Graphics performance boosts fall short on the Radeon RX 6500 XT
This week,AMD Software Adrenaline Edition 22.5.2released, making that new Radeon driver available to anyone who didn’t fancy switching to preview builds. Armed with anRX 6500 XT(a low-end card that desperately needs a performance kick), I gave the new software a whirl – and found that, for all those big numbers, Radeon owners should probably lower their expectations.
I’m not saying bigger gains won’t be had on other graphics cards, or in games besides the ones I’ve tested. But there’s a pretty wide gap between the reported results of AMD’s internal testing, and my own. For reference, these were recorded using the RX 6500 XT with anIntel Core i5-12600Kand 16GB of DDR5 RAM, with all games running at 1080p:
InWatch Dogs Legion, for example, AMD reported performance gains of up to 10%. I in factlost10% after switching from the Adrenalin software’s 22.4.2 version to 22.5.2. Granted, I don’t think you’d notice a 3fps difference even around the 30fps mark, but I mean… that’s the wrong way round, right?
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, meanwhile, can supposedly enjoy gains of up to 28%; here, the latest driver added a single extra frame per second, which is more like 2%. Most of the other DX11 games I tried either gained or lost frames by similarly miniscule amounts, except forShadow of the Tomb Raider, which gained about 9% on its Highest preset. And that’s good! But also the sole significant improvement in a pool of eight, and in a game that could run decently well on the RX 6500 XT to begin with.
It’s worth noting the vast gulf between my PC specs and the ones AMD used for their in-house testing, the latter comprising aRadeon RX 6950 XTGPU,Ryzen 7 5800X3DCPU, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It could just be a case of more powerful AMD graphics cards extending their leads over the likes of the RX 6500 XT, which doesn’t have much more left to give.
