This video has been a disaster! My original plan was to use my old Ryzen 2200G system, which has
built-in graphics, and to compare how fast that was, against how the system performs with a Radeon
6500 XT in it. I thought this would have been a great way to see what sort of performance boost
an older system would see if you slotted a 6500 XT into it, which I suspect a lot of people on
old or dying PCs might have to do. But then my 2200G processor died!
And I really didn’t know what to do then, having already sunk a few days into this project.
So this video will cover the results I got from that processor before it failed on me. This is
not going to be your usual benchmarking video- I have nothing to compare these results to, it’s
going to be me running this PC through a series of games and telling you how I feel they perform,
to see if a 6500 XT will bring these older systems into the modern era, or if it’s time to upgrade
the CPU as well. I feel this is an under-covered topic. Everybody (rightly) benchmarks new graphics
cards on newer systems, but I lack the resources to compete with these kinds of reviewers,
and honestly think a video series where I test it on older stuff might be more interesting any way.
Because I always like the tale of an underdog. So, the 2200G: this is sort of like a 4 core
first-gen Ryzen, but with a few tweaks, and with amazing onboard graphics for the time.
This is about equivalent to an old 4 core i5,
which people on a mid-range PC from between 2011 and 2017 might still be using.
And the 6500 XT is about equivalent to a $200 graphics card from 2016. So all-in-all,
the buying situation now is similar to back then, only these days you’ll get a better processor
for less money. And probably PCI-E 4 support, which I won’t have the luxury of in this video!
We’ll start with a demanding older game. Just to show you what this system can do.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is probably one of the toughest games from 2016.
It’s one of those games that will destroy performance if you ramp everything up to highest,
so there’s not much point in going beyond high preset. But I will any way. For science.
So at high preset at 1080p, the game’s benchmark averaged out above 60 fps,
it sometimes went up to the 80’s, though there were segments where it dropped to the 50’s.
For a game like Deus Ex, I would still call this playable. It seemed to tax the GPU and CPU
similarly- both regularly reached 90% utilisation or more. So actually a 4 core processor is quite
a good match for the 6500 XT in this game! Also: check out these watts! Apparently the
6500 XT’s using about 80, and the CPU’s hovering around 30. That’s incredible efficiency if true.
But then maybe this should be expected- the chip inside the 6500 XT is intended for laptops!
I next tried low preset, which performed a bit better, but still dropped below 60 fps in places,
and looked a lot worse. I wouldn’t bother dropping to low preset in
this game, on this sort of system. Ramping everything up to ULTRA warned
me that it would use more than 4 GB of VRAM, which you’d expect would cripple the 6500 XT.
But it still averaged 48 FPS, and while I wouldn’t recommend playing it like that,
the performance wasn’t as crippled as I would have expected given the circumstances. Just go
play Mankind Divided at high preset, and know that a CPU upgrade is just as relevant as a GPU one.
Doom Eternal is a more recent title, and requires higher framerates to be playable. So I admit I
was curious to know how this aging system would handle this title. It also has raytracing support,
but this was sadly greyed out, as was anything greater than High preset. This is the game
putting a hard block on the 6500 XT’s 4 GB of VRAM. I’m disappointed, because I’d still like
to try it just to see how badly it performs, but we’ll just have to use our imaginations.
As it turns out, this block was probably for the best. The PC had no problem running low preset at
more than 100 fps. It was extremely smooth and playable and didn’t appear to struggle at all.
But going up to medium crashed the framerate down to about 60 fps, which I wouldn’t consider to be
‘optimal’ in this title, and the performance seemed heavily dependent on the direction my
character was facing, so wasn’t stable at all. And this was the biggest issue-
looking through my footage on medium, a lot of the time was spent at 70 or 80 fps,
but when it drops to 60 or even a bit below when the action hots up, I simply couldn’t trust this
PC to remain smooth when I needed it to. And high preset brought it down to 30 fps,
which was unacceptable. And again, when I say 30, I mean when in the most demanding locations. A
lot of the time was closer to 60, or even above. But Doom Slayer guy deserves better.
Doom Eternal is a game I’ve always deemed to be highly optimised, but on minimum spec components
it’s evident how rapidly performance can drop off once limits are reached.
I found the home hub region to be particularly demanding, despite there being nothing there
that was trying to eat my FACE. You can see high preset dropping the framerate to under 40 FPS,
with the game indicating it’s being GPU-limited. But I’d definitely like to compare this with what
a Radeon 480 can manage in the same situation. Because it could be that the 6500 XT’s limited
bandwidth or VRAM is seriously gimping its performance in this particular area.
So all in all I’m very pleased I tested Doom Eternal because it
will be interesting to see how performance scales as I switch CPUs and GPUs around.
