Although Intel’s A770 drivers installed easily and we set up our Valve Index, SteamVR refused to recognize the Index and Intel confirmed lack of Arc driver support. Fortunately, we were able to set up a Reverb G2, a WMR (Windows Mixed Reality) headset, and charted A770 performance versus the RTX 3060 using FCAT VR.

The Reverb G2 is a much more demanding headset than the Valve Index. We do not recommend using entry level VR cards like the A770 or RTX 3060 to drive it any more than we would for 4K pancake gaming, but the G2 is our only WMR headset. Fortunately, despite many crashes to desktop, we were able to benchmark six VR games on generally the lowest settings using FCAT VR.

VR Games & Settings

We benchmark using FCAT VR on Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 with Intel’s Core i9-13900KF, and 32GB of T-Force Delta RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS Prime-A Wi-Fi Z790 motherboard with fast SSD storage. All VR games and benchmarks are patched to their latest versions, and we use Intel’s most recent drivers.

For this review, we benchmarked the Reverb G2 using FCAT VR and allowed the default SteamVR 100% render resolution (3168×3096). It uses a factor of ~1.4X (the native resolution is 2160×2160) to compensate for lens distortion and to increase clarity. We are going to compare the performance of the A770 with the RTX 3060, generally at each game’s in-game lowest VR settings.

Here are the six VR games we tested.

VR Games

• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Moss: Book II
• Project CARS 2
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

IMPORTANT: BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” – measuring only one important performance metric – which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS, faster is better.

In addition, FCAT VR does not distinguish between dropped and synthesized frames using the G2.

Let’s individually look at our 6 VR games’ performance using FCAT VR.

First up, Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Lowest settings but we left the Field of View on its maximum.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The A770 managed 69.73 unconstrained FPS with 3301 (40%) synthesized or dropped frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 77.41 unconstrained FPS with 4667 (50%) synthesized or dropped frames and no Warp misses.

Although the A770 delivers only ~10% less unconstrained frames per second, the Elite Dangerous VR experience is much better using the RX 3060. The A770 framerate delivery is uneven leading to visible stutters which break immersion.

Let’s look at F1 2022.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The A770 managed 38.58 unconstrained FPS with 5935 (61%) synthesized or dropped frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 59.13 unconstrained FPS with 6202 (54%) synthesized or dropped frames and no reported Warp misses.

The A770 falls way behind the RX 3060 in raw performance. The A770 framerate delivery is fairly even due to Motion Smoothing, but the artifacting is very annoying and there are immersion breaking stutters.

Stay tuned. Rodrigo has two not-to-be-missed in-depth major video card reviews coming shortly.

A personal note from BTR’s now retired E-I-C, Mark Poppin

After a great 15 years since ABT and then BTR were established, I am retiring from my duties as Editor-in-Chief and lead reviewer as of today, January 1, 2023. BTR’s has been acquired by JPR (Jon Peddie Research) splitting ownership with Mario who is now BTR’s manager, and Rodrigo is now the lead reviewer. I’ll continue to contribute some VR reviews regularly.

Thanks to all of our loyal readers who turn to BTR for the best reviews – It will get even better!

Happy New Year & Happy Gaming!

Video card prices have normalized and most prices of new video cards in the USA have dropped to at or below MSRP, plus there are sales and bundles to be found. This VR review of the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is our follow-up to BTR’s original review in May. We found that the RX 6650 XT beats up on the RTX 3060 but falls short of the RTX 3060 Ti in rasterized pancake gaming. This time, we want to see how the Hellhound performs compared to its faster sibling, the RX 6700 XT, and against the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti to see if it is a good entry level VR value.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is currently below MSRP for $369.99 at Newegg which AMD has positioned against entry level RTX 3060s which can be found starting at $380. RX 6700 XTs can be found starting at $430 and the RTX 3060 Ti can be found starting at $470. We have found the RX 6650 XT to be faster than than the RTX 3060 in rasterized pancake games but outclassed by the Ti which is in turn is slightly slower than the RX 6700 XT. For this VR value showdown, we will use the Valve Index and 10 VR games to compare the performance of the RX 6650 XT and the RX 6700 XT versus the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.

We want to see if the RX 6650 XT is adequate as an entry level mainstream card to power a Valve Index. Although a fast CPU is important for geometry and other processing, smooth VR delivery depends primarily on the video card. An underpowered video card can even cause reprojecting and artifacting for a substandard playing experience that may even lead to VR sickness.We currently benchmark ten VR games using the Valve Index that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), and we have changed our benching suite and added three new VR games: F1 2022, Kayak Mirage, and Sniper Elite VR.

BTR’s testing platform is an Intel Core i9-12900K, an ASUS ROG Maximus Apex Z690 motherboard, and 32 GB of T-Force DDR5 at 6400MHz on a recent clean install of Windows 11 Pro Edition.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-12900KF (HyperThreading and Turbo boost at stock settings)..
• ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Apex LGA 1700 motherboard (Intel Z690 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0, DDR5)
• T-FORCE DELTA RGB PC5-51200 6400MHz DDR5 CL40 2x16GB kit, supplied by TeamGroup
• Valve Index, 90Hz
• Hellhound RX 6650 XT 8GB, factory clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• Red Devil RX 6700 XT 12GB, factory clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• RTX 3060 Black 12GB, factory clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• T-FORCE CARDEA Ceramic C440 2 x 2TB PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD (one for AMD/one for NVIDIA)
• T-FORCE DELTA MAX White 1TBSATA III SSD (Storage), supplied by TeamGroup
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan; 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• Samsung G7 27? 1440P HDR600, 240Hz FreeSync/Gsync monitor

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 516.79 drivers – Stock settings in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin 22.6.1 drivers. Stock settings in the AMD control panel
• Windows 11 latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All 10 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (non-public) Beta
• FCAT VR Beta 18 (non-public)
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution

10 VR Game benchmark suite

SteamVR Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Myst
• No Man’s Sky
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite VR
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our ten VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution as we benchmark the Hellhound RX 6650 XT to see how it compares with the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black and against the Red Devil RTX 6700 XT and RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.

First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim. Best of all, it runs well on the cards we tested.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 struggled with 97.37 unconstrained FPS with 10 dropped frames and 10 Warp misses plus 4565 (46%) synthetic frames generated.

The RX 6650 XT managed to deliver 108.63 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 50 (1%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti 131.63 delivered unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses plus 14 synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT achieved 141.20 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and no synthetic frames were generated.

The RTX 3060 really struggled with the F1 2022 VR Medium preset unlike the RX 6650 XT, and the RX 6700 XT edged out the RTX 3060 Ti with a bit more performance headroom.

Next we check out Kayak VR: Mirage.

All cards deliver an identical vanilla Skyrim VR experience with a little bit of extra performance headroom for the RX 6650 XT, unlike with the RTX 3060, and a ton of extra headroom to add mods or to Supersample for the two faster cards.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Although The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an older first generation VR game built on the Unreal 4 engine, it still boasts amazing visuals even on entry-level cards. Although it is considered by some to be a walking simulator, it is also an excellent detective game with great puzzles. However, be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are only a few in-game graphics options available, so we picked the highest 130% resolution with TAA.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3060 managed 219.82 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss but no synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6650 XT achieved 258.13 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and no frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti produced 270.97 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss, but no synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT delivered 304.39 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, and no synthetic frames were generated.

The experience playing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on our medium VR settings is identical for all cards. The RX 6600 XT is faster than the RTX 3060 as the RX 6700 XT is faster than RTX 3060 Ti, which means there is a lot of performance headroom to increase the SteamVR render resolution.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are very good and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its High preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 managed 108.22 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses. In addition, 2565 (33%) synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6650 XT provided 128.54 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and but 324 (4%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 152.75 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss and 55 (1%) synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT achieved 155.17 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 9 synthetic frames were generated.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game High preset and 100% Pixel Density is too optimistic for both of our lower end cards and some individual setting should be lowered. However, the RX 6700 XT and the RTX 3060 Ti deliver a decent and similar High preset experience.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD and NVIDIA delivering two mainstream cards that are both again priced below $400 that are adequate for entry level VR using a Valve Index (or Vive Pro). AMD appears to have addressed the micro stutter VR driver issues we found when we tested the RTX 6600 XT versus the RTX 3060 last August, and the Radeon is now a faster card that offers slightly more VR performance headroom.

