Don’t be tempted by the relatively low price of this underpowered GPU
You’d be forgiven for getting excited about the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT. A brand new RDNA 2 graphics card, withray tracingsupport, that’s both easy to find in stock and available at a comparatively approachable £200 / $230? In the midst of a years-long components shortage, exacerbated by all manner of price-gouging bollocks, it’d be entirely understandable if upgrade-starved PC owners went for this like my cat goes for unattended crisp packets. Especially if they’re happy to stick to playing at 1080p.
On the model I’ve tested, the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6500 XT, Sapphire have at least tried to perk up the clock speeds with factory overclocks: the maximum boost frequency is up from the stock 2815MHz to 2815MHz, while the more commonly achievable ‘Game clock’ speed is up from the stock 2610MHz to 2685MHz. They’ve also fitted a quiet yet effective cooler, which keeps the core temps from reaching above 61°c under load.
First, though, let’s see how it runs in more favourable conditions, namely our PCIe 4.0-based test rig (specs on the right). To give the RX 6500 XT some credit, it’s not incapable of smooth frame rates: at 1080p and with Ultra quality settings,Hitman 3managed a 92fps average in its Dubai benchmark and 72fps in its Dubai benchmark. 1440p was doable here too, with 57fps in Dubai and 49fps in Dartmoor – again on Ultra settings.
Forza Horizon 4’sbuilt-in benchmark landed dead-on 60fps when running Ultra settings as well, and this only dropped to a playable 49fps at 1440p.Horizon Zero Dawncouldn’t quite make it to 60fps at 1080p/Ultimate, though its 54fps result came close. Engaging FSR, AMD’s upscaling tech, also pushed HZD’s 1440p/Ultimate average from 40fps up to 50fps.
The second problem is that results like those of Forza and Hitman 3 are in a minority: even at 1080p, most games will struggle to get over the 60fps line without demanding quality sacrifices.Shadow of the Tomb Raideris getting on a bit these days, but even this only made it to 57fps on a combination of the Highest preset and the most basic SMAA option. At 1440p, this plummeted to 34fps. And althoughTotal War: Three Kingdomscould pump out 87fps in its Battle benchmark on Medium quality, trying to use Ultra quality sees it slump to 38fps. And again, that’s just at 1080p – try to upgrade to 1440p, and that 38fps becomes 20fps.
If you were being profoundly generous, you could say the RX 6500 XT never technically fails to reach playable performance at max-quality 1080p – but whether you’re spending £200 on a new GPU or £1200, I don’t think “just above 30fps” is the level you should aspire to. Even the comparatively geriatricGeForce GTX 1060can more outpace this card at 1080p, and theGTX 1660will downright embarrass it – the latter being available for about £260.
What’s more, one of the RX 6500 XT’s supposed upgrades on the RX 5500 XT – ray tracing support – hurts more than it helps. There’s simply not enough power here to handle the extra strain of all those realistic lighting and shadow effects: adding Ultra-quality ray traced shadows toShadow of the Tomb Raider, at 1080p with the Highest preset, dragged its original 57fps average down to an untenable 20fps. It took dropping to Medium quality, plus Medium ray tracing, to simply climb back up to 37fps.
Metro Exoduscouldn’t cope with the rays either, collapsing to 13fps after adding Ultra-quality RT effects to the general Ultra preset. Lowering the non-ray tracing settings to make up the difference will an option in any RT-supportive game, but then doing so makes the game uglier, defeating the point of enabling these effects in the first place.
After tinkering with my test PC’s BIOS to use PCIe 3.0 instead, I re-ran a few games benchmarks, and found an often nasty downgrade from PCIe 4.0. Metro Exodus was the only one to get away practically unscathed, averaging 37fps at 1080p/Ultra – just a 1fps drop.Horizon Zero Dawn, on the other hand, stumbled from 54fps on 1080p/Ultimate to 46fps, a noticeable drop in smoothness.
Watch Dogs Legion, already at the precipice of unplayability at 1080p/Ultra, sank from 30fps with PCIe 4.0 to just 24fps with PCIe 3.0. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on 1080p/Ultimate/SMAA, dropped from 57fps to 49fps, with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla getting the worst of it: its 39fps average on Ultra High quality got chopped in half to 19fps.
Even very powerful graphics cards can lose 1-5% of their frame rates when using PCIe 3.0’s much lower bandwidth, but it’s usually nothing like the huge drops we can see here. It’s the RX 6500 XT’s unique combination of meagre VRAM and minimal PCIe lane usage that gets it in trouble: with so little memory to work with, the PCIe bus needs to take up the slack, but even on a 4.0 interface that’s lacking in bandwidth too. Apply the same pressure to a naturally slower PCIe 3.0 interface, and performance suffers even more.
