Let’s see how the Radeon 6500 XT, the slowest new graphics card, performs when paired with an
older processor, and when restricted to PCI-E 3. Coupled with my cable management, this is indeed,
a worst-case scenario for a computer to be in. My 2200G killed itself, rather than to
endure another second in this chassis. If you were to pair the 6500 XT with a modern
processor and motherboard and some decent cable management, then you’ll likely get performance
BETTER than what is seen in this video. Let’s begin with pre-2016 titles… but
there’s a twist! Despite these games being older, ALL of these games have continued
to be updated since, so while they’re arguably pre-2016, they’re also still quite current.
The first of these is CS:GO, which sounds like a logical choice for me to test,
but I very nearly didn’t because I just sort of assumed it would be able to run it!
But incredibly, it struggles! You heard me- the 6500 XT (Running on PCI-E 3) struggles with CS:GO.
To be more specific: it doesn’t struggle… until suddenly, it does.
If you want to play ‘normal’ maps, like Dust2 and Inferno, then that’s fine! I was getting 270 FPS
average on Inferno, low settings, and that only dropped to 250 FPS at high with 2xAA. You look at
that and think you’ve got loads of power to spare. But in more demanding maps, that power means
NOTHING. You could be looking one way, and getting hundreds of frames a second,
only to turn your camera around and for it to suddenly plummet to 60 or even just 40 FPS.
The normal rules do not apply here. Dropping the resolution will not help. Lowering the
settings does, if your computer wasn’t already struggling, but look at one of those frame-rate
plummeting angles and it don’t care which settings you’re using, it’s still going to
sap your framerate and make it feel unresponsive. So this currently happens on the Dangerzone maps,
which are larger and more open than the normal ones are. But it also with de_ancient,
which is the latest Valve-made defuse map. So I’m assuming what’s happening here is that Valve
has been perfecting their method of making the ancient source engine look decent by decorating
the levels with lots of high-quality props. And this runs really well… provided you have at least
the minimum bandwidth required to run it. Even my 2200G had that! But the 6500 XT does not.
But yeah, this issue exists, so I cannot recommend the 6500 XT for people playing CS:GO,
unless you’re willing to avoid the newest maps. Or happen to be using a PCI-E 4 capable motherboard,
which MIGHT not have the same problems, but I’ll have to check it to confirm!
So if the 6500 XT struggles with CS:GO then there’s no hope for it running other games,
right? …Not exactly. Like I’ve said, it’s a weird card, and in my testing,
this serious bandwidth issue only seemed apparent in CS:GO, and in Doom Eternal, at higher presets.
Arma 3 is an easy game to run. Released in 2013, it’s coming up to 10 years old
now and is one of the easiest games that I’ll be testing in this video, which I ran through a few
single-player scenarios. The first I did was its Infantry showcase, where you run through the woods
shooting at people. This is probably more taxing on the CPU than it is on the GPU, but it was
still playable right up to Ultra preset. Here’s how it performed, averaging out about 50 FPS,
which is absolutely fine in this game. Ignore the questionable image quality- that’s just my
capture card being unbelievably wasteful with the generous bitrate I configured it to have.
Despite this game being easy to run, Arma 3 doesn’t run well. And what I mean by this is that
there are some games which feel like 60 FPS even if they’re running slower than that. But Arma 3
is the opposite of that, and it feels slower than 60 FPS, even when it’s running faster than that!
It’s just an Arma thing, but I deem anything higher than 40 FPS in this title to be acceptable.
I also booted up the more graphically demanding jungle map, which was a more recent expansion
for the game. Much denser foliage, more detail on stuff and it dropped the framerate from 50 down
to an average of around 40. Again, it still felt playable, but if you’re in any way concerned then
dropping it down to ‘Very High’ preset brought it back up to 50-60 FPS again. There’s definitely a
lot of leeway to slide the settings above and below the options that I tested in this video,
but I think it’s fair to say that this PC handled this game well. As it damn well should have done!
