AMD RX 6500 XT Review ft. Gigabyte Eagle

Taking a look at average performance then across all twelve games we tested, we'll start by talking about the RX 6500 XT on PCIe 4.0. Even in that best case scenario, it's a very disappointing release – performance is worse than the GTX 1650 Super which launched in 2019 for £150, and it's basically the same as the RX 5500 XT 4GB. We're only looking at a 4% boost over the RX 580, a card that hit the market in 2017 (and was basically just a re-released RX 480 from 2016), and frankly that's such a negligible difference it that I'd call the two effectively as fast as each other.

And then when we assess average performance on the card on PCIe 3.0 – which I stress, is likely to be the case for majority of people interested in buying such a card – it gets even worse. The 6500 XT is 17% slower on average when tested with PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0, meaning the GTX 1060 6GB is actually the faster card. PCIe 3.0 performance is also on-par with the RX 570, though I did note numerous occasions where the RX 570 offered more stable 1% lows than the 6500 XT, too.

For a quick look at 1440p performance, this is really just a ‘bonus' chart as the 6500 XT is not designed for anything above 1440p. The average frame rate is not great and not shown are the 1% low figures, which also suffered at the higher resolution.

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