AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Graphics Card Review

Monster Hunter: World

On the previous page, we saw the 5600 XT give the RTX 2060 a great fight in every test, but NVIDIA manages to strike back in Monster Hunter World, with it, and the GTX 1660 SUPER soaring to the top. Seeing the 1660 SUPER outpace a card like the RX 5700 is really intriguing, considering the SRP on the 5700 is around $349, and the 1660 SUPER, $229.

Clearly, optimizations are going a long way for NVIDIA with this title, so we’d lean towards that being the better choice if you take this game really seriously (and it seems like many do).

Since its launch, MHW has dramatically upgraded itself to support newer technologies. The game didn’t even launch with ultrawide support, but that was taken care of fairly quickly. Since then, a high-res texture pack has also come out, and support for both NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX have been added – so regardless of whether you go AMD or NVIDIA, you have some extra toys to play with.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

With SotTR, AMD’s boosted-clock RX 5600 XT matches NVIDIA’s RTX 2060, while the 5600 XT reference clock of course falls a bit behind. Well, “a bit” being 9 full frames on average. It should be clear by this point that if you want the best-performing 5600 XT, you’ll definitely want to make sure you get one with the increased clocks, which includes the 14Gbps memory.

This is another title where the RX 5600 Pulse concerns the RX 5700 just a wee bit. The difference between RX 5600 XT reference and Pulse is 9 FPS, and that happens to be the same difference between the Pulse and RX 5700.

Total War: Three Kingdoms

Three Kingdoms has been promoted as working on Intel’s integrated graphics – it even has an Intel logo while the game starts up. That’s all fine and good, but the reality is, Three Kingdoms, like most Total Wars, has an obscene number of dials that can be turned, so no matter the hardware you’ve got, you should be able to reach playable framerates easily, or at least eke out a ton of graphical IQ.

A result that stands out here is between the two RX 5600 XT configurations. The reference card hit 72 FPS at peak, which happened to be the Sapphire Pulse’s minimum, with the overall advantage being 8 FPS on average. Another interesting result is that the RX 590 performs the same as RX 5500 XT, despite the latter being the much newer replacement.