The next old game I tested was Skyrim SE. And I’ll admit, I’m unsure of what is a good result here.
Having played this game with a number of different graphics cards since its release,
I was under the impression that the Special Edition was harder to run than the original game
was, but looking online, other people don’t seem to have had the same experience. I’ll just say
that I remember recording my Odgrub videos with a Geforce 1080 and it would sometimes lag at 4K!
I didn’t test this PC at 4K, though. It maxed out the game at 1080p, at a locked 60 FPS.
It’s locked, because Skyrim is one of those games that breaks if you unlock it, so I didn’t bother.
But I DID try upping the resolution to 1440p, and it still returned an excellent result-
if no longer flawless. Half the time, it still hit 60 FPS. The other half,
it hovered in the high 50’s, sometimes dropping as low as the 40’s in dense woodland. But it
didn’t hamper the experience, and I would happily say that the 6500 XT can power Skyrim at 1440p,
maximum settings. Unmodded, of course.
Witcher 3! And this is where my inexperience shows, because I don’t have a Novigrad
save ready to go, which is generally regarded as being the more difficult area in this game
to run and ideally where I’d want to test on this PC. All of the savegames I downloaded
online required expansions that I don’t have, and so I just had to test from this spot with
the aim of getting to the capital city in order to test it. I didn’t manage to reach it, however,
I don’t think this PC would struggle, because in my long and awkward journey to try and reach the
capital city, the framerate remained at 80-90 FPS. So it wasn’t even on the border of 60 fps
or anything like that- The Witcher 3 is a game that this PC can EASILY handle at ultra preset,
even with stuff like hairworks which AMD cards don’t often work that well with.
This is one game I did ramp up to 1440p, but this unfortunately broke the framerate counter,
and only displayed the centre region of the screen on my monitor. So I was unable to tell exactly how
fast it was running, but it was still playable in the small area of the map that I tested it on,
but it was obviously not running as fast as it was when at 1080p.
And the last ‘older’ game I tested was Crysis… REMASTERED! I’ve heard before that Crytek titles
don’t play nicely with AMD cards, and it reared its ugly head here as well as I kept being told
that raytracing and DLSS support would be disabled until I updated my driver. Which clearly isn’t
referring to AMD drivers, which were up to date. So it didn’t bode well for this game, but at
low preset, the benchmarking started off a bit stuttery, but then picked up pace and the 2nd,
3rd and 4th runs all averaged over 100 FPS. So there- Crysis Remastered is easily playable on
this machine, ignoring the laggy first benchmark. Looking online, it seems normal for other systems
to behave the same way in this game, so I won’t hold it against the 6500 XT here.
After a laggy first run, Medium preset with low raytracing continued to run well,
averaging 100 FPS in the later runs. When I tested this game the other year, I concluded that medium
is the preset to aim for, because it offers better textures, shadows and draw distances than the low
preset does, and is really where the pretty graphics of Crysis Remastered begin to shine.
I next tested high preset, the benefits of which are that it stops shadows from
shimmering so noticeably, and it adds a lot more details in the distance.
So while I wouldn’t consider it to be a substantial ‘improvement’, it averaged
just 45 FPS, which didn’t seem worth it. And last I tried the high preset with
high raytracing, and it ran at a sluggish and stuttery 37 FPS,
which I don’t think is worth it for anything other than taking pretty screenshots with.
In conclusion: Crysis Remastered runs TOO well at medium, and not quite well enough at high,
so a mixture of the two is likely the way to go on this card.
I’m surprised by how few people online have commented about this game’s supposed
incompatibilities with the Radeon 6000 series of graphics cards- it’s almost as though it
sees them as an Nvidia card and throws a bit of a fit about it. So let’s hope that Crytek
improve support for these cards, and then we’ll see if that can to improve the game’s performance
at higher graphical and raytracing presets. Now onto 2016. This is an important cut-off point,
because I consider the PC I’m testing on to sort of be like a decent mid-range computer
bought in 2016, so this is when it will start to be challenged by the most demanding titles.
