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. In this specific case, the TUF Gaming RX 6500 XT OC Edition has the same overclock as the Sapphire card that I previously took a look at but we will see how it performs in 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 TUF Gaming 6500XT surprisingly did come in ahead of the Sapphire even with the same overclock. In the performance detail setting that put it a lot closer to the RTX 3050 with a stock clock. In the extreme detail mode the TUF Gaming 6500XT was faster than the Sapphire but still far behind the 3050. Then in Ultra the 3050 fell off and the TUF Gaming 6500XT was at the top of the Sapphire once again.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. For Time Spy the TUF Gaming 6500XT did outperform the Sapphire 6500 XT as well as the 5500 XT but the RTX 3050 is in a different class out ahead of all three. Both the normal and extreme detail levels here had basically the same results.
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 TUF Gaming 6500XT did come in ahead of the Sapphire 6500XT here but was still sitting behind the GTX 1070. Both 6500XT’s did well at 1080 against the older 5500XT but with the 4k test, they were both behind the 5500XT with 8GB of VRAM.
While testing in 3DMark I did also test the TUF Gaming 6500XT with the Ray Tracing focused Port Royal test which is mostly filled with Nvidia RTX cards, but with AMD including RT support on their latest cards I was able to finish the test. The 6500XT, however, doesn’t handle it well and on this test the TUF Gaming 6500XT came in behind the Sapphire 6500XT.
