AMD RX 6500 XT Review ft. Gigabyte Eagle

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RX 6500 XT Eagle3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. Assassin's Creed Valhalla6. Cyberpunk 20777. Death Stranding8. Far Cry 69. Forza Horizon 510. Hitman 311. Horizon Zero Dawn12. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy13. Red Dead Redemption 214. Resident Evil Village15. Total War Saga: Troy16. Watch Dogs: Legion17. PCIe 4.0 vs PCIe 3.0 Investigation18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Ray Tracing20. Cost Per Frame Analysis21. Clock Speed22. GPU Temperatures23. Acoustics24. Power Draw: 1080p25. Power Draw: 1440p26. Performance per Watt: 1080p27. Performance per Watt: 1440p28. Total System Power Draw29. Overclocking30. Closing Thoughts31. View All Pages

Taking a look at average performance then across all twelve games we tested, we'll start by talking about the RX 6500 XT on PCIe 4.0. Even in that best case scenario, it's a very disappointing release – performance is worse than the GTX 1650 Super which launched in 2019 for £150, and it's basically the same as the RX 5500 XT 4GB. We're only looking at a 4% boost over the RX 580, a card that hit the market in 2017 (and was basically just a re-released RX 480 from 2016), and frankly that's such a negligible difference it that I'd call the two effectively as fast as each other.

And then when we assess average performance on the card on PCIe 3.0 – which I stress, is likely to be the case for majority of people interested in buying such a card – it gets even worse. The 6500 XT is 17% slower on average when tested with PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0, meaning the GTX 1060 6GB is actually the faster card. PCIe 3.0 performance is also on-par with the RX 570, though I did note numerous occasions where the RX 570 offered more stable 1% lows than the 6500 XT, too.

For a quick look at 1440p performance, this is really just a ‘bonus' chart as the 6500 XT is not designed for anything above 1080p. The average frame rate is not great and not shown are the 1% low figures, which also suffered at the higher resolution.

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