Budget RDNA2: A Review Of AMD’s $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT

[PAGETITLE=Games: AC Valhalla, Borderlands 3, God of War, Monster Hunter...][Top Ad] With its new Radeon RX 6500 XT (and RX 6400), AMD becomes the first major graphics vendor to release a new product in 2022, and among the current generation, it's also the first to offer a solution priced at $199. In the current market, where graphics cards have endured shortages and high pricing since the launch of the latest-gen architectures, AMD hopes a card like the RX 6500 XT, with its 4GB frame buffer, will be more likely to find its way into the hands of gamers, not cryptocurrency grifters. With that 4GB frame buffer, the RX 6500 XT is going to be best-suited for 1080p resolution, something also dictated by its placement in AMD's overall lineup. With this launch, AMD's current-gen RDNA2 series moves up to eight models total, although the eighth, RX 6400, is OEM-only. That's probably fine, since the RX 6500 XT offers considerably better specs for DIYers. Over the previous few generations from AMD, we've seen its $199 option revolve around a model that's been available in either a 4 or 8GB flavor, but the RX 6500 XT looks to become hinged on 4GB. This raises a number of inevitable comparisons, because in some ways, this new AMD GPU has design cues that need to be discussed. But, before we get into that, here's a quick look at AMD's current-gen Radeon lineup: AMD's Radeon Creator & Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Boost MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price RX 6900 XT 5,120 2,250 23 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $999 RX 6800 XT 4,608 2,250 20.7 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $649 RX 6800 3,840 2,105 16.2 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 250W $579 RX 6700 XT 2,560 2,581 13.2 TFLOPS 12 GB 1 384 GB/s 230W $479 RX 6600 XT 2,048 2,589 10.6 TFLOPS 8 GB 1 256 GB/s 160W $379 RX 6600 1,792 2,491 8.9 TFLOPS 8 GB 1 224 GB/s 132W $329 RX 6500 XT 1,024 2,815 5.77 TFLOPS 4 GB 1 144 GB/s 107W $199 RX 6400 768 2,321 3.57 TFLOPS 4 GB 1 128 GB/s 53W OEM Notes 1 GDDR6 Architecture: RX 6000 = RDNA2 It might have taken about 14 months, but it's nice to see AMD's current-gen lineup fleshed out like this, with an offering for most expected price-ranges. The OEM-only RX 6400 shaves a quarter of the cores off of the RX 6500 XT, but it also spec'd at half the power, so we'd expect to see it land itself into smaller form-factor prebuilts, where cooling can be simpler. As for the RX 6500 XT, there's more worth talking about than what can be gleaned from the earlier specs table. As mentioned above, 1080p is going to be the ideal target resolution here, but because of the overall performance the card offers, and its frame buffer size, anyone who owns one will need to get used to tweaking graphics detail in order to achieve a good blend of image quality and performance. We did see the 4GB frame buffer cause larger-than-expected drops in performance vs. the 8GB RX 6600 than we'd expect, and you can see those results in a little bit. Having a 4GB frame buffer isn't likely to be a detriment unless you have higher-end gaming demands. AMD has technologies to help improve things without any extra hardware, such as its FidelityFX Super Resolution feature, which is finding itself in more games all of the time. With it, you may be able to use higher-end graphics settings, and have the game render at a lower resolution in order to hit your desired performance. We'll talk more about this later in the review. One last caveat to be aware of with the RX 6500 XT is its lack of an AV1 decoder, as well as AVC/HEVC encoders. The latter means that you can't use the GPU for accelerated encoding, which is a bit of a downer, considering the $199 Radeon in 2016 (RX 480 4GB) included that capability. Interestingly, during its briefing for this card, AMD drew specific attention to the RX 570, which it claims is still one of the most used GPUs today (along with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650). So it's a little strange, then, that those who upgrade from the RX 570 to RX 6500 XT will suddenly lose their accelerated video encoders. Of course, whether that lacking feature impacts you will depend on whether or not you encode videos to begin with, or intend to stream your gaming. One last thing worth pointing out is that the RX 6500 XT appears to include only one DisplayPort and one HDMI connector on each card, although it's possible some vendors will shake things up. Our GIGABYTE sample, dubbed Eagle, requires just one 6-pin power connector, which is something else we'd expect to be a common trait. With all of that covered, let's jump into a quick look at our test system and methodologies, and then get right into our real-world performance results. Benchmarking PC & Testing Methodology. Techgage Gaming GPU Test PC Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (3.4GHz Base, 4.9GHz Turbo, 16C/32T) Motherboard ASRock X570 TAICHI (EFI: P4.60 08/03/2021) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x4 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT (8GB; Adrenalin 22.1.1) AMD Radeon RX 6600 (8GB; Adrenalin 