Polaris, Boosted: A Look At PowerColor’s Radeon RX 570 & RX 580

Since the original The Witcher title came out in 2007, the series has become one of the best RPGs going. Each one of the titles in the series offers deep gameplay, amazing locales, and comprehensive lore. Wild Hunt, the series’ third game, also happens to be one of the best-looking games out there and requires a beefy PC to take great advantage of.

Testing: Our saved game starts us just outside Hierarch Square, where we begin a manual runthrough (literally – the run button is held down as much as possible) through and around the town, to wind up back at a bridge near a watermill (pictured below). The entire runthrough takes about 90 seconds. Please note that while ‘Ultra’ detail is used, NVIDIA’s HairWorks is not.

Like a handful of other titles in this article, Witcher 3 can look beautiful on fairly modest hardware. 1080p is a chore for no RX series card outside of the low-end RX 460. At 1440p, both the RX 570 and RX 580 deliver suitable enough framerates – anything close to 50 is a good alternative to 60 FPS with lower detail.

Total War: ATTILA

For strategy fans, the Total War series needs no introduction. ATTILA is the latest in the series, which will remain true for only the next week, as Warhammer is due to launch. Thankfully, any recent Total War game is suitable for benchmarking, and our results are going to prove that.

Testing: ATTILA includes a built-in benchmark, so again, I’ve decided to use that. However, as I do with Metro, I stick to Fraps for framerate capturing as the game’s results page isn’t too convenient.

ATTILA might not look as attractive as some other titles in this article, but it sure is a hardcore test on the GPU and CPU (as our Ryzen testing proves). I should note that “Max” detail is overkill in some ways, so you don’t actually need a GTX 1080 to enjoy playable framerates at 1440p. With this game, little graphics tweaks can have a huge impact.