Shadow of War is a weird game. I remember it looking amazing when it came out in 2017,
but today it looks decidedly dated, showing just how far open world games have come in
the last 5 years. If you want to know why this video took so long, it’s because most games I
tested were about 60 GB in size, but Shadow of War for some reason is 150, which takes a
huge amount of time for me to download on my 60 mbit connection, and then to shuffle between my
games hard drive and main SSD for testing. Not that this mattered at all- for even on an SSD,
the framerates in this game remained inconsistent. I was proud of this little comparison that I made,
which shows that all settings ran smoothly apart from Ultra, which suffered from quite
a lot of stuttering earlier on in the benchmark. High and Very High both have one long stutter,
but at different spots and I don’t fully know why- but it will certainly mess up their minimums! The
general performance of all presets seemed to pick up more performance as the benchmark progressed,
even during the large battle scene where you’d expect performance to be worst.
Whether we’re CPU or GPU limited depends on whether you go by the benchmark’s figures
or the AMD performance chart down the side. I’d say it challenges both, but it looks like High,
Very High and Ultra all make full use of the 6500 XT’s power. So maybe it’s a bit disappointing that
Shadow of War presents a challenge for this graphics card, but when I look up benchmarks
of the game online, this card’s performance falls roughly where you’d expect it to be. Guru3D shows
the Radeon 480 and 570 averaging 52 FPS at ultra settings, so actually the 6500 XT is comparable
with these, despite me using a less capable CPU, and likely running into more bandwidth
limitations. The 6500 XT’s performance still falls short of the Radeon 580 and Geforce 1060 though,
and WAYYY behind Vega and higher tier Geforce 1000 series cards. I feel it’s only fair that the 6500
XT gets another chance at this game when paired with a more capable processor than the 2200G,
as it may improve its results further. But on this particular setup,
I’d recommend sticking to Very High, or even just High for that little bit more performance leeway.
And the last game I tested was Far Cry 5, which was when I had the awesome idea of comparing the
6500 XT with the 2200G’s built-in graphics. Which I was then going to test in all the other titles
as well. Yes, it took me too long to realise I should be doing this. And I can see how hardware
reviewers get paranoid- there I was, benchmarking these things, and when I saw this game maxing out
the 2200G’s default usage of 2 GB of VRAM I knew people would call me out on it for not
increasing this to a higher value. So I went into the bios, upped it to the maximum 3 GBs…
and my PC never turned on again. RIP, 2200G. I’m still not sure what I did so wrong,
but changing this value in the BIOS will be another irrational fear I have moving forward.
STILL! I did manage to get a few results before this happened.
So WITHOUT the 6500XT, and using only the 2200G’s built-in graphics, At low settings,
720p, it still managed a rather acceptable 43 FPS average and 38 FPS minimum. But at 1080p
resolution, this dropped to 22 average. Slotting a 6500XT into the system only
increased the average to 57 fps- which means the 6500 XT isn’t even 3 times faster than the
built-in graphics! But that’s not its fault here- looking at the stats, we can see it’s
very CPU-limited at these settings. So although we’re not even managing 60 FPS in this game,
it makes sense to increase the settings since the 6500 XT still has a lot of performance overhead.
High still ran at 53 FPS, which is hardly a drop at all… and then something incredible happened.
Ramping it up to ULTRA settings actually increased framerates to 71 FPS, returning the best result I
got in this game! WHAT’S GOING ON?! I can only assume that Ultra setting offloads more of the
work from the CPU onto the GPU instead, resulting in a weird situation where the game works better
at high settings than it does at low. But yeah, I got the highest framerate in this game at the
highest graphics settings. It’s so ridiculous I would have retested it, had my CPU not died on me.
The last thing I attempted was the HD textures, which,
on the menu, appeared to max out the 6500 XT’s 4 GB of VRAM. It still averaged 57 FPS -same as
at low preset- but it stuttered from time to time so I wouldn’t want to play it on these settings.
So yeah. A bit of a silly video really, because typically when you’re benchmarking you
either want a CPU or GPU bottleneck, and not a bit of both at the same time. Which is the
opposite of when you’re trying to play a game, because ideally then you’d like a bit of both
then because then it means your PC is balanced! But IS this system balanced? Is the 6500 XT a good
match for an older 4 core Ryzen? I think that completely depends on the game you’re playing,
and the settings you’re using. It could certainly run every game I threw it at -so far- but
interestingly… none of them at maxed out settings, even though most of them are already several
years old! I don’t think this really matters for these titles- with the exception of Doom Eternal,
which I don’t like having to run at low preset. But it bodes worse for the future titles. I feel
like with GPU bottlenecks, you can always drop the settings and resolutions if you need to,
but if a CPU isn’t up to the task then there’s not a lot you can do besides overclock it.
I’ll be honest- beyond the fastest ones, I think 4 core processors are on the way out,
and I’m kind of happy that I’ll be doing the bulk of this ‘low budget’ testing with
8 threads instead of 4. Consoles have had more than that for a long time and I really would feel
more comfortable with the 1500X’s 8 threads, or better still, a 6-core CPU of some kind.