Which I believe in 2016, was Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and the computer handled this at high
settings at a minimum of 57 FPS, and at an average of 72. This is better than the 66
FPS average I got with the same graphics card when paired with a less powerful processor.
So all in all, this is a very good result and I’d have no worries about playing this game
at these settings on this system. I also tested it at ultra preset,
which in my opinion isn’t worth it in this game. It still averaged 49 FPS with a minimum of 37,
which is probably still playable. So yeah, you can feel good knowing that
this computer can PROBABLY run one of the most demanding titles from 2016 maxed out,
but I’d still rather settle for high preset to get the smoother performance that it yields.
I tested 3 games from 2017, Shadow of War is one that I tested on a slower CPU previously and I
noticed stutters anywhere above Medium preset. But this time around I tested the ‘Preload High
MIPS’ option, which seems to improve things a bit. With a more powerful CPU, I managed Ultra settings
at an average of 56 FPS, but its minimum framerates were very poor, presumably because
it’s exceeding the 6500 XT’s 4 GB of VRAM. I turned on the ‘preload High MIPS’ option,
and this DOUBLED the minimum framerate! All the way from 1 to… 2 fps. So no, ultra setting is
still beyond the 6500 XT’s ability to handle. Very High preset, without preloading MIPS,
averaged 71 and minimum’d 3. But this is when preloading
MIPs started to help! It averaged a slightly slower 69 FPS, but minimumed a much better
18. A minimum framerate of 18 doesn’t sound great, but watching the benchmark through, there
were no long noticeable freezes. In fact, it all looked very smooth to me, so I’d recommend using
Very High Preset with ‘Preloading MIPs’ enabled if you want to play Shadow of War on this PC. And
then if you want better performance still then you can drop the preset to high which kept the average
above 60 at all times. So there’s plenty of room to maneuverer if you want even better performance.
I was told to test Quake Championships. Normally I ignore such suggestions,
but something about this request enticed me and I ended up downloading it about half a dozen
times cos the installation kept corrupting for an unknown reason. Eventually though, I got it
working and was delighted to discover a game more like the old days than I had expected it to be!
Being a competitive, twitch-shooter kind of game, my framerate expectations were sky-high. And I’m
happy to say that medium preset worked without a hitch. 100+ FPS at all times, and a very pleasant
gaming experience. Even on a 6500 XT, limited to PCI-E 3 bandwidth. Anybody remotely serious about
competitive games will be wanting this sort of consistent, distraction-free performance.
But more ‘casual’ quake players -if such a thing exists- might get away with high preset in this
game. It’s still smooth and above 100 FPS most of the time, apart from the very occasional ‘stutter’
amidst heavy, close-up combat. Which will immediately be enough to deter serious players,
even though it’s kind of a shame because it really is very infrequent, and the
framerates feel so buttery smooth the other 99% of the time, plus it looks so crisp and clear!
Also know that different maps may (and will!) perform differently.
I only played one map at each preset. And last, I ramped it up to ultra to really
test the VRAM limits. You can see the minimums are low, and I could feel that stuttering as
I trying to aim. It’s running into a limit of some sort here, so I’d deem it to be unplayable.
So yeah, in Quake Championships, you can probably get away with high preset,
but serious players will want to stick to medium. But who am I kidding- the playerbase of this game
are probably all in their 40’s and still reliving the glory days at lowest settings at 640x480.
AREN’T YOU.
I respect PUBG. It’s a game that still receives love and attention, and following a very buggy
release, has become quite a polished title! If I’m honest with you, I was surprised I wasn’t
able to max it out with this graphics card. But high preset ran beautifully, and the only
time where it dropped below 60 was during the plane-jump segment, but that’s to be expected
and it was back up to competitively viable framerates again by the time I reached the ground.