Both the RTX 3060 and the RX 6650 XT can max several VR games in our benching suite if the resolution is left at 100% or slightly subsampled, or if the in-game settings are lowered. But if a VR enthusiast is going to spend $1000 for a premium HMD, it makes sense to pair it with a faster video card like the RTX 3060 Ti or the RX 6700 XT. However, one cannot pair a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2 with any of our four tested cards without lowering the resolution or settings.

To recap pricing: The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is currently below MSRP for $370 at Newegg versus entry level RTX 3060s which can be found starting at $380. The RX 6700 XT can be found starting at $430 and the RTX 3060 Ti can be found starting at $470. Make sure to check for new game bundles, sales, and promotions as both AMD’s and Nvidia’s promos recently ended. Video card pricing changes almost daily.

The RX 6650 XT offers a stronger VR performance at a slightly lower price than the RTX 3060 while the RTX 3060 Ti offers a similar VR experience to the RX 6700 XT. The advantage the GeForce cards hold over the Radeons is that they offer more DLSS supported VR games.

We did not test DLSS in VR nor did we use FSR and will leave that comparison for future reviews. We are going to take a break this week to play Spiderman: Remastered for PC and will be back with more great reviews next week.

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

A new Hellhound RX 6650 XT arrived at BTR for evaluation from PowerColor as a premium and overclocked 8GB vRAM-equipped 128-bit card at $409 although the base models start at a rather high $399 considering it is targeting 1080P and with only a mild speed bump over the $379 RX 6600 XT. Using a borrowed PC GamerZ Hawaii ‘Blue Elixir’ 12700KF PC, we have been exhaustively comparing it versus the $399 RTX 3060 EVGA Black XC 12GB and versus the unavailable-at-any-resonable price, RTX 3060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition. Using AMD’s latest Preview public driver for Win 11, we test 38 games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

This editor is in Honolulu for the month of May on a working vacation, so we asked PC GamerZ for a 12700KF/DDR4 PC that we will compare with BTR’s flagship 12900K/DDR5 PC for an upcoming review next month. The owner kindly allowed us to switch out video cards and we brought along a EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black and a RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition (FE) for comparison with the Hellhound.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is factory clocked higher than the reference version using its OC BIOS. While the reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 2589MHz, its replacement reference RX 6650 XT has a Game clock up to 2410MHz and a Boost clock up to 2635MHz – a 2% improvement. The GDDR6 memory clocks of the RX 6650 XT (17.5Gbps) is clocked about 9% higher than that of the RX 6600 XT. The Hellhound RX 6650 XT game clocks up to 2486MHz and further boosts to 2689MHz. The RX 6650 XT board power is increased by around 13% over the RX 6600 XT so the Hellhound RX 6650 XT tames its thermals by using a dual fan design whose LED lights up in blue.

The Reference and Hellhound RX 6650 XT Features & Specifications

First let’s look at the Hellhound RX 6650 XT specifications:

Additional Information from PowerColor

PowerColor newest RX 6650 XT Hellhound, is positioned to compete with custom 3060 premium models.

• PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT is equipped with a dual fan design (2x 100mm), a cooler with 3X6Φ nickel-plated heatpipes, and a smooth nickel-plated copper base that enhances heat dissipation.
• The card has 2 modes, OC and Silent. There’s a BIOS switch on the side of the card. We designed this card to be very quiet, even on performance mode it’s considerably quieter than most silent cards. We advise trying the silent mode as it’s truly whisper quiet.
• The board has 10 Phase VS the 6+2 Phase VRM design on the standard designs meaning is over spec’d in order to deliver the best
  stability and overclock headroom, and by having such VRM it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMOS provides superior power efficiency and offers better thermal protection, and the 6+2 phases VRM guarantees better overclocking and stability, no compromises.
• Dual 100mm fans optimized static pressure fan design provides more air flow and longer circulation; at this TDP there is no need of oversized 3 fan coolers, better sized and yet efficient cooling!
• Hellhound features the blue LED lighting on the shroud and backplate that provides a cold color to light up in your case.
• Hellhound has Mute fan technology, fans stop under 60c!
• The metal backplate strengthens the card and improves the airflow through the cuts. It does not use thermal pads but instead the cuts allow the PCB to breath, which under high heat scenarios is more beneficial than having thermal pads as otherwise a back plate can become a heat trap.

RX 6000 features

AMD has their own ecosystem for gamers and many unique new features for the Radeon 6000 series including the FidelityFX 1.0 Super Resolution upscaler and the brand new 2.0 version that looks about as good as native resolution in Deathloop.

Infinity Cache and Smart Access Memory are two other important components of many included in Adrenalin software.

Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory

AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture includes the Infinity Cache which alters the way data is delivered to GPUs. This global cache allows fast data
access and increases bandwidth. This optimized on-die cache uses 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache delivering up to 2.5x the effective bandwidth compared to 256-bit 12Gbps GDDR6.

BTR is using an Intel 12th generation CPU, the i9-12700KF, which does not have this cache available so our results will probably be lower than what a gamer using a full Ryzen 5000 platform will achieve. In addition, we don’t have Smart Access Memory.

AMD’s Smart Access Memory is a new feature for the Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that enables additional memory space to be mapped to the base address register resulting in performance gains for select games when paired with an AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processor or with some Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. Using PCIe, the Base Address Register (BAR) defines how much GPU memory space can be mapped. Without using Smart Access Memory, CPUs can generally access up to 256MB of GPU memory restricting performance somewhat.

NVIDIA has worked with its partners and with Intel to enable Resizable BAR which currently is enabled for the ASUS H670-DDR4 motherboard. We also enabled it for the RX 6650 XT and tested all of our video cards and games with Resizable BAR.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 38 games and 5 synthetic game benchmarks at 1920×1080 as well as SPEC, workstation, and GPGPU benchmarks. Our latest games include Total War: Warhammer III, God of War, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Elden Ring, Dying Light 2 and CoD: Vanguard. The testing platform uses a recent installation of Windows 11 Pro Edition, and our CPU is an i9-12700KF, an ASUS TUF Gaming H670-PRO WIFI D4 motherboard, and 16GB of G.SKILL Trident DDR4 at 3600MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT.

A Closer Look at the Hellhound RX 6650 XT

Although the Hellhound RX 6650 XT advertises itself as a 7nm 8GB vRAM-equipped card on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture which features 1080P and PCIe 4.0, the cover of the box favors stylized imagery over text.

The back of the box touts key features which now include HDMI 2.1 VRR, ray tracing technology, FidelityFX, and VR Ready Premium as well as states its 600W power and system requirements. AMD’s technology features are highlighted and the box features PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, blue output LED, and a solid backplate with the Hellhound logo.

Opening the box, we see a video card inside a anti-static bag. It’s barebones.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a dual-fan card. Turning it over (below) we see a solid backplate that features the Hellhound logo.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a medium-sized dual-fan card (220mm long x 132mm tall x 45mm thick) in a 2 slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s colors and even more striking with the blue LED on.

The Hellhound uses one 1×8-pin PCIe connector. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS (below, left). We didn’t bother with the Silent BIOS as the card is very quiet using the OC BIOS, but a dual BIOS is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

We would suggest that with the current voltage limitations and low power draw, any extra connector besides what PowerColor included is completely unnecessary even for overclocking.

Looking at the edges, we can see it is all heatsink fins for cooling as is typical of Hellhound cards, and we expect it to run cool.

