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 case, I am curious how the previously reviewed overclocked TUF 6500 XT compares to the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB because it is the lower memory model. Then, of course, I want to see how the RTX 3050 6GB compares as well which is why I have that card highlighted as well. That is Nvidia’s direct competitor to the 6500 XT 8GB.
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 PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB is right with the 8GB RTX 3050 and the overclocked 4GB 6500 XT in all three of these tests with the 6GB 3050 being down below with a noticeable gap between the two.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. Time Spy is a DX 12 based test and the gap between the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB and the 6GB RTX 3050 is a lot smaller here but the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB is still out in front in both tests.
For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB scored an 827 which was below the RTX 3050 6GB. The extra VRAM comes into play when compared to the 4GB 6500 XT with it struggling to complete the test at all. The Port Royal test was similar but with an even bigger gap between the 4GB and 8GB 6500 XT.
I couldn’t forget AMD FSR 2 testing when running our 3Dmark tests. For this, everything was tested at 4K which is way beyond the target resolution of the 6500 XT but it did still complete the tests. The extra VRAM helped it outperform the 6500 XT 4GB in the FSR2 and higher quality tests but the overclock on that card did give it an advantage in the ultra-performance and performance settings.
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 1080p setting the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB came in ahead of the 3050 6GB but a hair behind the overclocked 6500 XT. The 3050 did however edge out in front for the 4k test which was interesting.
