Agent47 Posted August 7, 2022 Posted August 7, 2022 Last year, it was nearly impossible to find reasonable prices on the best graphics cards, never mind finding anything that would qualify as a "budget" or cheap option. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super and Radeon RX 6500 XT we're looking at today basically weren't available in 2021, despite the former having launched in late 2019 — it was selling for as much as $350, according to our historical GPU pricing data. 2022 has thankfully brought an end to the GPU drought, and AMD's Navi 24 cards are selling for less than their official MSRPs. The RX 6500 XT can be had for as little as $180(opens in new tab), and the GTX 1650 Super is back in stock as well, at least in some places — the EVGA 1650 Super SC goes for around $200 now, at Amazon(opens in new tab) and Newegg(opens in new tab) as well. Which means we can put these two sub-$200 graphics cards up against each other to see which cheap GPU is the better choice. We'll look at performance, price, features and tech, drivers and software, and power and efficiency in order to determine a winner. Those categories are listed in order of decreasing importance, in our view at least, so we'll start with the critical aspects and move on down the list from there. Gaming Performance: GTX 1650 Super vs RX 6500 XT Gaming remains the main draw for graphics cards, though they can also help with video encoding and other tasks — or at least some of them can. Budget GPUs aren't intended for high-resolution gaming, instead delivering performance similar to previous-generation midrange and high-end GPUs at substantially lower prices. We put the GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT to the test with our updated 8-game test suite, looking at three different settings and resolution combinations. 1080p gaming is the real target for these cards, though some lighter games might manage 1440p at lower quality settings. 1440p ultra obviously pushes things too far, with sub-30 fps performance in most of the games we tested. So let's just ignore the 1440p ultra numbers and focus on 1080p performance. It's a bit of a mixed bag, with wild swings in relative performance, depending on the game. Overall performance at 1080p medium basically ended up a tie, with the GTX 1650 Super holding a negligible 2% lead. In the individual games, the 1650 Super was anywhere from 4% slower (Borderlands 3) to a whopping 31% faster (Total War: Warhammer 3). But for the most part, the two provided a comparable experience. Bumping the quality settings from medium to ultra creates problems in several of the games, which start to use more than the 4GB of VRAM that's available on these GPUs. Forza Horizon 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Warhammer 3, and Watch Dogs Legion all see performance basically cut in half, sometimes more. Most of the games remained playable, meaning 30 fps or more, but TWW3 and WDL both dropped below that mark. Technically, AMD's RX 6500 XT has the advantage of also supporting DXR (DirectX Raytracing), which the GTX 1650 Super fails to run (you need a 6GB GTX 10- or 16-series GPU for limited DXR support). However, performance in DXR games on the 6500 XT, even at 1080p medium, is typically so slow as to be meaningless. In our 6-game DXR test suite, the RX 6500 XT averaged 13.5 fps and failed to run Control (which requires 6GB or more to enable DXR). Fortnite was the best result, at 20 fps, while a couple of the games didn't even break 10 fps. Don't bother, in other words. It's interesting what AMD is able to do with significantly less memory bandwidth, even with a relatively small 16MB Infinity Cache. The RX 6500 XT has just 144 GB/s of bandwidth, compared to 192 GB/s for the GTX 1650 Super, due to the 64-bit memory bus on Navi 24. However, the 232 GB/s of Infinity Cache bandwidth basically makes up the difference, most of the time. It starts to fall short at ultra settings, but those mostly aren't playable anyway. Incidentally, while we're only showing average fps, the 99th percentile lows are mostly the same story, except Nvidia's lead is slightly larger. Overall, the GTX 1650 Super was 4.9% faster on minimum fps at 1080p medium, 10.0% faster at 1080p ultra, and 43.7% faster at 1440p ultra. In other words, the framerate consistency was slightly worse on the RX 6500 XT. While the performance might look like a tie, that's using a modern test system that supports the PCIe 4.0 interface. We also tested RX 6500 XT with PCIe 3.0 speeds, and performance dropped by 9% overall, but there were instances where it was up to 40% slower. Testing the GTX 1650 Super on the same two PCs showed a 2% improvement in performance on the older Core i9-9900K system, so the drop in AMD performance can safely be attributed to the PCIe interface and platform. That gives Nvidia the overall lead for this category. Winner: Nvidia GTX 1650 Super Nvidia came out ahead at all three tested settings and resolutions, using a modern test PC. 1080p medium performance was pretty much tied, and we could throw AMD a bone for its ray tracing hardware. However, for budget hardware, we feel there's a far greater chance these cards will end up in a PC that doesn't support PCIe 4.0, which means Nvidia gets the lead. Neither one of these GPUs are particularly potent, of course. You're getting the equivalent of an RX 580 8GB (but with less VRAM), or a bit faster than a GTX 980, half a decade after those GPUs were in their prime. Link : https://www.tomshardware.com/features/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1650-super-vs-amd-rx-6500-xt
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