Hi! I’m 2kliksphilip. You might be wondering how I got here.
Me too.
Our old cards are starting to fail us. New graphics cards are unavailable. Out of stock
‘cos they’re being bought up by all those damned Crypto miners…
…using them to… save the world, or whatever.
What us gamers need is a hero! …A graphics card hero. It just needs to be cheap, available,
and just about powerful enough to be able to run today’s titles.
And several of these might be on the way. AMD are releasing the Radeon 6500 XT for $200.
And Nvidia’s gearing up for the Geforce 3050, priced at $250. Both are designed for
1080p gaming, with compromises, and they will be the slowest raytracing-capable desktop
graphics cards the companies have ever (and may ever) release. But given that there isn’t
ANYTHING available at these price-points right now, it’s still a step in the right direction.
And even if they are price-scalped, they’ll still have to be priced lower than existing
cards are, because they’re slower. So there’s that.
I’ll start with the Geforce 3050, which is the simpler of the two cards to explain.
For performance, Nvidia showed us two slides, both comparing it with previous 50 series
of cards, to which it compares favourably! As you’d hope for from a newer card.
Compared with older cards -and ones which you might be upgrading from- it looks to be
about double the speed of the Geforce 1650, quite a bit faster than the 1060, and slightly
faster than the 1660 Super. But let’s be honest- we want to see how
it stacks up against existing RTX cards! So I took a look at the specs, and the 3050 is
essentially 2/3 of the Geforce 3060, give or take a bit. Look at the speed of this card,
lop off about this much… and that’s probably what the 3050 will be like. And that makes
it easily the slowest desktop RTX card yet. It doesn’t even match the previous title-holder,
the Geforce 2060 6GB, but the 3050 does at least come with a more generous 8 GB of VRAM.
So I’d describe the Geforce 3050 as being kind of like a beefed up 1600 series of card,
AND with RTX support. So this does mean that it will support raytraced games, but the performance
will be pretty terrible. But that’s where DLSS comes in! As far as intelligent upscaling
goes, DLSS is as good as it gets. Which is just as well- because it looks like this card
will rely heavily on DLSS to achieve much beyond 60 FPS in normal games, and in order
to make raytracing run ‘acceptably’ at all.
Really, this is the first graphics card I’ve seen where DLSS is NEEDED in order to achieve
what the card intends to do! Without it, I’d call this a compromised 1080p experience.
But thanks to DLSS, no current game or setting should be beyond this card’s ability to
run at close to maxed out settings. Of course, not every new game supports DLSS, but I do
think Nvidia does a rather good job of integrating it the most demanding new titles out there,
and for the rest, they now have Nvidia Image Scaling to fall back on instead. So this card
always has something that you can use to upscale your games with.
Now onto the 6500 XT, which is priced $50 less at $199. Which makes this card special:
this could possibly be the $200 graphics hero that I wanted a year ago. On paper, it ticks
all the boxes; less than $200, it supports raytracing, AND upscaling. But all these things
come with a compromise, especially when compared with the Geforce 3050.
For a start: this card only has 4 GB of VRAM. Which is cruel! Even back in 2016, $200 cards
came with a choice between 4 and 8 GB. There were questions even back then about how future-proof
4 GB of VRAM would be. So these days, it’s already limiting, and will mean dropping the
settings and resolution in quite a number of modern titles.
The second compromise is with the raytracing. AMD cards are NOT as fast at raytracing as
their Nvidia rivals are. And given that the 6500 XT is already slower than any Geforce
RTX card is, I think we can expect the 6500 XT’s raytracing ability to be very limited
indeed. The third compromise is that it doesn’t
seem to have any video encoding support. Now, it should be obvious what this means, but
if I’m honest, I don’t know what it means because this is unexplored territory for me!
Every graphics card in recent memory has had video encoding. Even the budget ones! So it’s
a really odd thing for this card not to have, especially when they’re still trying to
charge $200 for it. So I guess what it means is that the 6500 XT won’t be able to screen-capture
stuff, like you’d do with shadowplay or relive. Which kills my interest in it as a
youtuber. It seems like a very strange feature to cut from a card like this.
And the last compromise is to the upscaling. I’ve mentioned DLSS and how great it is
and AMD doesn’t have an upscaling solution that’s anywhere near as good as that. The
6500 XT will rely on AMD’s FSR. I’ve tested it myself- and it IS better than nothing.
It WILL let you squeeze a bit more performance out of the card than if you were running at
native resolution. But the benefits will be nowhere near as great as with DLSS enabled,
and in my opinion, FSR really requires higher resolutions than 1080p to shine. But the good
news is that AMD are rolling out better support for it, so this upscaling should at least
work in every game out there, unlike DLSS which only works in supported titles.