The Hellhound’s RX 6650 XT’s connectors include 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connector. The specifications look good and the Hellhound itself looks great with its default bright blue contrasting with the black backplate.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-12700KF (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On) supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• ASUS TUF Gaming H670-PRO WIFI D4 (Intel Z690 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0/5.0/3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• G.SKILL Trident Z 16GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• Hellhound RX 6650 XT 8GB, factory settings and overclocked, on loan from PowerColor
• EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• T-FORCE CARDEA A440 Pro Special Series 2TB SSD for C: drive, supplied by Team Group
• The T-FORCE M200 4TB USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C Portable SSD for game storage, supplied by Team Group
• EVGA 850B5, 850W Bronze PSU, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• ACER (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27″ 1920×1080/165Hz monitor, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• Lian-Li Galahad 360 AIO Cooler, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• CoolerMaster TD500 Mesh White, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii

Test Configuration – Software

• AMD Software Preview Driver May 2022 Driver Version 22.10.01.03 used for the RX 6650 XT
• GeForce 512.59 for the RTX 3060 and the RTX 3060 Ti.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel; Vsync off.
• All optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings in the AMD control panel.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better.
• Windows 11 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• God of War
• Ghostwire: Tokyo
• Elden Ring
• Dying Light 2
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Far Cry 6
• Chernobylite
• Resident Evil Village
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Hitman 3
• Godfall
• DiRT 5
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• F1 2021
• Borderlands 3
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

DX11

• Total War: Warhammer III
• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Overwatch
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 3.01 benchmark
• Sandra 2021 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECviewperf 2020

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Next the AMD settings.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

Overclocking, temperatures and noise

We spent a lot of time overclocking the Hellhound RX 6650 XT for this review. It is factory clocked higher than the reference specifications using its OC BIOS. While the reference RX 6650 XT has a Game clock up to 2410MHz and a Boost clock up to 2635MHz, the Hellhound RX 6650 XT game clocks up to 2486MHz and further boosts to 2689MHz.

We used Wattman for overclocking. The performance didn’t matter whether the power limit was set to default or higher even when overclocked. At default, we typically saw clocks vary between 2626MHz and 2642MHz and the GPU stayed cool, up to 73C. The fan speeds are tracked by Wattman and they remained low (around 1000 rpm) and we could not hear them over our other case fans using the OC BIOS.

The Wattman auto overclock feature is still mostly useless as it advised a very conservative low overclock so we used trial and error to find the Hellhounds’s maximum performance at the edge of stability. We settled on increasing the memory to the maximum allowed by the slider, 110% (from 2180MHz to 2400MHz; typically 2386MHz) and increasing the core clock by 9% as below.

At maximum overclock, the clocks run from 2850MHz to a peak of 2859MHz, but this time the temperatures drop below 70C as the fan speeds increase. Even while overclocked to the max, the Hellhound remains very quiet and cool with power consumption just approaching 152W (from 140W default) and fan speeds increasing from the default 1000 rpm to just over 2000 rpm.

There is a small performance increase from overclocking the Hellhound’s core by 9% and increasing the memory by 10%. Unfortunately, AMD has again locked all RX 6650 XT cards overclocking down in an attempt to maximize overall performance by limiting the voltage We would also suggest that the RX 6650 XT is rather voltage constrained and the Hellhound could benefit by more voltage. No doubt some enthusiast gamers will use MPT (More Power Tool) and risk their warranty to gain a potentially higher overclock although we cannot recommend it.

We believe that the Hellhound’s overclock will not degrade over time as its PCB components are fit to run all the time at the highest overclock settings – perhaps unlike entry level versions which are not engineered for ultimate maximum reliability.

Of course, many gamers will want to fine-tune their own overclock and undervolting is a possibility although the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is no power hog. Check the overclocking chart in the next section for performance increases using ten key games.

Let’s head to the performance charts to see how the performance of the Hellhound RX 6650 XT compares with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.

Performance summary charts

Here are the performance results of 38 games and 5 synthetic tests comparing the factory-clocked 8GB Hellhound RX 6650 XT with the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black 12GB (reference) and versus the RTX 3060 Ti FE 8GB at their factory set clocks. The benches were run at 1920×1080. Click on each chart to open in a pop-up for best viewing.

All gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates (1% lows/99-percentiles) are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. We did not use any upscaling for any game – no DLSS and no FidelityFX.

The Red Devil RX 6650 XT vs. the RTX 3060 & RTX 3060 Ti

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is faster overall than the RTX 3060 EVGA Black (reference) version but it is still in a similar class, trading blows depending on the games tested. Being able to handle ultra ray tracing is still a weakness of AMD’s 6000 series compared with the GeForce 3000 series although rasterized games – the vast majority of current PC games – have no issues.

Since we do not have Smart Access Memory, we expect that some games would shift in favor of the Radeon using a Ryzen 5000 platform. However, it is outclassed by the much more expensive RTX 3060 Ti, winning only two games against it.

The RX 6650 XT gets outperformed overall when compared with the slightly less expensive RTX 3060 after ray tracing is enabled in many of our test games – even when NVIDIA’s DLSS is not used. However, AMD has recently introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) which is their answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS.

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

FSR improves performance by first rendering frames at a lower resolution and then by using an open-source spatial upscaling algorithm with a sharpening filter in an attempt to make the game look nearly as good as at native resolution. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a more mature temporal upscaling solution that uses AI/Deep Learning. With DLSS, data is accumulated from multiple frames and combined into the final image with the AI reconstruction component running on GeForce RTX Tensor cores.

In contrast, FSR is basically a post-process shader which also makes it easy for game developers to implement across all graphics cards and not just for Radeons. So far, there are about a dozen games that use it and we have tested three games that use FSR. Although Ultra FSR is not the equal of DLSS – and especially not of DLSS 2.0 Quality which rivals and sometimes improves on the native image – it is still a very solid non-AI/temporal upscaler that provides good performance improvements.

Ultra FSR is far more than a standard Lanczos implementation plus sharpening and it brings good value to Radeons (and for all video cards!) for higher “free” performance with a minimal hit to visuals. We were especially impressed with the Ultra FSR implementation in Chernobylite. although the image quality still not up to Quality DLSS standards. However, AMD has just released FSR 2.0 which we briefly got to compare using Deathloop.

By comparing FSR 2.0 with DLSS, we were pleasantly surprised to see a massive IQ improvement of FSR 2.0 over 1.0. It’s only one game, but there is a lot of promise for increased performance, especially with ray traced games.

Next we look at overclocked performance.

Overclocked benchmarks

These ten benchmarks were run with both Hellhound RX 6650 XT overclocked as far as it can go while remaining stable as described in the overclocking section. The factory-clocked results are in the first column and the overclocked results in the second column.

There is a reasonable performance increase from manually overclocking the Hellhound RX 6650 XT beyond its factory clocks up to around 10%.

Let’s look at non-gaming applications next to see if the RX 6650 XT is a performer in creative/workstation tasks starting with Blender.

Blender 3.01 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender benchmarks which measure GPU performance by measuring samples per second by render production files. We tested our comparison cards using OpenCL for the Radeons and CUDA on GeForce running on the GPU and the comparing with a 12700KF CPU.

For the following chart, higher is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in samples per second.

OpenCL is not as well-optimized for Radeons compared with CUDA for GeForce but all three video cards are significantly faster than a 12700KF CPU.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.70

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days. CPU results are also shown for comparison.

Here are the Hellhound RX 6650 XT AIDA64 GPGPU results compared with an overclocked i9-12700KF and the two competing GeForce cards.

The RX 6650 XT is a fast GPGPU card and it compares favorably with competing RTX 3060/Ti cards, being weaker in some areas and stronger in others. So let’s look at Sandra 2021 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2021R13

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2021. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper”.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2021 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2021 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran the latest version of Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark that features updated viewsets, new models, support for up to 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management. We use 1900×1060 display resolution for midrange cards like the RX 6650 XT.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Hellhound RX 6650 XT benchmarks summarized in a chart together with our two competing cards.

Again we see different architectures with different strengths and weaknesses.

After seeing these benches, some creative users may upgrade their existing systems with a new card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require. The question to buy a new video card should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is primarily 1080P gaming for gamers.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Final Thoughts

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT boasts a mild speedup over the RX 6600 XT and it trades blows with and overall it beats the RTX 3060 in most of the rasterized games we tested. The RX 6650 XT like the RX 6600 XT beats the last generation cards including the RX 5600 XT although it struggles with ray traced games compared with competing GeForce cards. We somewhat handicapped the RX 6650 XT by not being able to use Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory and we expect that performance would be higher if we used a Ryzen 5000 platform.

