Yes, that is correct. As of the making of this video the RX 6650XT
costs about the same as Nvidia's lowest GPU in their current stack, the RTX 3050.
The thing is the 6650XT performs on par with the 3050's bigger brother the RTX 3060,
so if you're looking to spend around $300 on a GPU to get you into some PC VR,
here's what you can expect this offering from team red to provide.
In Red Matter 2 I set the in game Resolution Scale to 1.5 with Indirect and Dynamic Shadows
both On. In the Oculus PC App I set the render resolution of my Quest 2 to 4704
x 2384 and the refresh rate to 72Hz and at these settings the 6650XT performed really
well. The graphics were sharp and crisp and the frame rate stayed at a constant 72fps.
For all the tests in this video I'm using an MSI RX 6650XT Mech 2X OC,
with a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and 32 GB of 3600MHz CL16 DDR4 RAM.
The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners was another game I think the 6650XT
runs quite well. Just like with Red Matter 2 I set the render resolution in the Oculus app to 4704 x
2384 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. In Saints and Sinners graphics options I set the Pixel
Density to 100%, the View Distance to Far, turned Anti-Aliasing off and all other settings to High.
Most of the time this left us with a pretty good amount of Performance Headroom to spare
which tells me I very easily could have pushed things up a bit higher,
but for whatever reason this game likes to cut the frame rate in half whenever
you're taking on walkers so I decided to just leave things where I had them.
Just FYI this phenomenon is not unique to the 6650XT,
this happens even on high end graphics cards. I've tested this game with an RTX 3080ti and
an RX 6950XT and whenever I fight walkers the frame rate drops in half. This really isn't
that big of a deal though because even though the application is dropping frames when this
happens the compositor never does, so game play still feels smooth in these moments.
When it comes to VR games, Vader Immortal is pretty easy to run. In this game the 6650XT
was able to run at 4704 x 2384 at 90Hz. Vader Immortal only has two options in
it's video settings, High and Low and as you probably guessed I set it to High. As
you can see from the performance graphs here the 6650XT was able to maintain a constant
90fps at these settings giving us very smooth game play and nice sharp graphics.
Another game that can run on even the most humble of VR Ready machines is Beat Saber;
and the 6650XT had no problem at all with this title. I once again set the
Render Resolution to 4704 x 2384 but was able to up the refresh rate to 120Hz.
In Beat Sabers graphics settings I set the Render Scale to 1.6, turned
Anti-Aliasing off and set all other options to their maximum values. To give the 6650XT
as much of a work out in this game as I could I enlisted the help of my 15 year old daughter
and she played through a handful of songs on Expert plus and as you can see the 6650XT
was able to keep feeding her sharp/crisp looking blocks at a very steady 120fps.
Keeping our resolution and refresh rate the same I then fired up Contractors.
In the Graphics options in Contractors I set Anti-Aliasing to Low and all the other settings
to High. In this mod map from Call of Duty the 6650XT had no problem keeping the frame
rate up around 120fps and our Performance Headroom was regularly hovering around 60%.
Switching over to Parking Lot, one of Contractors more graphically intense maps, the 6650XT
continued to pump out frames with plenty of performance headroom still in the tank. There
were a few small moments on this map where the performance headroom dropped almost all
the way to zero but those moments came and went so fast, if you blinked you missed 'em.
Dropping the refresh rate back down to 72Hz but keeping the render resolution at 4704 x 2384,
Bone Lab ran great. In Bone Labs Graphics Options I first set the graphics to the High preset,
then set MSAA to 1x, disabled SMAA, set the render scale to 1.0, the Level
of Detail Bias to 4.0 and Foviated Rendering to Medium. This resulted in some sharp crisp
visuals and the performance you see on screen now. A rock solid 72fps and
just enough performance headroom left on tap for when you need it.
Moving on to some of VR's more demanding titles, Lone Echo 2 is one of those games that even at Low
settings still looks good. Yah, this is what this game looks like with settings as low as they go.
The list of settings for this game is a little long so rather than go over them
one by one I'm just going to put them all on screen right now so you can see them.
I did have to lower the Render Resolution a little from what we've been using in other
games to get Lone Echo 2 to run at a constant 72fps, but at 4224 x 2128 the graphics still
looked fairly sharp in the headset which is always my primary objective when doing testing like this.
I like my VR graphics as sharp and detailed as possible and keeping
the resolution as high sometimes means having to run games at a lower refresh
rate. But in my opinion, it's totally worth the trade off.
Fuzzy/blurry graphics in VR is just not enjoyable.
Assetto Corsa is another game that has a butt ton of settings you can tweak, so just like with Lone
Echo 2 I'm going to just list them all on screen rather than go over them one by one. On the plus
side the 6650XT was able to run this game at 4704 x 2384 at 72Hz with almost all the settings maxed
out! To keep our performance headroom just high enough to stay above zero I had to turn
the World Detail down to Very High from Ultra and the Shadow resolution to Medium. Other than that
all the other graphics settings in this game were set to their maximum values. Yah, this
did push things pretty close to the edge but in the end the 6650XT
held in there and consistently delivered the 72fps I was targeting.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is an absolute beast. This game chews up even the most
powerful graphics cards and spits them out in a pile of steaming greenish yellow goo.
For testing this game with the 6650XT I set the render resolution in the Oculus app to 2432 x
1216 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. As for the VR Graphics settings in Flight Simulator
I turned Anti-Aliasing off, set the Render Scaling to 100 along with the World Scale,
Level of Terrain Detail and Objects Level of Detail. All the other options I set to
their lowest value and turned off those that could be turned off.
I like to first test in a training flight and as you can see here the 6650XT actually didn't do all
that bad. For the most part the frame rate stayed right at 72fps. The graphics did look really
pixelated though in the headset at these settings so this wasn't really a result I was happy with.
I next cued up a flight over New York City to really put the 6650XT
through it's paces and as I expected this pushed our performance headroom below zero
and our frame rate was cut in half. As you can see in the Performance Overlay the application
was dropping about 100 frames every 3 seconds but thankfully the Compositor did not follow
suit. It did exactly what it's supposed to do and kept delivering frames at regular
intervals so even though the frame rate was noticeably low, overall motion felt smooth.
And now it's time for the one VR game I'm sure most of you watching
this video are wondering about; Half Life Alyx.
As I did for most of the games in this video I set the resolution of my Quest 2 to 4704 x 2384
and the refresh rate to 72Hz. In Half Life Alyx I used the Medium Fidelity Performance
Preset and it not only played great on the 6650XT but looked fantastic as well.
So what did you think? Did the 6650XT live up to your expectations? Or were
you hoping for more? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
I know this is the part of the video where most of you are going to click
away and leave so I'm not going to stand in your way. Subscribe
to the channel for more content like this and have a good one.