AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT review: ray-tracing performance

We normally test new AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in three games with RT enabled: Control, Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5. Each has a different interpretation and implementation of RT features, so we should get a good idea of how the 6500 XT handles a range of RT workloads.

However, we weren't able to enable RT in Control, even with the public driver, so we've skipped it for now. Each of our two remaining tests are performed at 1440p, a middle ground that we chose to gives GPUs across the stack a good workout. Fairly obviously we can expect better performance at 1080p than at 1440p, as the RT workload shrinks, and we've included some 1080p results to provide an idea of what frame-rates you might expect with RT enabled at a sensible resolution.

Metro Exodus

The RX 6500 XT is not a great card for RT gaming, sad to say. It achieves just an average frame-rate of just 7.5fps at 1440p, well below any other card we've ever tested, and improves to just 9.5fps if we drop the resolution to 1080p - that's some distance behind even the RX 6600's 1080p result of 38fps. The worst Nvidia card in our roundup is the first-gen RTX 2060 Super, which manages 34fps at 1440p - more than four times faster.

Battlefield 5

Battlefield 5 was one of the first RT games and uses just one part of the RT toolbox, reflections. That means it doesn't impose such a heavy RT performance penalty, but it's still a death sentence for the RX 6500 XT at 1440p. The card manages just 16fps on average, well below even the 33fps managed by the RX 6600 and well beneath the ~53fps delivered by the likes of the RTX 2070 and RTX 3060.

So: the RX 6500 XT is a ray tracing GPU, but only barely. Unless we see a massive driver fix or something, I don't expect that anyone will use this GPU for playing games with RT enabled.

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
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks [This Page]
• PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0 - How does bandwidth affect frame-rate?
• AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT - the Digital Foundry verdict