FSR brings a great value to the RX 6650 XT as an alternative to DLSS, although it cannot quite match it in visual quality. We look forward to critically comparing further side-by-side improvements in FSR 2.0 and hope many more games use it as it also works on GeForce cards.

For Radeon gamers, the $409 Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a great alternative to the $399 RTX 3060 for the vast majority of modern PC games that use rasterization. However, although the RX 6650 XT offers 8GB of GDDR6 to the 12GB of GDDR6 that the RTX 3060 is equipped with, 12GB appears to be wasted for that card.

At its suggested price of $409, and significantly less than the street price of the RTX 3060 Ti – beginning around $550 – the RX 6650 XT offers a good value. Now that the Russian scalpers have been cut out of the market, cryptocurrency is crashing and mining with new cards is dead, gamers are returning to work in the new COVID-19 normal, and the supply chain is starting to normalize, supply of AMD cards at near or even below MSRP/SEP has drastically improved over the past 18 months.

We think that AMD has set pricing too high on the RX 6650 XT. They appear to forget that the competing GeForce is much stronger in ray traced games – with over 150 games featuring DLSS – and that FSR 1.0 doesn’t match it although FSR 2.0 is very promising with only a single game to show now. At $120 more than what the RX 5600 XT launched at, AMD has jacked-up the price of 1080P gaming and it is not a consumer friendly move. However, for practical terms – since the RX 6650 XT can be found at MSRP/SEP – it is a good value as most other competing GeForce cards are still selling for well above MSRP except for the 3060 which is a slower card at rasterized games.

We recommend the Hellhound RX 6650 XT as a great choice out of multiple good choices, especially if you are looking for good looks with blue lighting, an exceptional cooler, and great performance for 1920×1080, PowerColor’s excellent support, and overall good value. We are convinced that PowerColor is an outstanding AMD AIB, and we never hesitate to recommend their cards to our friends. When we have a choice, we pick and have picked PowerColor video cards for our own purchases.

Let’s sum it up:

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT Pros

• The PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT like the RTX 6600 is much faster than the last generation RX 5600 XT by virtue of new RDNA 2 architecture. It beats the RTX 3060 in most raster games and is a great ultra 1080P card.
• FSR is an awesome added value that can greatly improves performance without impacting visuals significantly and FSR v2.0 looks to be a significant improvement.
• The Hellhound RX 6650 XT has excellent cooling and it is a very quiet card even when overclocked to its maximum
• The Hellhound has a very good power delivery system and dual-fan custom cooling design
• Dual-BIOS give the user a choice of quiet with less overclocking, or a bit louder with more power-unlimited and higher overclocks. It’s also a great safety feature if a BIOS flash goes bad
• FreeSync2 HDR eliminates tearing and stuttering
• Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory give higher performance with Ryzen 5000 platform
• A blue LED and a neutral color allow the Hellhound to fit into most color schemes.

Hellhound RX 6650 XT Cons

• Pricing. $399 for a midrange 1080P card is $120 more than AMD’s RX 5600 XT launch price.
• Weaker ray tracing performance than the RTX 3060

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a good card choice for those who game at 1920×1080, and it represents a good alternative to the RTX 3060 albeit with weaker ray tracing performance. They are offered especially for those who prefer AMD cards and FreeSync2 enabled displays which are generally less expensive than Gsync displays; and Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory are a real plus for gamers using the Ryzen 5000 platform.

If a gamer is looking for something beyond the reference version, the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a very well made, solid and handsome card that will overclock decently and it should last a long time without performance degradation.

The Verdict:

PowerColor’s Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a solidly-built good-looking RGB card with higher clocks out of the box than the reference version and it overclocks decently. It trades blows with and overall beats the RTX 3060 in most rasterized games. PowerColor has made a kick-ass RX 6650 XT.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT offers a good alternative to the RTX 3060 for solid raster performance in gaming, and it also beats the performance of AMD’s last generation by a good margin. A bonus is that availability is excellent and pricing is at MSRP.

Stay tuned, there is much more coming from BTR. Stay tuned for Rodrigo’s upcoming GeForce 512.77 driver performance analysis! We will follow up with a T-FORCE SSD review and then a review of PC GamerZ Hawaii 12700KF/RTX 3080 ‘Blue Elixir’ PC.

Happy Gaming!

Myst (2021), by Cyan Worlds Inc, is the latest remake of the iconic 1990s puzzle-adventure game. Myst was rebuilt to play in PC VR and for flatscreen gamers. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, the pancake game features gorgeous advanced ray traced graphics and support for both AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technologies to boost performance. Unfortunately, the VR edition does not support ray tracing or FSR, so we will focus on DLSS as the game is especially demanding on the Epic Preset with a Vive Pro/Valve Index class VR headset and much more so with a Pro 2.

We offer a review of Myst‘s PC VR graphics performance using the latest AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.9.2 driver with the RX 6800 XT/RX 6800/6700 XT/RX 6600 XT, and the latest GeForce Game-Ready 472.12 driver with the RTX 3080/3080 Ti/3070/3060 Ti/3060. We will also make suggestions for setting the best balance of visuals to performance for each card.

BTR received a Steam Myst key from NVIDIA. It is available as a $29.99 Steam game that is playable as a pancake game or in VR on multiple HMDs including the Valve Index, Vive HMDs, and Oculus Rift HMDs, but not for WMR like the Reverb G2. This isn’t a game review, but rather we are concentrating on its performance as measured by FCAT-VR using nine video cards on their latest drivers at factory settings.

Here are the cards that we benchmarked Myst with the very latest drivers from NVIDIA (472.12) and from AMD (21.9.2):

• RTX 3080 Ti (12GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3080 (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3070 (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3060 Ti (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3060 (12GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RX 6800 XT (16GB Reference Edition, on loan from AMD)
• RX 6800 (16GB Reference Edition, on loan from AMD)
• RX 6700 XT (12GB Red Devil, on loan from PowerColor)
• RX 6600 XT (8GB Red Devil, on loan from PowerColor)

BTR’s testing platform is an Intel Core i9-10900K at 5.0/5.1GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard and 16GB of T-Force XTREEM DDR4 at 3866MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition. We benchmark using a Vive Pro which gives identical results to the Valve Index as well as using the Pro 2 for our top cards.

Settings

Myst has 4 basic in-game user settings: Low, Medium, High, and Epic Presets. There aren’t a lot of visual differences between Epic and High, but dropping to Medium is noticeable, and Low is rather low.

The Supersampling Method in the pancake version allows for either FSR or DLSS, but DLSS is the only option available in the VR game. And there are four levels of DLSS choices: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance.

• Quality DLSS is upscaled the least and it offers the highest image quality above the Balanced mode and is indistinguishable from the native resolution.
• Balanced offers higher performance than Quality and offers a great balance of visuals to performance.
• The Performance mode offers higher performance than the Balanced mode with only slight visual differences in motion.
• The Ultra Performance mode offers the highest performance increase but it is upscaled the most.

There are also multiple individual settings that may be changed by the user although we are just concentrating on preset performance.

DLSS versus FSR

AMD does not have a direct competitor to DLSS although they offer FSR which also improves performance.

FSR improves performance by first rendering frames at a lower resolution and then by using an open-source spatial upscaling algorithm with a sharpening filter in an attempt to make the game look nearly as good as at native resolution. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a more mature temporal upscaling solution that uses AI/Deep Learning. With DLSS, data is accumulated from multiple frames and combined into a final image with AI reconstruction running on RTX Tensor cores.

In contrast, FSR is a post-process shader which also makes it easy for game developers to implement across all graphics cards. So far, there are about a dozen pancake games that use it and we have tested three games that use FSR. Although Ultra FSR is not the equal of DLSS – and especially not of DLSS 2.0 Quality which rivals and sometimes improves on the native image – it is still a very solid non-AI/temporal upscaler that provides good performance improvements.

