AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

Next up we have two Ubi open world games, Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, plus two other relatively recent releases: Death Stranding and Hitman 2. Note that we have an even split between DX11 and DX12 representation here, with Far Cry and Assassin's Creed on the older API and the remainder on the latest DirectX.

As we mentioned earlier, we're using our 2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a ultra premium Asus Maximus 13 Hero Z590 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal at DDR4-3600 CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by a 1000W Corsair RM1000X PSU, a recent upgrade to our test rig supplied by Infinite Computing.

Death Stranding

The Decima Engine tends to favour AMD hardware, but the RX 6500 XT is still a poor performer. The 65fps average is playable, but the RX 6600 manages 114fps and the RTX 3060 113fps - both comfortably ahead to the tune of about 70 percent. If we look at 1440p, we're still just within the range of a good VRR display, averaging 40fps, but everything else is managing a solid 80fps here.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 tends to be quite CPU-bottlenecked at 1080p resolution, and it takes quite a slow card to come outside the usual 145-165fps range of our 1080p test. The RX 6500 XT is another of those outliers, outperforming the RX 580 by around 10fps but still managing only an 85fps result. By comparison, the RX 6600 is more than 50 percent faster, and that's just at 1080p.

Hitman 2

Hitman 2 is even more strongly CPU-bound, so the 1080p results are pretty meaningless - pretty much everything manages around 120 to 150fps here. That's of course, except the RX 580 and RX 6500 XT which are holding up the bottom of the table at 69fps (nice) and 77fps, respectively. The RX 6600 is 54 percent faster than the 6500 XT.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

AC Odyssey's built-in bench tanks both CPU and GPU, but even at 1080p the RX 6500 XT is the weak link. Its 28fps average is the lowest we've ever seen, with every other card we've tested in the modern era managing above 60fps. Incredible.

Next, let's look at our final set of rasterised game benchmarks - including one of our favourite games to benchmark of all time.

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT analysis

• Introduction and hardware analysis
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Game Benchmarks Part 2 [This Page]
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks
• PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0 - How does bandwidth affect frame-rate?
• AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT - the Digital Foundry verdict