Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For this time around I’m mostly interested in how the RX 6500 XT compares with the new RTX 3050 and the GTX 1650 from Nvidia and the 5500 XT from AMD. The Pulse 6500 XT is overclocked compared to the stock clocked EVGA 3050 that I just reviewed but it should still be a close comparison.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Pulse 6500 XT came in at 14909 in the base fire strike test which puts it sitting behind the RTX 3050 and ahead of the older RX 5500 XT by a good margin. Going up into the higher detail settings the limited bandwidth does show itself a little with the 5500 XT overtaking the 6500 XT by just 2 points in the Fire Strike Extreme test. But then funny enough in the Fire Strike Ultra test the 5500 XT and the 3050 both drop as well as they reach their memory bandwidth limits and the Pulse 6500 XT sits just right above them.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. The Pulse 6500 XT came in at 4919 in the base Time Spy test which is above the 5500XT but with a big margin between it and the 3050. Nvidia’s latest-gen cards favor the Time Spy test a lot more and it shows here. With the detail up to the extreme setting the 6500 XT drops down below the 5500 XT but just by a few points.
The 6500 XT does support ray tracing even though the card isn’t designed to perform well with it so I did run it in the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark which I was testing in 3DMark. It did complete the test when the GTX 1650 didn’t complete it, but that put it at the bottom of the chart of completed results with the GTX 1070 being the next highest card.
The last test was using the Unigine based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the Pulse, 6500 XT came in sitting close to but above the RX 5500 XT with the 1650 below that. The 4K optimized result on the other hand flips that around putting the 6500 XT at the bottom when trying to handle the higher resolution.