Ultra FSR is more than a standard Lanczos implementation plus sharpening and it brings good value to Radeons and for all video cards for higher “free” performance with a minimal hit to visuals. The issue is that FSR has not been implemented into any VR game yet. We hope that AMD and the Cyan developers will bring native FSR to Myst as they have done for the pancake version since using the OpenVR_FSR mod brings very inconsistent results.

The maximum meaningful resolution for VR is approximately one and a half times the native display resolution of the headset since the runtime warps the image to correct for optics’ warping, and a 1.5x rendered resolution results in pixels matching the native headset resolution at the center of the headset’s viewing area. But for complex games played on demanding headsets (especially like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2), the render resolution should probably be set lower than 1.5x.

Generally, the render resolution has the biggest impact on a game’s performance so it can consistently render frames at least as fast as the refresh rate of the headset which is usually 90 FPS. The render resolution should be selected to ensure consistently delivered framerates above 90 FPS, and it’s independent of the headset resolution. Of course, a minimum render resolution is needed to deliver a quality VR experience that varies from headset to headset.

DLSS Scaling

There are two scaling stages in the VR pipeline. When both are enabled, they work together to produce the final frame. When NVIDIA DLSS is enabled, it reduces a game’s render resolution by a predetermined scaling factor. Afterward, the driver uses AI to scale the rendered resolution to the original requested runtime. From an example NVIDIA gives, if the requested render resolution is 1848 x 1872 per eye, and DLSS is running in Performance mode, the game will render to 924 x 936 per eye, and DLSS will scale it back to 1848 x 1872.

The VR runtime takes the frame rendered by either the game or generated by DLSS and scales it to approximately 1.5x the native headset resolution to compensate for optics and image warping. This scaling is usually part of the lens distortion compensation. So when DLSS is supported in VR you want to maximize the scaling done by DLSS and minimize the scaling done by the runtime to maximize performance.

Whenever you enable DLSS you change the render resolution of the game and its performance. It’s important to keep this in mind when finding the ideal configuration. NVIDIA gives another example that a configuration that can maintain 90 fps at 982 x 1000 with DLSS off will likely maintain 90 fps at 1424 x 1408 with Quality DLSS, 1720 x 1774 with Balanced DLSS, 1960 x 1984 with Performance DLSS, and 2704 x 2736 with Ultra-performance DLSS. It is up to the end user to determine the best balance of visuals to performance, remembering that 90 FPS is the minimum target framerate.

Performance

Myst has very good to excellent VR visuals, and it generally runs well on BTR’s flagship i9-10900K with a variety of video cards depending on the settings. The map where we had universal issues was in Channelwood where there was considerable microstutter for all cards, and we have concluded that it is not currently representative of the game’s VR performance.

Unfortunately, Myst is very challenging to benchmark in VR because the maps are relatively small requiring a lot of turns, so we use a 60 second benchmark run over one of the more visually demanding maps in the game in the Selentic age.

Myst should not be played with constant reprojection, synthetic frame synthesis, or with Motion Smoothing applied. Continually delivering frames at half the HMD’s optimum rate refresh by using Motion Smoothing tends to cause artifacting and it may even cause some upset or even VR sickness for the gamer.

All nine video cards were tested by FCAT-VR using the in-game presets which include Ultra, High, Medium, and Low. Of course, we did not test a RTX 3080 Ti on Low settings nor did we test a RX 6600 XT on Epic settings, but we tried to keep the settings realistic and close to optimal for each card with a goal of a steady 90 FPS being delivered to the headset without requiring synthetically generated frames.

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which show what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to 90 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures one important performance metric, faster is better. Also, please note that FCAT-VR does not differentiate between dropped and synthesized frames for cards tested with the Pro 2 as it does not use SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing.

Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution (2016×2240)

Lets start by testing the video cards that appear to run best at Low or Medium settings using the Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution.

Low/Medium Settings

The first card we test is an RX 6600 XT and is the only card we tested that requires the Low preset. Unfortunately, from our earlier testing, we discovered it is a relatively weak card for VR – unlike the rest of the RX 6000 series. We originally tested Myst with Adrenalin Software 21.8.2 but found that the latest driver, 21.9.2, improves performance so we retested all AMD cards using it.

RX 6600 XT 8GB

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6600 XT comparing Medium with Low settings.

Here are the details.

The RX 6600 XT really struggles at Medium settings delivering 102.60 unconstrained frames, and it requires 1344 (25%) frames to be synthesized while dropping 17 frames and delivering 17 Warp misses.

It does better on Low settings by delivering 112.05 unconstrained frames, dropping 6 frames with 6 Warp misses, and requiring 248 (5%) to be synthesized. However, at even the Low setting, microstutter is still noticeable. It may be a driver issue exacerbated by the RX 6600 XT’s limited bandwidth when used with a non-Ryzen PC.

Next up we test the RX 6700 XT.

RX 6700 XT

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6700 XT tested at the High and Low preset.

The RX 6700 XT cannot handle either the High or Medium preset without synthesizing frames. Here are the details.

On the High preset, the RX 6700 XT delivers 98.45 unconstrained frames, but it drops 13 frames and delivers 13 Warp misses. In addition, it requires 1540 (28%) frames to be synthesized, and microstutter is evident while playing.

It does better with the Medium preset but our goal is an absolute minimum of delivering 90 FPS, so we had to drop to the Low Preset. On Low it delivered 154.70 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses and it only required 11 frames to be synthesized for a good VR experience. Playing on the Medium preset is a possibility for players who can tolerate synthetically generated frames.

Next we test the cards that can mostly handle High settings.

High Settings

The first High preset card we test is an RTX 3060.

RTX 3060

The RTX 3060 can handle High setting only if DLSS is used. Otherwise it would require using the Low/Medium preset. Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details.

On the High preset without DLSS, the RTX 3060 delivers 69.54 unconstrained frames, and although it drops no frames nor delivers any Warp misses, it requires 2631 (50%) of its frames be synthesized. However, even without DLSS, microstutter is not evident while playing, unlike with the RX 6600 XT.

The RTX 3060 does much better with 105.61 unconstrained frames on the High preset with Balanced DLSS – with no dropped frames or Warp misses but with 219 (4%) synthetic frames. It is very playable and the Balanced DLSS image quality is very good.

However, since our goal is a minimum of delivering 90 FPS without synthetic frames, we also tested Performance DLSS. On the High preset it delivered 116.22 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses and it only required 2 frames to be synthesized for a very good VR experience.

It should be noted that Performance DLSS compromises VR visuals very slightly, so High/Balanced DLSS is a real possibility for players who don’t mind if some frames are synthesized or if they are willing to drop some individual settings.

Next we check the performance of the RX 6800.

RX 6800

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6800 run at the Epic and High preset.

Here are the details.

The RX 6800 cannot handle the Epic preset as it delivers 92.55 unconstrained frames but it drops 17 frames and delivers 17 Warp misses and it requires 2222 (41%) of its frames to be synthesized, and microstutter is evident.

Myst gameplay becomes smooth using a RX 6800 at the High preset, delivering 127.81 unconstrained frames with no Warp misses or any frames dropped, but it requires 15 synthetic frames.

Next we test the performance of video cards that can play at the High to Epic Preset

High/Epic settings

The first card we test is a RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.

RTX 3060 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3060 Ti run at the Epic preset with no DLSS, Quality DLSS, and with Balanced DLSS.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3060 Ti struggles at the Epic preset with 82.73 unconstrained FPS, and although it doesn’t drop frames or deliver any Warp misses, it requires 2562 (49%) of its frames to be synthesized. It does much better with Quality DLSS and doesn’t compromise image quality with 108.36 unconstrained FPS, dropping no frames or having any Warp misses, but it still requires 149 frames (8%) to be synthesized.

Using Balanced DLSS on the Epic Preset, the RTX 3060 easily hits its target of a locked-on 90 FPS with 122.61 FPS with one dropped frame, one Warp miss, and 3 synthetic frames. The ‘Balanced’ visuals are still very good although some players may prefer to play on the High preset with Quality DLSS with some synthesized frames.

The next card we test is a RX 6800 XT.

RX 6800 XT

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6800 XT run at the Epic and High preset.

Here are the details.

Using the Epic preset, the RX 6800 XT delivers 107.42 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but it requires 314 (6%) of the frames to be synthesized.

Using the High preset, it delivers 154.15 unconstrained FPS, dropping no frames nor having Warp misses but requiring 7 frames to be synthesized. It would be acceptable to play with a mix of mostly Epic settings with a few High settings if the goal is a minimum of 90 FPS with zero synthetic frames.

Next up, the RTX 3070.

RTX 3070

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3070 run at the Epic preset.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3070 cannot meet our goal of 90 FPS without synthetic frames by using the Epic preset without DLSS. It delivers 99.17 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 1353 (26%) frames to be synthesized.

Using Epic with Quality DLSS, the RTX 3070 delivers 124.39 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 7 frames to be synthesized. There is no reason not to use Quality DLSS as the image quality is the equivalent of playing without it and the VR experience is excellent.

The next Epic preset card we test is an RTX 3080. But this time, using Quality DLSS, we attempt using the Epic preset with 150% SteamVR render resolution.

The Epic Preset with 150% SteamVR Render Resolution

RTX 3080

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 run at the Epic preset at 100% SteamVR render resolution, first with no DLSS and then at 150% render resolution with Quality DLSS.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 is suitable for using with the Epic preset with no DLSS, delivering 117.72 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 10 frames to be synthesized.

It is not playable without synthesizing mass frames on the Epic preset with 150% render resolution without DLSS but it does great using Quality DLSS. It delivers 119.48 unconstrained FPS only requiring 8 frames to be synthesized and it neither drops frames nor has Warp misses. However, the visuals and clarity become noticeably better using SteamVR’s 150% render resolution with Epic/Quality DLSS than by using Epic at 100% without DLSS.

Next up, the RTX 3080 Ti.

RTX 3080 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 Ti run on the Epic preset comparing 100% with 150% SteamVR render resolutions with Quality DLSS on versus off.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 Ti can easily handle the Epic preset without DLSS at 100% SteamVR render resolution delivering 138.07 unconstrained FPS with no Warp misses or dropped frames, although 4 frames were synthesized. However, increasing the SteamVR render resolution to 150% drops the unconstrained framerate to 100.23 FPS, and without DLSS, it requires 942 (18%) of its frames to be synthesized although again, no frames are dropped.

Using Quality DLSS at 150% render resolution, the RTX 3080 Ti delivers 135.71 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, and only 1 frame was synthesized. There is no reason not to use Quality DLSS at 150% render resolution as its Epic preset visuals are far superior to not using DLSS at 100%.

Next we test our two fastest cards, the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti with a much more demanding headset, the Vive Pro 2. Please note that FCAT-VR does not distinguish between synthesized and dropped frames using the Pro 2 since it uses the Vive Console’s Motion Compensation (which we do not use) instead of SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing.

Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution (3184×3184)

High/Epic Presets

RTX 3080

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 using the Epic preset with the Vive Pro 2. This time we test the Epic and High presets but find that we cannot use Quality DLSS without requiring synthetic frames as the Pro 2’s render resolution is so high.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 on Epic without DLSS delivers 51.97 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp miss, and it drops or requires 1914 (43%) frames to be synthesized. Using Performance DLSS which compromises visuals slightly using the same settings, it manages 95.78 unconstrained frames with only 8 dropped or synthesized frames.

Without using DLSS, the RTX 3080 performs better on the High preset over Epic, delivering 83.72 unconstrained FPS, while dropping or synthesizing 1952 (39%) frames and suffering 1 Warp miss. Using the same settings with Balanced DLSS, it gives 97.86 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp miss, and dropping or synthesizing 10 frames.

It is a toss up between using Epic/Performance DLSS and High/Balanced DLSS. Next we check the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti.

RTX 3080 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 Ti using the Pro 2 at 100% SteamVR render resolution.

Here are the details.

Although NVIDIA’s top gaming card produces no Warp misses, the RTX 3080 Ti cannot handle the Epic preset without DLSS as it delivers 55.08 unconstrained FPS, and it drops or requires 2049 (45%) frames to be synthesized. Using Quality DLSS, it still falls short of our 90 FPS minimum goal, delivering 91.71 unconstrained FPS but it still drops or synthesizes 656 (13%) frames.

Using the same settings but with Balanced DLSS, the 3080 Ti delivers 98.54 frames with only 8 dropped or synthesized frames. We would suggest playing either Epic/Balanced DLSS or with Quality DLSS and a mix of Epic and High settings to stay above 90 FPS for an awesome visual experience on the Pro 2.

Conclusion

After spending many hours playing and benchmarking Myst 2021 in VR with nine video cards, we have concluded that it is a decently-optimized game that delivers reasonably good performance with very good VR visuals that really draws the player into its world. The map where we had universal issues was in Channelwood where there was considerable microstutter and we have concluded that it’s not representative of the game.

The Radeons that are normally equivalent to their GeForce counterparts in pancake gaming are somewhat held back by microstutter, but far more so by not having a DLSS competitor for VR. All of the competing GeForce cards were able to deliver similar visuals but with much higher performance by using Quality or Balanced DLSS. And using DLSS is the only way to play Myst at 100% SteamVR render resolution with a Pro 2 without synthesizing frames. DLSS works great for the three VR games that we have tested, and we highly recommend its use.

We hope that AMD and the Cyan devs will bring native FSR support to Myst as they have done for the pancake version since using the OpenVR_FSR mod brings inconsistent results. We are still holding out hope since AMD told us, “FSR is not supported with VR in Myst at this time.”

Next up, expect Rodrigo to deliver a brand new 472.12 driver performance analysis shortly. And he is also working on a Myst pancake game performance review while we are working on a budget TeamGroup SATA SSD evaluation. Stay tuned to BTR.

Happy VR Gaming!

The RX 6600 XT is priced starting at $379 while the factory overclocked Red Devil is priced higher than the $399 RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, yet AMD has positioned its newest mainstream video card against the entry level $329 RTX 3060. We have found the Red Devil RX 6600 XT to be a bit faster than than the RTX 3060 in rasterized pancake games but outclassed by the Ti. For this VR showdown, we will use the Valve Index and 10 VR games to compare the performance of the RX 6600 XT with the RTX 3060.

We want to see if the RX 6600 XT is worthy of AMD’s claim of VR premium and how it compares with the RTX 3060 which is adequate as an entry level mainstream card to power a Valve Index. Although a fast CPU is important for geometry and other processing, smooth VR delivery depends mostly on the video card. An underpowered video card can even cause reprojecting and artifacting for a substandard playing experience that may even lead to VR sickness.We currently benchmark ten VR games using the Valve Index that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), the same as the Vive Pro and with similar performance at 90Hz/90FPS. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a recent clean install of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Valve Index, 90Hz
• EVGA RTX 3060 Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• Red Devil RX 6600 XT 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• 2 x 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive (one for AMD; one for NVIDIA)
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB T-FORCE DELTA MAX SATA III SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 471.68 drivers – Stock settings in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin 21.8.1 drivers. Stock settings in the AMD control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All 10 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (non-public) Beta
• FCAT VR Beta 18 (non-public)
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution

10 VR Game benchmark suite & 1 synthetic test

Synthetic

• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Borderlands 2
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Half Life: Alyx
• No Man’s Sky
• Pavlov
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our ten VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution as we benchmark the Red Devil RX 6600 XT to see how it compares with the EVGA RTX 3060 Black.

The OpenVR benchmark ranks the RX 6600 XT and the RTX 3060 almost identically.

But we really want to see gaming benchmarks. First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

Half Life: Alyx

Half Life: Alyx uses an adaptive/dynamic scaling algorithm which uses a card’s performance headroom to subsample in demanding scenes and to supersample in less demanding scenes. We used its console commands to lock the SteamVR resolution to 100% so that it did not supersample or subsample and we set the graphics preset to High.

Here is the frametime plot for Half Life Alyx.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 114.87 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but 222 (4%) of its frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 managed 114.43 unconstrained FPS with no Warp misses but with 2 dropped frames and 399 (6%) synthetic frames.

Half Life: Alyx isn’t particularly demanding unless the Super Resolution increased in SteamVR settings, but unless console commands are used, the game will automatically subsample or supersample as needed and it will run fine with High settings on both cards. Unfortunately, while playing the game, Warp misses happened too frequently with the 6600 XT to mar an otherwise good VR experience.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot. We set the settings to Standard, but we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA. Although DLSS is available for RTX cards and the Quality setting improves performance without impacting image quality significantly, we did not test with it.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 76.91 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but 3221 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 produced 103.61 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and it only required 191 (3%) synthetic frames.

Although, the RTX 3060 gives a better experience over the RX 6600 XT in No Man’s Sky using the Standard preset, it isn’t strong enough to play on the Enhanced setting without synthesizing frames.

Next we check out Pavlov.

Pavlov

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Pavlov in VR. Pavlov is the most popular multiplayer VR shooter with a primary focus on its community. Realistic fast-paced combat is a large part of its core experience, and even tanks have been added.

We benchmarked using the training sessions with the highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RX 6600 XT delivered 165.97 unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthesized frames, or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 175.96 unconstrained FPS also with no dropped, synthesized frames, or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivers an identical VR experience to the RX 6600 XT although it has a little more performance headroom. We recommend that it be used for increasing the SteamVR render resolution or for playing at 120Hz.

Next we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2

Project CARS 2

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and will continue to use the older game instead for VR benching.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA Ultra.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur although it looks best to us on Low or Medium. For lesser cards, we would also recommend lowering grass and reflections to maximize framerate delivery as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6600 XT managed 100.15 unconstrained FPS with 17 dropped frame and 17 Warp misses but 566 (6%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 achieved 77.43 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame and with 1 Warp miss but with 4820 (50%) synthetic frames. It had no Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our medium VR settings is unsatisfactory for both cards and we would recommend lowering individual settings or even lower the resolution a bit as needed to stay out of reprojection. The RX 6600 XT is faster, but the VR experience is spoiled by dropped frames and Warp misses.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings but we did not increase or Supersample the resolution.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 128.30 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthetic frames and there were no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 managed 129.39 unconstrained FPS, also with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 26 synthetic frames were produced

Both cards deliver an identical experience with a little bit of performance headroom to add mods or to Supersample.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are outstanding and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its highest settings and we left the Pixel Density at 100%.. Here is the frametime chart. Please note that the Pixel Density is 100%.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT produced 120.55 unconstrained FPS with 7 dropped frames and 7 Warp misses, but 114 (2%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 managed 115.00 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses and 37 (1%) synthetic frames were generated.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game maximum settings and 100% Pixel Density should be similar for both of our cards although the RX 6600 XT has too many dropped frames and Warp misses.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD and NVIDIA delivering two mainstream cards that are both priced below $400 – if they can be found at all at MSRP – that drop the entry price for VR. The EVGA RTX 3060 Black sits in a unique position as the fastest $329 MSRP video card available for VR and it offers reasonable performance for use with a Valve Index, and no doubt it would offer excellent performance for an original Vive, Rift CV1, or even for a Rift S. The Red Devil RX 6600 XT at above $400 should be slightly faster, but unfortunately it suffers from microstuttering together with excessive dropped frames and Warp misses, and we suggest that AMD’s driver team should address this.

Both the RTX 3060 and the RX 6600 XT can max multiple VR games in our benching suite if the resolution is left at 100% or slightly subsampled, or if the in-game settings are lowered. But if someone is going to spend $1000 for a premium HMD, it makes sense to pair it with a faster video card like the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition which is MSRP/SEP priced below the Red Devil RX 6600 XT. However, one cannot pair a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2 with either card.

The RTX 3060 is a good card for high/medium quality PC VR at a rather bargain price of $329 – if it can be purchased at this price – and the RTX 3060 Ti is a more solid offering for $70 more. Unfortunately, the RX 6600 XT at $379 barely matches the experience of the RX 3060 at $329 – never mind the Red Devil at above $400 – and it needs some attention from AMD’s driver team before we can give it a solid recommendation for VR. We did not test DLSS in VR nor did we use FSR and will leave that comparison for a future review.

Next up, we plan to review Myst which launches tomorrow on Steam also in VR. It features ray tracing in the pancake version and DLSS in both versions.

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

The RTX 3060 has arrived as the EVGA Black since there is no Founders Edition, and we will benchmark this midrange video card for virtual reality to compare performance with its faster sibling, the RTX 3060 Ti, that we recommended as the new “bang for buck” VR champ. This review presents its performance in 16 VR games using the Vive Pro and FCAT VR. We will follow up later today with Part 2 of BTR’s mega review using 37 regular games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks comparing the new card’s performance with the RTX 3060 Ti, the RTX 2060, the GTX 1060, and against the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

In pancake games, depending on resolution, the $329 RTX 3060 is about 30% slower than the $399 RTX 3060 Ti, and about 25% faster than the Turing GeForce RTX 2060 which launched originally at $349. It’s also on average 90% faster than the Pascal GeForce GTX 1060 which was one of NVIDIA’s most popular cards that launched at the bargain price of $249 four and one-half years ago. The RTX 3060 is also about as fast as the Radeon RX 5700 XT which launched at $449, but we test using the Anniversary Edition which originally launched at $499.

The RTX 3060 delivers 12.7 shader TFLOPs, 24.9 RT TFLOPs, and 102 Tensor TFLOPs (using the new sparsity feature) of computational power over a 192-bit memory interface using 12GB of GDDR6. It is based on its own 12 billion transistor GA106 chip, not the GA104 chip used in the RTX 3060 Ti and for the RTX 3070.

We want to see where the RTX 3060 fits regarding VR performance and how it compares with the RTX 3060 Ti which is sufficient to power a headset of the Valve Index/Vive Pro class. We had originally planned to also compare its performance with the RTX 5700 XT, but the latest driver caused conflicts with SteamVR that we were unable to solve in time for this review. Although a fast CPU is important for geometry and other processing, smooth VR delivery depends mostly on the video card. An underpowered video card can even cause reprojecting and artifacting for a substandard playing experience that can even lead to VR sickness.

We currently benchmark sixteen VR games using the Vive Pro that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), the same as the Valve Index and with similar performance at 90Hz/90FPS. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a clean install of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition using the RTX 3060 launch driver, 461.64.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RTX 3060 Founders Edition 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB, Anniversary Edition, at AE clocks (Adrenalin Edition 21.2.3 drivers).
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 461.64 press RTX 3060 launch drivers – High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, no optimizations, Vsync is off as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v2004.
• Latest DirectX
• All 16 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture Beta 03/04/20
• FCAT-VR Beta 18
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution unless specified

16 VR Game benchmark suite & 3 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Blue Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Into the Radius
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Pavlov
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our sixteen VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution (or higher as noted for ARK: Park) as we benchmark the RTX 3060 to see how it compares with the RTX 3060 Ti.

First up, ARK Park.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 uses the Creation Engine, and Bethesda has dropped all support for it so it remains unoptimized although there are mods that may be helpful. It’s pretty hard to use the Index controllers with it, so we use the Vive wands instead for this game. We benchmark at its highest settings and with TAA. All Fade settings are set to their maximums.

Fallout 4 had some issues on both cards as it is still an unoptimized mess abandoned by its publisher – but it is playable and an amazing full-game experience.

Here is the frametime plot for Fallout 4.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3060 delivered 71.17 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames and no Warp misses, but 2922 (50%) of its frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 107.76 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and two Warp misses, but 1859 (27%) of its frames were synthesized.

These cards may both benefit by using lowered settings for a smoother experience.

Next we look at Half Life: Alyx:

Half Life: Alyx

Half Life: Alyx uses an adaptive/dynamic scaling algorithm which uses a card’s performance headroom to subsample in demanding scenes and to supersample in less demanding scenes. We used its console commands to lock the SteamVR resolution to 100% so that it did not supersample or subsample.

