Review AMD Radeon RX 6400 Review: Budget in Almost Every Way

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Well, while I may be old fashioned, but how does a 6nm process , 50 Watt card that can churn out 60 FPS on max settings in 1080p in many of the recent games tested in reviews get only 2 and 1/2 stars.

I'm just not seeing it. How does it get better? Sure, the prices for low end stuff are not what they used to be 10 years ago, but that's true across the board. And those low end cards in their time had value if they could reach 40-50 FPS on medium. This one can manage 3x the FPS of my current RX550. I am sorry to be all negative, but the review may not reflect the realities and needs of low end computing.

The process node doesn't really matter; what matters is price, performance, features, and power. Of those four factors, the RX 6400 only looks decent in power. Price is lower than some other GPUs, but it's not low. $139 for performance that matches the 3.5 years old GTX 1650, a card that cost about $150 for much of 2019 and early 2020 before things went haywire. That. Is. Not. Good.

That's where the 2.5-star rating comes from. Three years of "progress" for roughly the same price performance isn't laudable. Especially when you then factor in the other aspects of the design. GTX 1650 includes full H.264/H.265 encode and decode; Navi 24 only does decode. GTX 1650 supports up to three displays and has an x16 link; Navi 24 is only x4 and suffers greatly if you plug it into an older PCIe 3.0 system. 4GB on a 64-bit interface is worse than 4GB on a 128-bit interface when it comes to bandwidth.

The GTX 1650 GDDR6 version also has a slightly lower price these days than the GDDR5 variant, which makes it almost universally faster than RX 6400. And the ray tracing support in Navi 24 is laughable, because it's effectively useless.

This is also factually wrong: "50 Watt card that can churn out 60 FPS on max settings in 1080p." No, it's a 50W card that can manage 60 fps at medium settings in a lot of recent games. At 1080p ultra, unless you're looking at light esports games like Valorant, it's not going to do 60 fps. In our eight game test suite using moderately demanding games, it averaged 26 fps and only broke 30 fps average fps in two of the games (Borderlands 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn).

Is it a terrible card? That depends on what you're after. But here's a brand-new GTX 1650 GDDR6 for $160. https://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-GeForce-128-bit-Graphics-ZT-T16520F-10L/dp/B0881YZJ45. If you're willing to buy used (which shouldn't be a problem with a lower tier card like a GTX 1650 that wouldn't have been used for mining), you can readily find them for around $120. That's "buy it now" and if you go for auctions they often sell for under $100.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/27386/i.ht...-digital+-lot+-combo+-bundle&_sop=15&_udlo=50