22.1.1) AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT (4GB; Adrenalin 22.1.1) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8GB; GeForce 511.23) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB; GeForce 511.23) Storage GeForce: WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Radeon: WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Corsair RM850x (850W) Chassis Fractal Design Define C Mid-tower Cooling Corsair iCUE H115i RGB PLATINUM (240mm) Et cetera Resizable BAR is disabled Windows 10 Pro build 19044.1466 (21H2) All of our testing is completed using the latest version of Windows 10 (21H2), recent graphics drivers, and up-to-date games. For this performance look, we've tested AMD's new RX 6500 XT, and the two Radeons placed above it, as well as NVIDIA's lowest-end Amperes, RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti. For those who want a much fuller picture of the entire current-gen lineups from both companies, you can enjoy a deluge of synthetic benchmark results on the following page. Here are some general testing guidelines we follow: Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc. Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver. Vsync is disabled at the driver level (and in any tested game). OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another. We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run. Testing doesn’t begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage). All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results. As covered above, this article is going to focus on 1080p gaming. To spice things up a bit, some of our previous games have been replaced with new ones: Forza Horizon 5, God of War, and Monster Hunter Rise. Since the RX 6500 XT is a great target for it, we're also including two esports-focused titles for good measure: CS: GO and Siege. Here's the full breakdown of our tested games: Assassin's Creed Valhalla - AMD Ryzen partner Borderlands 3 - AMD Radeon partner Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Death Stranding F1 2021 Forza Horizon 5 God of War Monster Hunter Rise Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege Total War: Three Kingdoms Watch Dogs Legion - NVIDIA GeForce partner Note: You can download all of the tested setting images at once here (ZIP, 12MB). Assassin's Creed Valhalla. When we began testing the RX 6500 XT, we had intentions to include additional GPUs in our testing, but as we were going along, we realized we really needed to add some additional tests to help paint a fuller picture. We originally were only going to test nine games, but that was expanded to 11. When you take a look at the performance from the RX 6500 XT in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, we were inspired to bring back an old feature that has us figure out which settings are "best playable". We ordinarily use pretty high graphics detail settings to push our tested GPUs hard, but in the case of Valhalla, the limitations introduced by a 4GB frame buffer reared their ugly head quickly. In Valhalla, the RX 6500 XT performed much worse than we expected when compared to the RX 6600, making that 4GB buffer an obvious detriment. Thankfully, though, with some graphics tweaks, you can reach playable frame rates easily enough: Assassin's Creed Valhalla (DX12) - RX 6500 XT Best Playable Low 0.1% Average 44 FPS 70 FPS Resolution: 1920 x 1080 Graphics Quality: Medium Adaptive Quality: Off Anti-Aliasing: Medium World Details: Medium Clutter: Medium Shadows: Medium Volumetric Clouds: Medium Water: Medium Screen Space Reflections: Off Environment Textures: Medium Character Textures: Medium Depth of Field: Low Motion Blur: Medium Note that the included screenshots here were captured directly with the RX 6500 XT, with the graphics settings detailed above. If a game is tested with a timedemo, we manually played the game in order to see if the performance translated to real-world gaming. All things considered, we achieved a nice blend of quality and performance in Valhalla with the RX 6500 XT, but it became clear pretty quickly that this is one GPU that will make settings tweaking a common affair. Note that Valhalla has an option built-in that allows you to render the game at a lower resolution and still output to your monitor's native. This will cause a loss in sharpness, but allow you to run the game with higher detail levels, and still achieve 60 FPS. Borderlands 3. Borderlands 3 has favored AMD's graphics cards ever since its release, and the RX 6500 XT performs pretty admirably here, considering the graphics profile is set to Ultra. We don't really consider 46 FPS to be that great, so we adjusted some settings to quickly change that: Borderlands 3 (DX12) - RX 6500 XT Best Playable Low 1% Average 52 FPS 63 FPS Resolution: 1920 x 1080 Graphics Quality: High Anti-Aliasing: Temporal Texture Streaming: High Material Quality: High Anisotropic Filtering: 8x Shadows: Medium Draw Distance: High Clutter: Medium Terrain Detail: High Foliage: High Volumetric Fog: High Screen Space Reflections: Medium...

Budget RDNA2: A Review Of AMD’s $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT

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Rob Williams