But like you probably already know, the 6500 XT is not without fault. I think the HD texture
packs are already pushing into its limited 4 GB of VRAM, and Doom Eternal’s awful FPS drop-off
beyond low settings might be highlighting its limited memory bandwidth, but it’s not really
fair to call it unplayable when it’s pushing literally hundreds of FPS at low settings. I’m
especially looking forward trying games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Control, Crysis and Cyberpunk,
which are all notoriously demanding in one way or another. If I had to guess I’d say Cyberpunk
will punish this card the most, while the rest I’m expecting will scale well at lower presets.
I am really sad my 2200G died on me, because I didn’t get the chance to compare onboard graphics
in games VS the 6500 XT, and I really think that would have been fascinating.
From some of the comments I’ve seen, I get the impression that some of you think the
gap between the 6500 XT’s performance and that of APUs is smaller than it actually is. I’m not
dismissing APUs as being viable gaming machines, for those happy on sub-1080p resolutions. I have,
after all, spent years shouting about how great a 2200G is for an ultra-budget build!
As ElZamo92 says, if your whole computer needs an upgrade then something like a 5600G
could tide you over as an all-in-one system, but the 6500 XT would still be a big jump over that.
And there is definitely an audience out there that has a CPU still good enough for gaming, where
spending £200 on a 6500 XT makes more upgrading sense than having to buy a whole new system,
AND overpriced graphics card on top of that. As far as APUs go, if you already have a 2200G
then I don’t see one out there that’s worth upgrading to. At least, not for better GPU
performance. Something like a 5600G would be a major CPU upgrade, but ultimately, it’s still
stuck using Vega cores for the graphics. And while it’s better, it’s not THAT much better.
The big leap in APUs will come with the Steam Deck, which FINALLY switches from Vega
to Navi cores and utilises the system’s fast RAM to unlock its full potential.
Yet I still expect the 6500 XT to outperform that by a considerable margin, all thanks to
its great core numbers and clockspeeds. So returning to the 2200G, the 6500 XT
significantly boosted the framerates in the ONE game I managed to test it on before it died.
In Far Cry 5, moving from onboard to 6500 XT was a jump from 40 FPS at 720p low settings to 70 FPS
1080p ultra settings! That’s a really nice upgrade for anybody currently on an older system.
And I’ll answer a few other questions I’ve received too, because you’ve all
helped me to identify the kind of questions people have about this sort of hardware.
I’m not sure if Mankind’s comment was intended as a joke, but I can assure him, that the 6500
XT should be able to handle Half Life 2 very well! I’ve tried to find the most demanding titles I can
from every year and, while there will always be exceptions, the 6500 XT should comfortably max
out any game from 2015 or before, and as you can see, is still achieving smooth performance
at high settings in newer games as well. As you’d hope for, from a card released in 2022.
Moving onto Aijena’s comment about performance being worse in PCI-E 3, well… firstly,
I’m testing it in PCI-E 3. And secondly, like I’ve said before, even at PCI-E 3, the 6500 XT
seems competitive with other $200 cards. It’s just that with PCI-E 4 it pulls ahead of them.
Joker345172’s suggestion to benchmark games per year formed the backbone of my game selection.
Believe me, I have more, and more demanding titles planned and would have tested it had
my 2200G not gone bye-bye. I can assure you I’ll be running the 6500 XT through
much more gruelling titles in future videos and I can’t wait to hear this thing scream.
Fierce Vinegar implied I was making these videos to try
and make back the money I spent buying this card…
…and he’s 100% right!
And lastly, I’d like to address something else I’ve noticed going on- please don’t try to start
fights between youtubers by taking stuff out of context then by going to other youtubers being
all like ‘So and so said this, which disagrees with what YOU say!’. So I’ll just say it now:
I have nothing against tech youtubers, and don’t want forced rivalries and drama with them.
It seems to be a ‘thing’ these days for people to want fights between
everybody and I simply don’t have the time for that sort of nonsense.
I’m perfectly happy for tech youtubers with all the gear to do their own thing and to
do it better than I can, and I’m perfectly happy in my own little corner of the internet,
making videos that I like to think are a guilty pleasure for them to watch, but maybe
that’s just one of those weird fantasies of mine. And with that out of the way, onto my future plans
with the 6500 XT. It’s done raytracing at 60 FPS. It’s been paired with the 2200G. Now I’m going to
put it with a slightly more capable 1500X, and to run it through the whole series of games that
I intended to test in the first place, as well as to revisit problem titles like Doom Eternal.
And then I’ll jump onto a newer system to compare the 6500 XT against the Radeon 480. At least,
that’s the plan right now. Depends on whether any other components choose to fail on me before then!