Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For this time around, I’m especially curious how the 6650 XT Gaming X performs compared to the 6600 XT and the 6700 XT, and the RTX 3060 from Nvidia.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The 6650 XT Gaming X did very well in the base test coming in just behind the RTX 3060 Ti and ahead of the RTX 2080 SUPER. This was 1197 points above the 6600 XT as well. Going up into the Extreme and Ultra tests the 6650 XT Gaming X dropped behind the 2080 SUPER but is still in front of the original 2080 as well as the 6600 XT of course.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. These tests are DX12-based and more in line with what you will see with modern games. The 6650 XT Gaming X is right with the 2070 SUPER in both tests with the SUPER behind it in the base Time Spy and the SUPER ahead in the Extreme test. Both are way out ahead of the RTX 3060 and especially in the extreme test I was surprised at the gap between the 6650 XT Gaming X and the 6600 XT.
I did also check out ray tracking performance while doing my testing using the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark. The 6650 XT Gaming X did better than the 6600 XT but overall they both came in between the older RTX 2060 and the 2060 SUPER with the RTX 3060 way out ahead here.
The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the 6650 XT Gaming X did well compared to the 6600 XT, especially at 4k. Both were also ahead of the RTX 3060 as well in both tests.
