AMD is launching a new GPU today with 4GB of VRAM — something the company made fun of just a couple of years prior. With each year that passes, PC games become more and more demanding. Textures get sharper, ray tracing is more realistic, and developers can cram more things on the screen at once. All of this helps games feel more realistic than ever before, assuming someone has the necessary hardware to handle them.
Along with a capable CPU and ample memory, GPUs are a critical part of this process. They're the main component that brings a game's graphics to life, and there are a lot of things to consider when buying one — such as the core count, clock speed, memory type, etc. Another one of these factors is the amount of VRAM. The more VRAM a GPU has, the more graphics data the GPU has access to, which in turn means faster frame rates and better-looking games. VRAM amounts have gradually gone up over the years, with 4GB generally considered the absolute bare minimum in 2022.
That all leads us to today's news. On January 19, AMD launched its Radeon RX 6500 XT GPU. On the surface, it's a pretty modest card. It's based on a 6nm design, touts 16 compute units, and promises up to 108 FPS and 78 FPS in Resident Evil Village and Halo Infinite, respectively. However, it comes with just 4GB of VRAM. Not only is that a pretty small amount by 2022 standards, but as KitGuru cleverly pointed out, it's something AMD trash-talked a couple of years ago.
Per KitGuru's sleuthing, an AMD blog post from 2020 had a very interesting comment from Radeon marketing specialist Adit Bhutani. Trying to hype up AMD's new cards with 6 and 8GB of VRAM, Bhutani said the following: "AMD is leading the industry at providing gamers with high VRAM graphics solutions across the entire product offering. Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is evidently not enough for today's games."
Yep, that's correct. In 2020, AMD flat-out said 4GB of VRAM wasn't good enough for gamers. Fast forward to 2022, and the company's now launching a new GPU with 4GB of VRAM. It doesn't get much funnier than that. The Verge reports that AMD quickly removed the old blog post after this news broke, but it's since been restored to its original state.
As poor of a look as this is for AMD, it's far from the first time a tech company has had to awkwardly walk back on something it said. Samsung is notorious for this kind of thing. Right after the iPhone X came out, Samsung had a whole ad campaign mocking the iPhone's notch. A couple of years later, Samsung launched the Galaxy S10 with a cutout for its selfie camera. Samsung's also made fun of Apple for removing the headphone jack and not shipping chargers with its phones — two things Samsung's since started doing, too. Ultimately, this isn't that big of a deal for AMD. The RX 6500 XT will launch, people will still buy it, and that's all there is to it. Still, it's always humorous when something like this happens. The internet is forever, and that's especially true when people want to hold companies accountable for overzealous remarks.
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