Gameplay Performance
We are going to focus on gameplay performance today looking at game performance scaling between graphics settings at 1080p. We are going to test up and down the scale of graphics settings, from the highest Ultra and Ultimate settings, down to Medium or Low. The goal is to see how the Radeon RX 6500 XT scales in performance from intensive graphics settings, to less intensive. It will allow you to hone in on the performance you are looking for, and determine what settings will get you that performance on this video card. Are you aiming for 60fps at 1080p? These graphs today should help you narrow down what settings are playable at 1080p for you on the Radeon RX 6500 XT.
Forza Horizon 5
We will start with Forza Horizon 5 as it is one of the newest games on the block. This game does support Ray Tracing, and different levels of Ray Tracing are enabled using the presets on supported cards. However, our GTX 1650 and RX 5500 XT naturally do not support Ray Tracing. Therefore on the Radeon RX 6500 XT, we also disabled Ray Tracing to keep all the settings equal, so we are using the presets, but with Ray Tracing disabled so they match up.
The first thing to notice is how bottlenecked all three cards are at the Extreme quality setting at 1080p. As we move down to Ultra settings we start to see somewhat better performance, but ultimately what we would consider not playable. We are also seeing that the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6500 XT EAGLE is slightly slower than the last generation Radeon RX 5500 XT at Ultra settings. Once we move down to High settings though is where the real fun begins, the game is now much faster and very playable.
It seems there is a large bottleneck between the Ultra and High settings, so if Ultra is too slow for you, try High. Here the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6500 XT is just 4% faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT, so it doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of a performance improvement. It is faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 though by 34%, holding up AMD’s claims here. If you really want to aim for high performance, Medium settings will get that for you, edging out the RX 5500 XT by 9% and the GTX 1650 by 48%.
Far Cry 6
Next up we will do Far Cry 6, which is also still recent. For this game it’s quite interesting, this game does support HD Textures, but as you’d imagine, trying to use those create a huge bottleneck on these video cards. In fact, even without HD Textures we still got a VRAM warning that we were exceeding VRAM at every game setting except Low at 1080p. That’s right, only Low 1080p provided no VRAM low warning, and that is without HD Textures. In the graph above, HD Textures is turned OFF.
Starting off at Ultra game settings, it seems like 61FPS is respectable for 1080p, but we can’t say it wasn’t without fluctuations and hitching from time to time. There were certainly moments where it hitched, or paused, or skipped due to the framebuffer being an issue. Moving down to High or even Medium solved this problem, and framerates were much more consistent. The GIGABYTE RX 6500 XT is faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT, but not by much, just a few percent here and there, except for at Low, where the jump was larger. It is much faster than the GTX 1650, and offers a much better experience.
We wanted to include this second graph in Far Cry 6, testing HD Texture performance as well as including AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution FSR performance. This graph shows what turning on HD Textures does to each card at 1080p. The Radeon RX 6500 XT loses 23% performance when enabling the HD Textures at 1080p in Ultra settings and is incredibly hitchy. The Radeon RX 5500 XT loses more performance at 28%. The GeForce GTX 1650, however, does not lose as much, only 11% in performance.
Turning on FSR helps a little with HD Textures enabled, but not enough to actually enjoy the game. It’s better to just use FSR with no HD Textures, and then performance can actually be very good on the 6500 XT.
Cyberpunk 2077
Good ole Cyberpunk 2077, in this game we are running the different, presets, naturally without Ray Tracing, and the textures setting was left on default on High. This game shows a clear loss of performance with the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6500 XT EAGLE versus the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT across the board, no matter the game setting. We double-checked these numbers, and they are correct.
The Radeon RX 6500 XT actually seems to do worse in this game than last generation’s Radeon RX 5500 XT, at every setting. The Radeon RX 5500 XT is up to 13% faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. Even compared to the GeForce GTX 1650, the Radeon RX 6500 XT isn’t too far off from it at the higher settings. Only at Low does it stand apart.
In addition, any setting other than Low is simply not playable in this game. Even at Low graphics setting the game still feels laggy and slow in framerate on the Radeon RX 6500 XT.