On January 19, the new Radeon RX 6500 XT goes on sale (we talked about it here). It is a doubly important launch not only because of its price ($ 199) but because it is designed not to be especially efficient in cryptocurrency mining.
During a panel discussion last week, Radeon Vice President Laura Smith explained that the new affordable graphics is optimized solely for video games. Specifically, Smith was referring to the fact that the Frame Buffer or image buffer of the graph only has 4GB.
“There are many things that are influencing the availability of GPUs,” explains Smith to PC World. “In this case we have optimized the RX 6500 to prioritize gamers as the target audience. As you know, the graphic only has 4GB of Frame Buffer. It is a very good figure for most AAA games, but it is not particularly attractive for activities that involve Blockchain, such as cryptocurrency mining. We have made a particular effort to optimize the card so that it is more accessible to players.”.
In graphics, the image buffer is a part of the VRAM where the information of each of the pixeles on the screen that will compose the next frame. The limitation of this buffer joins another interesting detail of the new graph: its memory interface is only 64-bit when the normal thing in the new graphs is that it is 128. Both factors affect especially to Ethereum mining.
AMD is not the first company to try to limit the use of graphics for cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia already tried to limit this use in your models RTX 3070 and 3080, but it did it by software, and apparently the limitation could be overcome by inoculating the graphics with a custom firmware. AMD’s solution seems more definitive because it is a hardware limitation. Hopefully the hack doesn’t translate to limited vine experience as well.eogames. It won’t take long to find out.[[PC World via Ars Technica]
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