entry-level desktop card, but with such a small GPU a 192-bit bus seems unlikely, giving us an unusual 96-bit bus width for the 6GB of memory.
TUM_APISAK comments that the performance is similar to a GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, which is pretty underwhelming for a part coming out early next year. Hopefully this similarly-small GPU can be found in single-slot and low-profile form, because that kind of performance in a tiny graphics card is still something to appreciate. It's also possible that the preliminary benchmarks that the leaker is referencing are laboring under premature drivers.
Before any of these cards hit, we've got the GeForce RTX 2060 12GB, which lands next week. There's also still the looming prospect of a GeForce 3000-series refresh early next year. Here's hoping that some of us can actually get our hands on any of these GPUs.