Welcome to the start of a series of videos where I run the 6500 XT,
the world’s slowest graphics card with raytracing support, through a series of gruelling challenges.
In this video, I’ll be playing Quake 2 RTX. On the surface, it doesn’t sound too
demanding. After all, Quake 2 could run on a playstation 1! But the twist here is that it’s
FULLY raytraced. There are some games with raytraced reflections, or lighting. But this
is the real deal: everything’s fully path traced. And despite it having RTX in the name, which is an
Nvidia brand name for their raytraced and AI-based effects, AMD cards can also run this title.
These are the settings I used, and this is how the 6500 XT fared at full 1080p resolution.
20 FPS at best, but often dropping a frame or two lower than that. I think it performed…
better than I had been expecting? But it is of course, still nowhere near playable.
So I dropped the resolution to lower than 1080p, relying on upscaling to keep the image looking
acceptable. There will be a point where this game becomes smooth and playable- the question is:
what will it look like in that state? Setting it to target 30 FPS, it dropped the
resolution to 75% scaling, which softens the image a bit and blobs the textures, but I still think it
looks reasonable. I never know if 75% scaling refers to one dimension or total pixel count,
but from the look of it, I feel like it’s the scaling along each dimension, which would put
the resolution here to around 1440 x 810. Please, correct me if I’m wrong about this. Not that it
matters, since we only really need to care about the resulting visual quality and framerate.
But I still wouldn’t want to play this game at 30 FPS. And despite 30 and 60
making logical sense on a 60 hz screen, I still see value to increments between these,
as they do still noticeably improve the feel beyond 30 fps. From past experience,
I would call 40 fps ‘minimum playable’ for me, and 50 FPS actually becomes quite enjoyable
in all but the most twitch-shootery of titles! Which unfortunately Quake 2 kind of is.
But targeting 40 FPS, it looked like this and set the image scaling to around 63%. It certainly
looked and felt a lot more fluid than at 30 fps, but was still obvious that wasn’t hitting 60.
Next I tried targeting 50 FPS, which dropped the image scaling only slightly more down to
the low to mid 50’s, but the experience felt distinctly smoother than it did at 40 FPS.
Personally, this is how I’d play Quake 2 RTX on this card. I consider it to be
the sweet spot of performance and image quality. Hitting the magical 60 FPS-mark was a possibility,
but was the point where I felt the image quality was beginning to degrade substantially.
I’d still happily play this game like this, but I would understand people who wouldn’t.
I mean, you’re getting the pretty raytraced effects and lighting, but everything is beginning
to be covered in a layer of blobby Vaseline. Which at least makes it smooth and playable.
Screw it. Let’s see what it looks like at 100 FPS. Now this really is getting soft and unclear.
But it does still reach 100 FPS! And lastly, I tried 200 FPS, which
the 6500 XT failed to reach, dropping right down to the minimum scaling of 25% and looking like
ass. This is the price you pay for wanting triple digit raytracing on a budget card.
So let’s return to 60 FPS which, by comparison looks very nice indeed,
and I’ll discuss what I think about the 6500 XT’s performance in this title. How you feel
about it depends on which camp you fall into. The first camp is console gamers who resent all the
generations where they were teased by PC gamers for only gaming at 30 fps. Also in this camp are
PC gamers who expect a graphics card -especially a new one like this one- to hit a certain resolution
and framerate in all of today’s titles. If you’re in that camp, then you will think the
6500 XT is a failure for only reaching 60 FPS at 540p in some titles- especially in Quake 2
which was running faster than this in the 90’s! Now I know I don’t fall into that camp. Having
followed hardware for decades, I remember that until a few years ago, raytracing was
an unobtainable pipedream that still felt like it was many years off before becoming a possibility.
And yet here we are, just a few years after the first raytracing-capable cards came out,
and despite graphics cards’ performance and price stagnating (and even regressing) since then,
here we are, playing a fully raytraced game smoothly on a £200 graphics card. Let’s be real
here- if you choose to play Quake 2 RTX, then you’re doing so because you’re curious about
the raytracing, and the 6500 XT will satisfy that curiosity, even if it isn’t at 1080p. Like I was
saying, I didn’t have high hopes for a first-gen, low-end AMD raytraced card with no DLSS support,
and in this title it exceeded those expectations. Because despite its textures and polygons,
Quake 2 RTX is justifiably one of the most demanding titles out today.
You can see the system specs used in this video’s description. And you’ll immediately notice
I’m using an old 4 core Ryzen that’s limited to PCI-E 3. Is it fair to test the 6500 XT like this,
when it could run substantially better with a fast processor and when on PCI-E 4? Well this is what
I’ve been debating with myself since before I even got this card. I’d argue the 6500 XT is one of
the most difficult graphics cards in the world to test simply because it’s so dependant on so
many external variables. And because it’s a card that will be bought for so many different reasons,
be it to breathe life into an old system, or as a stopgap in a faster one, at least
until graphics card prices normalise somewhat. Which is why I opted for a video series on it,
rather than just a standalone video. I intend to test this card on slow processors, fast ones,
PCI-E 3, PCI-E 4, against a Radeon 480… you name it. But I figured this one would at least answer
the burning questions you had about its raytracing performance, and in a worst-case scenario.
So please, leave your thoughts in the comments below about how you think I should test this card,
and which sort of things you’d like benchmarked on this graphics card-lite.