I’m not sure exactly how many frames a second I was getting- Radeon’s benchmark says over 100
fps at most times, while Nvidia’s frameview states more like 90ish. But my experience of it was that
it was flawless, with the only jank being from PUBG’s general janky movement system. So yeah, I
know that the 6500 XT is a bit of a meme card, and that PUBG is hardly the most demanding or recent
title, but to give it credit where it’s due, it delivered a wonderful performance in this game.
Look, I was even able to kill somebody. Mum get the camera.
…But you don’t care about this, do you? You don’t want to see this computer performing well!
You want to know at what point it stops performing well, and under which conditions
it’ll fail spectacularly. And you know what? I agree! I jumped into each game with the goal
of finding the best playable settings, but I couldn’t wait to then whack up the
settings a bit more to make this thing suffer. Ultra settings brought this system to the very
edge. It started a bit slow until it was all loaded in, and then it became smooth again,
but the minimum framerates indicated it was still struggling. I’d no longer call this
competitive performance for an esports title. But it still just about held up well until I
slid the resolution scaling up to 120%. In other words, this is no longer 1080p. I’m not even
going to bother calculating what it really is, but it’s something higher. And you know when you
sprint in a game until you run out of stamina? That’s what this computer did in this mode! It
started off kind of okay, and then got slower and slower and slower, as though it wasn’t quite able
to keep up with what I was demanding of it. In other words: high is fine, ultra is
borderline playable, and 120% resolution scaling is cruel. Don’t go there.
I also dropped this game to lowest settings. For science. And the minimum framerate rarely
dropped below 90. It was very playable indeed. So yes, the 1500X / 6500 XT combo can run PUBG.
So far, the PC has performed kind of how I’d expected it to- it doesn’t max all the titles out,
in fact, it maxes out very few of them. But with just a few adjustments, and one or two notches
down the presets, you can still get these games looking decent and running acceptably. But I know
that these are older titles, and even when you’d expect more from a £200 graphics card in 2022.
But if you’re desperate, and can’t justify spending £300 or £400 on a faster one,
then the 6500 XT will at least transform an otherwise dead rig into on that can handle
older titles… and newer ones at reduced settings. I felt the need to make this video because
everybody else is out there benchmarking this card at ultra presets against other graphics cards.
Which is fine if you’re comparing it against other graphics cards, but not so useful if you
just want to know how to get it running well in a game, and what it will look like in that state.
Of all these games I tested, I think I was most impressed with how it handled the Witcher 3. It’s
not even the most recent or most demanding title that game studio has made, but seeing it maxed out
at 1080p at close to 100 FPS is still a beautiful sight! And of all the games I’ve tested, I was
most disappointed with… well, CS:GO, obviously. I know that it’s an old and outdated engine that’s
being pushed to the limits with the latest maps made for it. But that isn’t an excuse for the
6500 XT’s poor performance in the title. It has issues that other cards just don’t have, and that
undermines my trust in the product. What’s to say it isn’t going to suddenly bottleneck in
another game when I least expect it to? When a new title comes out, I don’t just have to ask:
is this card powerful enough to run it? But also: is this game going to work within the
card’s other limitations as well? So far, it has just been CS:GO and Doom Eternal that
have been limited in situations I wouldn’t have expected this card to be limited in.
The rest of the titles I’ve tested all work at 1080p, up to reasonable quality presets.
If performance with other cards looks like THIS as you turn the settings up, then the 6500 XT looks
more like THIS. As long as you keep it below a certain point then it’ll run it just fine,
but cross that boundary and it will quickly perform slow.
I wanted to see where a computer like this would fail, and what that would look like,
and I deliberately paired it with an older, slower processor, and limited its bandwidth to PCI-E 3,
again because I feel not a lot of other people are testing it in this way, whereas I expect a
lot of people on older PCs to be in this sort of situation if they buy a 6500 XT to modernise
their aging rig. And if you’re one of those people who are slotting it into a newer system, you may
be pleasantly surprised to discover that it runs considerably faster than it does in this video.
Next time, I’ll be testing newer titles, as well as the first with proper
RTX features. But you may be surprised by how playable some of these newer titles remain!