6.5 Creedmoor Vs. .308 Winchester: Which Wins?

When comparing 6.5 Creedmoor versus .308 Winchester, is one clearly better than the other? Or do both cartridges have their place?

As shooters and hunters, we’re always chasing something, be it the game or the high score in a match. As a result, we end up trying new things as well as reinventing old concepts. Today, we are debating a thin line of performance in our rifle cartridges that’s as much factual as it is sentimental, an ever-present past that we judge the future against. In a way, it’s a flat circle: We often forget what we had that worked … and have to see it come around again to remember that it wasn’t all that bad in the first place.

The ultimate success of a rifle cartridge isn’t to be the latest trend, but rather become something of a reliable choice that withstands the test of time. Until recently, there has been something of a rivalry between the classic .308 Winchester and the “new” kid on the block, the 6.5 Creedmoor.

Here I’m going to make the case for both.

What Makes a Cartridge Stick

For a rifle cartridge to succeed, it needs to be something new enough to gather interest and also do something different than its competing class. The obvious discussion here isn’t whether the .338 Lapua Magnum is going to replace 5.56 NATO in carbines for home defense. However, it’s a good illustration of just how lost we can get in terms of discussing the realities of ballistic performance in things that are, in fact, far more similar than they are different.

The nature of our industrial production, at least in America, has trended toward the modular. The AR-15 paved the path to this, and in the past decade, we now have hundreds of companies producing AR parts, and we also have an ever-growing open-source ecosystem that’s providing common parts for “Glock” pistols, Sig P365 and P320 aftermarkets, and bolt-action systems that will eventually be fully integrated into common industry standards. Even suppressors are trending to HUB base thread systems to accommodate different guns and mounting interfaces.

In the early days of this, which were not that far in the past, we didn’t have a lot of options for increasing or altering performance beyond totally custom options. The main dilemma centered on available magazines and bolt faces: introducing something outside of these specs would necessitate a completely new set of operating parts that would complicate things for the mass market and, therefore, influence the feasibility of new rounds.

In broader manufacturing, we’re somewhat stuck in the box: The ideas we have now are all somewhat limited because the base systems we shoot them out of are almost entirely rigid in their own design. Open-source rifle designs, or at least what we call “footprint” variations, are almost guaranteed to perform with cartridge options that fit in their magazines. So, what we end up with isn’t entirely a form of innovation, rather niche filling in a set space we’ve all agreed to with our wallets over decades.

The .308 Winchester has been a mainstay for the American shooter for decades. It has a special reverence in our culture and is one of the most popular hunting and fighting rounds available. It has a reputation for success, and it has become so commonplace that it has been the basis for several rifle families and magazine types. The .308 Win. is the “fatherly” short-action rifle round and also is the main influence on AR-10-class rifles.

So, knowing that, there was obviously some ground to start playing around in the .308’s backyard—namely in the guise of necking it up and down, but ultimately keeping its case head diameter.

As a baseline rifle cartridge that has been instrumental in establishing a host of firearms, standardized magazines, parts and ammunition types, the .308 is, in fact, very hard to beat. In today’s cartridge race, we often forget what our most established and widely available rounds are capable of. Yes, it’s somewhat easy to “beat” the .308 Win. in terms of trajectory at a given distance, but that’s only one metric of performance being considered. We tend to give advantages to things by way of marketing that are otherwise easily dismissed in ballistically identical cartridges that simply aren’t new or popular.

For instance, there are few talks about the 6mm Creedmoor besting the .243 Win., or if the 6 ARC is a viable contender in the same space. In terms of real-world performance, these three rounds each offer something great in the 100-grain +/- .243-inch bullet class. We don’t see this debate because it’s not a point of contention—none of these around are trying to “replace” the other, which, in general, was the argument of .308 Win. against 6.5 Creedmoor.

You’ve seen article after article by now: “Will the 6.5 Creedmoor Finally Kill the .308 Win.?” But why are we asking that at all? In a way, this was comparing apples to oranges that share a case-head diameter. The strengths of the .308 Win. have, at least in our media, been watered down to create controversy in areas it wasn’t meant for.

The Long-Range Problem

Let’s consider the 1,000-yard benchmark and the practical effective uses we see in the field.