Here is the frametime plot for Half Life Alyx.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 delivered 109.21 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but 763 (15%) of its frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 149.86 unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthetic, or Warp misses.

Half Life: Alyx isn’t particularly demanding unless the Super Resolution increased in SteamVR settings, but unless console commands are used, the game will automatically subsample or supersample as needed and it will run fine with Ultra settings on both cards.

Next we look at Into the Radius.

Into the Radius

Into the Radius is a hardcore single player stealth survival adventure/exploration game, and it pays homage to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series by being set in the dangerous large open world of the Pechorsk Exclusion Zone.

Into the Radius has decent visuals using Unreal Engine 4 that really add to its spooky and intense atmosphere, and its performance demands on the video card are also higher since its a huge open world game with a decent draw distance.

There are no user options for changing individual graphics settings other than High, Medium, and Low presets. There is also a slider to drop or subsample the resolution down to 65%, or to increase the resolution to 110%. We benchmarked our two cards at High Quality and with 100% resolution.

Here is the frametime plot for Into the Radius.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3060 managed 108.06 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 130 (2%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti produced 157.21 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames and no Warp misses but 11 synthetic frames were generated.

The RTX 3060 provided a similar VR experience playing Into the Radius as using the RTX 3060 Ti which offers enough performance headroom to increase the resolution to 110%.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot. We set the settings to Enhanced which is above Low and below High, but we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RTX 3060 delivered 64.35 unconstrained FPS with 5 dropped frames and 5 Warp misses, but 3179 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti produced 89.60 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss, but it required 3079 (48%) synthetic frames.

The Low Preset may be better suited for both cards or else individual setting may be lowered to maintain a balance of performance to visuals.

Next, we will check out another VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered to be the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine and it has very good visuals. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.
Obduction’s visuals are both graphically impressive and relatively intensive. There are adjustable menu sliders that will allow the player to dial down the settings but we picked Epic and left the in-game resolution at 100% plus 75% texture memory. Lowering the settings means the world textures are less detailed and the player will see them pop into view rather suddenly, breaking VR immersion.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3060 delivered 66.46 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses, and 3241 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 96.83 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but 1643 (25%) synthetic frames were generated.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivers a better VR experience than the RTX 3060 although we would not recommend playing with all Epic individual settings even at 100% resolution.

Next we check out BTR’s newest game, Pavlov.

Pavlov

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Pavlov in VR. Pavlov is the most popular multiplayer shooter in VR with a primary focus on its community. Realistic fast-paced combat is a large part of its core experience, and even tanks have been added to make it into a great shooter.

We used the training sessions with the highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RTX 3060 delivered 168.74 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 232.77 unconstrained FPS also with no dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivers an identical VR experience to the Ti although the faster card has significantly more performance headroom that may be used for increasing the resolution.

Next we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2 that we like better than Project CARS 3.

Project CARS 2

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and will continue to use the older game instead for VR benching.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA Ultra.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur although it looks best to us on Low or Medium. For lesser cards, we would also recommend lowering grass and reflections to maximize framerate delivery as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3060 managed 61.00 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss but 4793 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti achieved 77.43 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames but with 4792 (50%) synthetic frames. It had no Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our maximum VR settings is similar on both cards, but we would recommend lowering individual settings or even lower the resolution a bit as needed to stay out of reprojection.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings, and we also increased the resolution to its in-game maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 delivered 105.14 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses, and 2196 (24%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 124.266 unconstrained FPS with 6 dropped frames, 51 synthetic frames, and 6 Warp misses.

Only the RTX 3060 Ti can play Skyrim at its maxed out in-game settings including using maximum in-game Supersampling without resorting to reprojecting or synthesizing frames.

Let’s check out Subnautica next.

Subnautica

Subnautica uses the Unity engine. As the sole survivor of a crash landing, the player ventures into the depths of a visually impressive alien underwater world. Here you can explore, craft equipment and build bases, pilot underwater craft, and solve mysteries all while attempting to survive a hostile environment. It is an unoptimized mess, but the VR experience is well worth it.

We benchmarked Subnautica using its highest settings plus TAA, but we left its resolution at 100%, and here are the frametime results.Here are the details.

The RTX 3060 managed 52.85 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped frames and 3 Warp misses, but 3675 (58%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti achieved 69.47 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but 3187 (50%) frames needed to be synthesized.

The experience playing Subnautica using its highest settings is not great as it doesn’t appear to be very well optimized, and there are obvious stutters at times We would recommend lowering individual settings as needed to maintain a balance between visuals and performance to stay out of reprojection.

Next up, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an older game which is built on the Unreal 4 engine and it still boasts amazing visuals although it is not demanding. Although it is considered by some to be a walking simulator, it is also an excellent detective game with great puzzles. But be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are only a few in-game graphics options available, so we used 100% resolution in-game with TAA.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details at 100% Resolution.

The RTX 3060 delivered 132.88 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, and no frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 183.30 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames, 2 synthetic frames, and 2 Warp misses.

Although it is a beautiful game visually, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter isn’t particularly demanding. The VR experience playing on both cards are similar.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 16 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are outstanding and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its highest settings and we left the Pixel Density at 100%.. Here is the frametime chart. Please note that the Pixel Density is 100%.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR. Please note that the Pixel Density is 100%.

The RTX 3060 produced 111.87 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but 344 (5%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 146.53 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses but only 3 synthetic frames were generated.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game maximum settings and 100% Pixel Density is similar for both of our cards although the RTX 3060 Ti has sufficient headroom to not require synthetic or reprojected frames.

Unconstrained Framerates

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates (the performance headroom) of our two cards using sixteen test games and and we added the RX 5700 XT for three synthetic benches: Superposition, VRMark’s Blue Room, and the OpenVR benchmark. Higher is better. Synthetic benchmarks are only useful for ranking cards. They don’t predict how any game will actually play in VR on any particular video card.

We don’t give percentages of change or percentages of increase between competing cards since unconstrained framerates are just one metric of performance headroom that is useless without the accompanying frametime charts.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, we are facing two pandemics – the COVID-19 pandemic and the Cryptocurrency Pandemic – both of which have made it very difficult for gamers to find any new cards at all – and pricing is way up primarily because of the mining demand. If the EVGA RTX 3060 can be purchased for its suggested price of $329, it would be an acceptable entry level card for the Vive Pro or Valve Index class of VR headset. However, the RTX 3060 Ti probably gives the most bang-for-buck for VR at $399.

It is great to see NVIDIA delivering two cards that are below $400 – if they can be found – that drop the entry price for VR. It will also be interesting to see what AMD brings to this price segment with their upcoming midrange RX 6000 Navi 3 cards.

The EVGA RTX 3060 Black sits in a unique position as the fastest $329 MSRP video card available for VR and it offers reasonable performance for use with a HMD like the Vive Pro or the Valve Index, and no doubt it would offer excellent performance for an original Vive, Rift CV1, or even for a Rift S.

The RTX 3060 can max out several of the games in our benching suite if the resolution is left at 100% or slightly subsampled, or if the in-game settings are lowered. But if someone is going to spend $1000 for a premium HMD, it makes sense to pair it with a faster video card like the RTX 3060 Ti or higher. However, one cannot pair a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 with either card.

The RTX 3060 is a good card for high/medium quality PC VR at a rather bargain price of $329 – if it can be purchased at this price – and the RTX 3060 Ti is a more solid offering for $70 more. The RTX 3070 is faster but it also costs $170 more at $499 and the RX 6800 costs $258 more and is also almost impossible to find. The EVGA RTX 3060 Black is impressive as a $329 card that can even power a high-end HMD and its a real step forward toward more widespread VR adoption.

Next up for today is the much more detailed Part 2 of our Mega 53-game review using 37 pancake games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks comparing the new EVGA RTX 3060’s performance with the RTX 3060 Ti, the RTX 2060, the GTX 1060, and against the Radeon RX 5700 XT. Don’t miss it!

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!