This card supports raytracing so where are the raytracing tests?
I know that sounds like a joke but remember that AMD put raytracing into this card and will sell the cards to ignorant buyers based on the card's 'awesome' capability.
Fooling naive buyers isn't cool. It's bad business, no matter how hip it makes people in the know feel. That includes what AMD did when it put the FX 9590 into the market and charged an obscene price for it, while telling enthusiasts it was a proper 8 core chip with a huge 5 GHz clock. In reality, it couldn't hit 5 GHz generally. It had only 4 FPU units so it was bad for gaming. If it did ever manage to hit 5 GHz turbo it would manage it for two seconds or less. And, put it into an AsRock board certified for the 9000 series and it would catch fire.
It's a good thing for AMD that I didn't review this card because I would have started with charts showing its raytracing-enabled performance, versus the other cards that support raytracing — all the way up to the 3090. Those charts, of course, would be with this card running in PCI-e 3 mode. After that we could see its raytracing glory running in PCI-e 4.
Then, I would show non-ray charts only showing the card running in a PCI-e 3 board. I would include the Fury X, which is a more powerful 4GB card. AMD nevertheless chose to prematurely stop providing driver updates to owners of Fury X, Fury, and the Nano — any of which are better than this card. This, despite the shortage and Windows 11 coming to market.
After all that, I would show the card's non-ray performance in PCI-e 4.
Then, I would find the used Ebay prices for Fury X, 980, and 980 Ti — prior to this latest mining craziness. People were getting those cards for less than what this card is selling for. So, a price-to-performance chart would show what people were able to get used, versus the performance of this card. We can add the 1070 as well.
The next chart would show the prices the 470 and 480 routinely sold for, new. Slickdeals deals constantly had those dirt cheap, and new. They bargain price became the functional MSRPs. So, we'd see how much performance one would have gotten for that money, versus this card.
All of this is off the cuff. The main point is that when AMD makes a point of selling a product with a feature, like it does here with raytracing, its performance should be held to account.
And, literally, this is what Chacos of PCWorld said about this card and raytracing:
'Finally! AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT takes ray tracing under $200 Budget graphics cards are back! Cue the “It’s finally happening” GIFs. Well over a year after the launch of this GPU generation and after 12 months of excruciating supply woes, the first new-school graphics card that normal people might be able to afford is finally here. Hallelujah.
This GPU features 16 compute units and ray tracing accelerators along with 16MB of Infinity Cache, a radical RDNA 2 innovation that helps Radeon GPUs play games faster at the resolutions they’re tuned for.
Those ray accelerators mean the 6500 XT can handle real-time ray tracing, though frame rates will undoubtedly be low unless you flip on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, or the new Radeon Super Resolution feature that works in almost any game.'
Hallelujah, indeed.
I know that sounds like a joke but remember that AMD put raytracing into this card and will sell the cards to ignorant buyers based on the card's 'awesome' capability.
Fooling naive buyers isn't cool. It's bad business, no matter how hip it makes people in the know feel. That includes what AMD did when it put the FX 9590 into the market and charged an obscene price for it, while telling enthusiasts it was a proper 8 core chip with a huge 5 GHz clock. In reality, it couldn't hit 5 GHz generally. It had only 4 FPU units so it was bad for gaming. If it did ever manage to hit 5 GHz turbo it would manage it for two seconds or less. And, put it into an AsRock board certified for the 9000 series and it would catch fire.
It's a good thing for AMD that I didn't review this card because I would have started with charts showing its raytracing-enabled performance, versus the other cards that support raytracing — all the way up to the 3090. Those charts, of course, would be with this card running in PCI-e 3 mode. After that we could see its raytracing glory running in PCI-e 4.
Then, I would show non-ray charts only showing the card running in a PCI-e 3 board. I would include the Fury X, which is a more powerful 4GB card. AMD nevertheless chose to prematurely stop providing driver updates to owners of Fury X, Fury, and the Nano — any of which are better than this card. This, despite the shortage and Windows 11 coming to market.
After all that, I would show the card's non-ray performance in PCI-e 4.
Then, I would find the used Ebay prices for Fury X, 980, and 980 Ti — prior to this latest mining craziness. People were getting those cards for less than what this card is selling for. So, a price-to-performance chart would show what people were able to get used, versus the performance of this card. We can add the 1070 as well.
The next chart would show the prices the 470 and 480 routinely sold for, new. Slickdeals deals constantly had those dirt cheap, and new. They bargain price became the functional MSRPs. So, we'd see how much performance one would have gotten for that money, versus this card.
All of this is off the cuff. The main point is that when AMD makes a point of selling a product with a feature, like it does here with raytracing, its performance should be held to account.
And, literally, this is what Chacos of PCWorld said about this card and raytracing:
'Finally! AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT takes ray tracing under $200 Budget graphics cards are back! Cue the “It’s finally happening” GIFs. Well over a year after the launch of this GPU generation and after 12 months of excruciating supply woes, the first new-school graphics card that normal people might be able to afford is finally here. Hallelujah.
This GPU features 16 compute units and ray tracing accelerators along with 16MB of Infinity Cache, a radical RDNA 2 innovation that helps Radeon GPUs play games faster at the resolutions they’re tuned for.
Those ray accelerators mean the 6500 XT can handle real-time ray tracing, though frame rates will undoubtedly be low unless you flip on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, or the new Radeon Super Resolution feature that works in almost any game.'
Hallelujah, indeed.
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