Graphics cards have always been a bit of a bone of contention for me these last couple of years as a dedicated PC gamer, what with the shortages and extravagant price hikes that have made this hobby elitist if you want to afford the best GPUs for gaming. With the biggest sales event of the year past us, and Christmas just around the corner, we're still looking out for deals on GPUs for those little budget gaming builds that might be offered as presents this year.
Dropping to a new lowest-ever price, the Radeon RX 6650 XT is yours for only $209 from Amazon. This iteration of the RX 6650 XT comes from board partner PowerColor and features 8GBs of GDDR6 VRAM and sports a base clock of 2486MHz. This card is perfect for 1080p gaming in a budget gaming PC and can even handle 1440p gaming at sensible graphics settings.
You can see where the performance of the RX 6650 XT stacks up in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy compared to the competition from its own range of GPUs and that of rivals Intel and Nvidia. The 6650 XT is faster than an RTX 3060 in 1080p gaming (discounting ray tracing), and It's also significantly faster than the RTX 3050 and even beats the 16GB Arc A770 from Intel.
You're going to struggle to find budget gaming cards that will beat this price point and performance without forking out say an extra $90 for an Nvidia RTX 4060 at $299, but you should also consider that the RTX 4060 is the latest generation and will have significantly better performance in ray traced games (if you want to make use of the feature), and have access to DLSS 3/3.5 frame generation software. Don't forget to check out our GPU Price Index for the latest up-to-date graphics card prices.