The shooting industry went through a pretty long zombie phase, and the 6.5 Creedmoor was introduced during this somewhat bonkers time, and it slowly began to take root. Initially, it confused many shooters, who were not familiar with metric designations on American cartridges; the bulk of 6.5mm experience was with wildcats like 6.5-284 … and classic military rounds like 6.5×55 Swedish.

It was a gamble to introduce something with a relatively unfamiliar bullet diameter during what was the height of the surplus market, with cheap ammo everywhere and the rising popularity of the modular AR-15, itself spurring the development of .30-caliber rounds like .300 Blackout.

Suffice to say, these two introductions, the 6.5 Creedmoor and 300 Blackout, were instrumental in changing our landscape. The 6.5 Creedmoor is largely responsible for the long-range trend we had, the .300 Blackout for helping make suppressor ownership commonplace. Today, we see a melding of these two things as shorter barrels with suppressors are becoming more the norm.

After we lost interest in killing zombies, the next big trend became long-range shooting—and the 6.5 Creedmoor was the newly crowned king. One-thousand yards had suddenly become accessible to the average shooter with a regular short-action rifle and cost-effective ammo. The culture moved to hits on steel as sports like PRS grew. Making contact with plates was the name of the game, and the industry responded in kind.

The practicality became lost over time, and the sports became their own punchline: bullet golf. To me, long range has always been training for field shooting on game, which takes place ethically at much shorter ranges that neglect the imaginary 1,000-yard benchmark. I’ve shot .308 Win. to a mile, as well as with .338 Lapua, 6.5 Creedmoor and .300 Win. Mag. It’s hard with any of them.

In terms of “rivalry,” what really needs to be understood is that the .308 Winchester was not designed as a long-range cartridge … while the 6.5 Creedmoor was. Of course, there was more that went into this, but the .308/7.62 NATO was a general-purpose cartridge developed in the post-World War II years to replace the .30-06 Springfield and other foreign military cartridges as the Western world aligned itself against the Soviet sphere. The standard cartridges of the era are what appeared in what was considered precision rifles, .308/7.62 NATO and 7.62x54R becoming the dominant chamberings. Over time, there were certainly attempts to increase long-range performance.

For general recreation, the 6.5 Creedmoor is a great round, and it’s worthy to note that it was far from the first 6.5mm/.264 cartridge utilized in .308 actions. The .260 Remington is still around in limited circumstances; however, it, too, was not designed with modern bullets in mind. The case dimensions and intent to use these modern bullets was what set it apart when Hornady introduced it. Everything about this cartridge was well thought out, and Hornady deserves a lot of praise for what is likely one of the most successful new cartridge introductions in history.

The main thing that needs to be understood is that the 6.5 Creedmoor was introduced into the .308’s manufacturing base with the idea it would offer an improvement for long-range shooting, whereas the .308 was designed as a cartridge, and guns were designed around it. The rivalry here is purely media bias in our own industry, neither can nor even should replace the other.

Real-World Brotherhood

I’ve taken game of various types all over the country with both the 6.5 Creedmoor and .308 Winchester. Likewise, I’ve shot matches of all kinds, from CMP military matches to long range on moving targets. In all practicality, I’ve not been one to understand the idea that one needs to beat the other. In general, I don’t get the hype for the 6.5 Creedmoor and don’t get the hate for .308 Winchester that I hear so often.

Let’s add some numerical context. The .450 Bushmaster, on a good day, is a 200-yard cartridge. Drop is measured in feet at most ranges. In contrast, the .308 and 6.5 zeroed at 100 meters are both dropping less than a half mil—mere inches—at 200 meters. In general, you don’t need to compensate too much until you get past 300 meters. Both .308 and 6.5 can easily do this with rudimentary holdovers. In fact, many chamberings can.

In practical terms, you should think about owning both of these cartridges from a purely pragmatic standpoint. The .308 Winchester established the basis for the success of the 6.5 Creedmoor, but it isn’t really competing in the same ways as the 6.5 Creedmoor has been made to compete with it in return. Both of these rounds offer unique benefits, and both are nearly interchangeable in terms of the firearms they are used in. It’s really the best of all worlds to be able to have the flexibility of .308 Winchester and the extended-range performance of 6.5 Creedmoor.

There’s no reason to declare one a winner when they are both such distinguished gentlemen in their own rights. It’s better to have more friends than fewer, at least that’s how I see things. 

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.

---

More On Long-Range Shooting: