Maybe I should make a 3rd blog named ‘Benie’s Tech Blog’ at this point. Yet I suspect people would think I’m some kind of tech blogger talking about the latest and greatest tech out there. ..And I’m by no means qualified for that task.
If you want tech reviews, go to the numerous tech reviewer YouTube channels out there where it’s their job to inform consumers.
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This card supports Raytracing.. but only for Vulkan-built games
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I’ve been getting a few emails asking me “is the RX 6650 XT worth it?” “How much did it cost you?” “Should I wait for a sale?”
Before I answer your questions, take what I say with a grain of salt.
To answer your questions, in order that I received them;
1. It depends on what you need it for. All I can say is don’t be afraid of the ‘AMD is cheap made’ crap. It’s the equivalent of a 3060 Ti.
2. At the time I bought it, it was $334. It has gone up in price since then.
3. Always wait, for any product for a sale. Not just a graphics card.
And finally: “does the RX 6650 XT have RTX, even though it’s not a NVIDIA card?” And my answer to that question is, “yes and no”. The RX 6650 XT (and the entire 6000 series of AMD GPUs) doesn’t have actual RTX (as that’s exclusive to NVIDIA GPUs), but a similar version called ‘DXR’ (DirectX Raytracing). You remember DirectX, yes? If
not, does DirectX 9, 11, and 12 ring a bell? It’s software to render your games, to allow your graphics card to take what it sees and places the images on your monitor.
So what does this mean exactly, that it doesn’t have RTX? Well it’s obvious: I cannot play games that exclusively use RTX (aka Portal with RTX). However, that isn’t always the truth. Quake II RTX can actually be played on AMD GPUs, all thanks to
the Vulkan engine, which is famously known for DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal.
And this is how I found out my RX 6650 XT has this ability.
Note: DOOM Eternal is the only one out of the two I mentioned who use the Vulkan API, that supports Raytracing.
With a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, and running at 1080p (while in ‘DXR ON
mode’), the game runs fairly good at around 40-60 FPS. Quite playable.
I have everything (except Motion Blur) set to Ultra Nightmare. Quite impressive. It just shows you the power of the Vulkan engine, with how optimized it is for low-end hardware. And yes, I myself call my Ryzen 5 2600 ‘low-end’. Compared to my beefy RX 6650 XT.
And may I say, witnessing Raytracing for the first time, fucking blew my mind and made me hunger for more.
The shadows. The reflections. The light bouncing off of objects in real time. Oh
my GOODNESS they’re gorgeous!! 😍 I would had never, ever seen the day when I would have a graphics card capable of Raytracing. MORE!! I want MORE!! 🤤
…But I think I should look into getting a faster CPU first.
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Issues with video watching in VRChat
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I tried to make the title of this segment as compact as possible, as this post is going to be already long. But anyway, a few days ago I was with Spoon and Jero and they were watching a.. well, let’s say definitely a Rated R movie in LS Media. It had really graphic scenes, but thankfully I was able to sleep after.
While I was watching this movie, I kept seeing the screen ‘glitch out’ on me. From what I saw it seemed the frames were looping back and forth, almost like the movie was out of sync but not quite.
So I asked in the LS Media discord and this is a known issue with the series my video card is in (the 6000 series), and the only way to fix it is to downgrade to an earlier driver version. Why it didn’t happen before with my RX 580 is.. well, it’s not a modern card compared to the RX 6650 XT.
But, there is a temp workaround that Spoon taught me. Simply spin in a circle (just look away from the screen), and it’ll be fixed. Though this doesn’t always work and waiting a few seconds while looking away from the screen, seems to has a better chance to fix
it.
Heh, there though has been a few times the glitchy frames actually made the movie more funny, especially at scenes where they’re dancing or grabbing something and you see them spazzing out. It was hilarious.
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Bad side about updating BIOS
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What do I mean ‘bad side’? Simple. It enabled UEFI on my motherboard, so now Microsoft is starting to full-on harass me to upgrade to Windows 11. Though it only happened
once, the fact they had a screen on top of the other screen I said “HELL NO” to, is bad. It was almost like they got down on their knees… pleading me to upgrade. More like pleading me to give them access to my data. Not happening.
I have nothing against anyone using 11, especially ones that have to, who use the latest generation Intel chipsets (because of their ‘P-Cores’ and ‘E-Cores’).
But 11 as it stands, offers nothing to my AMD-based computer.. unless I was to get
into AM5. But I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon when apparently I can get
the Ryzen 5 5600G (that supports my motherboard). I’ll be discussing a maybe possible upgrade to my CPU in a future blog post, for I will need to be doing a lot of research in this manner.
…And also, if you’ve been living under a rock, there’s been scattered reports of a ‘Win-dows 12’ that might be coming.
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And that’s it for this blog post.