AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Graphics Card Review

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 was tested with DX12, screenshots of settings on previous page.

With our first result, we can see a noticeable gain between the RX 5600 XT’s reference clocks, and those that Sapphire has upgraded. This is actually one of the tamer performance deltas between the configurations, but it’s about what we’d expect to see in general between a reference and a pre-OCed card.

Sadly, ever since Borderlands 3 came out, we’ve heard multiple reports of the game not running ideally over the long haul on either AMD or NVIDIA, but we’ve never been able to nail down where it’s worse. We’ve been waiting for the game to hit Steam before playing it, so we’re hoping by that point, some of these long-standing bugs will finally be nailed down.

If the 5600 XT delivers 82 FPS at an SRP of $289, then the RX 5700 at $349 begins to look a little questionable. That’s especially the case if we’re taking a look at the boosted clocks on the Pulse. Notably, in this particular game, AMD’s $289 beats out NVIDIA’s $299 RTX 2060 – a card that was $349 ahead of AMD’s 5600 XT launch.

F1 2019

With F1 2019, we’re again seeing the RTX 2060 struggle to exceed the Pulse 5600 XT’s performance, which is starting to make the price drop on the RTX 2060 make a bit of sense. But here, we see a bigger performance delta between the reference-clocked 5600 XT, and this boosted clocked one.

We’re seeing a full 10 FPS difference between the two 5600 XT configurations here, which might seem insignificant at 100 FPS, but it’s really not. When we look at the minimums, that kind of difference makes an even bigger real-world impression. It could be that you want to run this game at 1440p, which means the FPS is going to drop, so any extra performance you can eke out of it will be put to good use.

In both of these charts so far, we’ve seen AMD’s newer RX 5500 XT fall behind its older RX 590 sibling, which makes the newer release seem quite strange in some ways. Granted, Navi is the technically better architecture overall, but Polaris is really battle-tested, so we’d be quicker to recommend that one over the Navi card if it came down to it – and if the price was where it should be. It makes no sense to not go for whichever card makes the most sense value-wise.

Metro Exodus

The going gets real tough with Metro Exodus. For this test, we use the in-game benchmark, which suffers more dramatic lows than we see in most of our other testing. We don’t really think that this benchmark is representative of the entire game, but it seems to be good at testing its worse-case scenario, especially with the minimums.

That said, this is the third game in a row that puts the 5600 XT boosted-clocked version ahead of the RTX 2060. The stock-clocked version slides in just behind it. What a difference a BIOS can make!