AMD's Radeon RX 6400 is geared for a very specific niche. If you happen to fall into that niche, go ahead and add 1.5 stars to our score and pick one up. For most people, however, it's a relatively anemic card that basically matches the performance of Nvidia's three-year-old GTX 1650 for roughly the same price. That's not progress, though a lot of the blame lies with the pandemic, cryptocurrencies, and the supply chain issues of the past two years.
The target market is anyone needing a GPU that doesn't require any form of external power, and people that need a half-height GPU for a slim PC. Such users do get a mostly modern GPU, but as we noted in our RX 6500 XT review, AMD arguably cut features a bit too much with Navi 24.
The biggest issue is the outdated video engine. Yes, you can watch YouTube and NetFlix on the RX 6400, as it still supports H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) decoding. What you can't do is any form of accelerated video encoding. That probably won't matter for a lot of people, but any budget gamers thinking about doing a Twitch stream will be disappointed — especially since you get both H.264 and H.265 encoding support with Nvidia's older GTX 1650. HTPC users that want to encode live streams for later viewing will also be disappointed.
If you do end up buying an RX 6400, note that AMD's Raise the Game Bundle is now live, and you'll get a free copy of the Saints Row reboot. No, you don't get the choice of one of the other games, sorry.
AMD revealed that the Navi 24 GPU at the heart of the Radeon RX 6400 (and RX 6500 XT) was originally intended for laptops. As such, some of the missing features like video encoding support can be easily explained. On a laptop, the integrated graphics — either from AMD or Intel — would have handled video encoding and decoding. But the crazy GPU market of the past year caused AMD to rethink the product line and ultimately release dedicated GPUs for desktops.
The lack of video encoding hardware doesn't make this a terrible card, but it's one more factor to consider. We'd prefer Nvidia's GTX 1650 Super, which you can often find used for about the same price, or AMD's previous-gen RX 5500 XT 4GB. And while we would normally have concerns with buying a used graphics card, neither of those were likely to be used as mining GPUs, so they should be okay. But those GPUs need a 6-pin power connector and aren't available in half-height form factors.
The last two years of GPU and component prices were especially awful, but thankfully those days appear to be over. The RX 6400 at least makes some progress in providing an entry-level GPU that doesn't suck horribly (I'm looking at you, GT 1030 and RX 550), but we used to see $90–$120 budget GPUs, and now the best we can do is $160. AMD's RDNA 2 architecture manages to perform quite well for a chip that only has a 64-bit memory interface, but it's still not a step up in performance from the prior generation of hardware.
We wouldn't hold out hope for a better alternative from AMD or Nvidia, either. Nvidia's GTX 1630 might challenge the RX 6400 on price, but it will be slower than the existing GTX 1650, which is already basically tied with the RX 6400. The real potential savior for the budget market may come in the form of Intel's Arc A380. Specs and performance look like they could compete with the GTX 1650, if Intel can get its drivers up to snuff, and Intel will include one of the best video codecs around with hardware AV1 encoding and decoding support alongside H.264/H.265. Once the cards hit the US market, which should happen in the next few months, we'll see what Arc has to offer budget gamers.
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