AMD GPUs at a reasonable price could be available as early as January 2022.
The RX 6500 XT will be available in mid-January, with the RX 6400 following in March
AMD is rumored to be working on a pair of low-cost graphics cards, and the latest rumors suggest that the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 GPUs will be available as early as January.
This comes from the Chinese forum Bilibili, which is not the most reliable source in general, but the leaker has a good track record, according to VideoCardz, which flagged the post. They anticipate that the RX 6500 XT will go on sale in mid-January, with the RX 6400 in March.
The leaker also mentions that the VRAM loadout for both AMD graphics cards will be 4GB and that the RX 6400 will not require a power supply connection.
According to previous rumors, both products will use the Navi 24 GPU, with the RX 6500 XT packing 1,024 stream processors (SPs or cores) and the RX 6400 having 768 SPs.
Budget cards aplenty, perhaps – but stock permitting
We’ve heard about these cards before, but the rumor mill had them both slated for a Q1 release date. It’s nice to hear more specific timeframes now, but keep in mind that this is just what the grapevine is speculating, nothing more.
Even with only 4GB of memory, these budget graphics cards should be sufficient for 1080p gaming.
Naturally, more appealing budget GPU options will be welcomed, especially since this has been a missing piece of the puzzle for AMD and Nvidia’s current-gen offerings. Speaking of Team Green, as we mentioned yesterday, Nvidia is also rumored to be working on an RTX 3050 desktop variant for Q2, which could be April 2022. (and it might run with a chunkier 8GB of VRAM).
If true, this would come on the heels of AMD’s low-cost GPU launches, reshaping the affordable graphics card landscape to be far more appealing than it is now.
However, the other big question mark is availability, given that Nvidia’s CEO has stated that stock issues will persist until 2022. AMD has slightly more optimistic comments about GPUs’ badly skewed supply and demand balance, but it still doesn’t expect a natural recovery until later in 2022.
This leaves us with a hazy picture of a steady stream of new affordably priced graphics cards – at least with recommended pricing – arriving early-ish next year, as well as concerns about how much those budget prices might be inflated by scarcity and scalping.