So what this all means for the 6500 XT is that it will be a 1080p card, with serious
compromises, and with questions about its future longevity. Now over on AMD’s site,
they do provide some ‘framerates’, which apparently shows anywhere between 60 and 120
FPS at 1080p, high settings. Up to. What does UP TO even mean? It’s such a vague metric
that I think I’d rather use the slides they showed in the presentation. These didn’t
show the framerates, but did at least provide comparisons with the Geforce 1650, and 5 year
old Radeon 570. These graphs do appear to be accurately represented, so I was able to
pikey some data from them. On average from the games shown, the 6500 XT will be 36% faster
than the geforce 1650, and 23% faster than the Radeon 570.
…But while AMD is happy to compare their latest graphics cards with ones from 2017,
I don’t think it cuts it any more.
And I think it’s frankly embarrassing that we haven’t moved on at all since then.
But we’ll have to wait for release day to get blown away when we discover just how underwhelming
the performance uplift will be, and how many times over the msrp this card will be sold
for. So expect the 6500 XT to be like the 5500
XT, with raytracing but no video encoding support. And limited to just 4 GB of VRAM.
So it doesn’t look good for the 6500 XT! But there is one positive that I can see.
AMD are using a new chip. It’s not a cut-down version of a bigger graphics card; I think
the 6500 XT simply uses a card that was designed for mobile gaming! So this means that it will
be very small, and (potentially) VERY power-efficient. It might not even require extra power cables
to run, meaning the it will be a neat little card that you can just slot into any existing
PC, no problem at all! But that is the only positive that I can see.
So: the Geforce 3050, for $250. And the 6500 XT, for $200 and delivering about 2/3 the
performance, but with even worse raytracing and upscaling support, and only half the VRAM.
The 6500 XT sounds dead in the water, doesn’t it. But you know what I’m going to say!
It all comes down to pricing, and availability. If past releases are anything to go by, these
cards will be snapped up, and then resold on ebay for double the asking price. But the
Radeon 6500 XT has a secret weapon: it’s so bad, it might possibly be good! Its 4 GB
of VRAM could make it unappealing for mining. It also makes it an unappealing card for gaming,
but it might remain available!
And let’s not forget how capable these cards still are for gaming. Yes, they’re not exactly
going to run like a Geforce 3080 or Radeon 6800 XT will. But it’s easy to forget how
ridiculously overpowered the high-end cards currently are, and how they’re designed
to run at much higher resolutions than you honestly need, if you’re simply looking
to be able to play some games. And, if we approach it from the other extreme,
these new cards look a lot better. They’re still well beyond what you’d find in Valve’s
Steam Deck, which itself is still powerful enough to run every game they’ve tested
on Steam. Compared with that, the 6500 XT has double the compute units, and will be
clocked higher! So these cards are well beyond the latest
APUs, which are being marketed as being gaming-capable in laptops and stuff like that. And even with
those, it’s only in the very latest and most demanding titles that you’ll start
to struggle: we’re talking maybe a dozen or so games here. Literally any other game
ever made should run quite easily on these things. I suppose you’ve got to try and
gain perspective here by looking at the games you’re trying to run. And you might be surprised
to find that Valorant, PUBG and Age of Empires 2 will run quite well, even on modest hardware!
A year ago, I made a video speculating about a $200 graphics card hero. One that supported
raytracing and upscaling. I argued that it wouldn’t need to be very fast: it simply
needed to exist. Fast-forward to today, and I think this remains truer than ever. And
the Radeon 6500 XT and Geforce 3050 are the first cards that I think have been designed
with this in mind. We’ve just got to hope that they aren’t
suitable for mining. Nvidia is resurrecting the Geforce 2060 with 12 GB of VRAM, which
might be to give miners a more desirable option than the 3050. And AMD is being really miserly
with their 4 GB of VRAM, which again I hope will in some way disincentivise mining. And
maybe things will change once Ethereum changes over the block based goes blllllll later in
the year.
But for now, it’s the worst time we’ve ever had to buy a graphics card. We get less
stuff, and it costs more money. But even knowing this, and stating it constantly on every video
about graphics cards, ISN’T going to help you if you currently don’t have a graphics
card, or if you just want to get on with some gaming without spending a small fortune.
So if you’re desperate for a graphics card, and are wary about spending $300 on a second-hand
graphicsthing on ebay, then these new cards might indeed be the graphics card heroes that
you’ve been waiting for. And once you get them… never give them up!
For we need to keep these beauties out of the hands of miners! We must remain one step
ahead of them, using these chips only for good.
They’re not the cards that we deserve, but could be the cards that we need right now.
A silent card. A watchful renderer.
A bit shite.