AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 & RX 5700 XT At 1080p, 1440p & Ultrawide

Battlefield V

There are a handful of interesting comparisons that can be made in any one of the graphs throughout this article, but the two most notable ones are the RX 5700 XT against the RTX 2060 SUPER, and the RX 5700 against the original RTX 2060. Both sets share the same SRPs, $399 and $349, respectively, so we couldn’t ask for better match-ups. It is worth pointing out, though, that the RX 5700 includes an 8GB framebuffer within its price tag, while NVIDIA’s stuck at 6GB.

With the ultrawide resolution of 3440×1440, something wonky is going on with Radeon. We first saw this bizarre issue in our SUPER article the other day, but once we plugged the 5700 series results into Excel, we had to dig deeper. Being capped at 60 FPS, you’d imagine that V-Sync was enabled – but that wasn’t the case.

Even with V-Sync disabled inside of the driver and the game itself, Radeon cards seem to cap at 60 FPS in this game, but only at this ultrawide resolution. Before launch, we were told that there were some ultrawide-related bugs in the beta driver, but this one wasn’t on the company’s radar. Funny enough, this was the absolutely only ultrawide bug we encountered.

Given that the 0.1% results are really low for Radeon at the ultrawide resolution, we hope that whatever fix comes along to tackle the frame cap will also fix the somehow impacted minimums. Other than ultrawide, both of the 5700 cards deliver great performance up to 1440p, with even the non-XT surging 24 FPS beyond 60 FPS.

F1 2019

Once again, both of the RX 5700 cards are driving some great performance here, with even the non-XT model hitting 60 FPS at the ultrawide resolution. For those who like even higher framerates, the XT has what it takes to breach the 100 FPS mark. If you want to sacrifice some detail, you could likely inch your way towards taking full advantage of your 144Hz monitor with either of the 5700 cards.

In the competitive match-up, NVIDIA edges out the RX 5700 XT at all resolutions, much to the red team’s chagrin, we’re sure, as it’s the one with a logo on an actual Formula 1 car right now.

It’s worthy of noting that the RX 5700 has consistently been beating out the last-gen Vega 64, something that makes us wonder if the same scaling would be seen in an area where Vega really excels: compute. We’ll be tackling that benchmarking this week, so stay tuned for our report on that.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 was a game heavily promoted by AMD, and it also happens to have AMD’s logo on the splash screen, so it’s not too surprising to see Radeon perform so strongly here. But this strongly? The XT actually manages to surpass the RTX 2070, which is not something you’d expect to happen – but it does, at all three resolutions.

Another interesting angle is that the non-XT keeps right up to the RTX 2060 SUPER. NVIDIA found a way to eke another frame or two out of the performance there, but overall, there’s some seriously good performance from the 5700 series here.

Metro Exodus

Where Far Cry 5 is clearly marketed around AMD hardware, Metro Exodus has been marketed around GeForce. That’s thanks in big part to the fact that the game can take advantage of real-time ray tracing, a feature currently exclusive to NVIDIA’s RTX line. If you are really wanting to try next-gen gaming with ray tracing, AMD unfortunately does not have an answer yet.

If you don’t care about ray tracing until performance improves, we understand where you are coming from. Fortunately, you won’t be lacking anything truly important but ray tracing if you go with AMD, as the performance delivered by the 5700 series once again is very impressive. This is an NVIDIA title, yet the $399 5700 XT outpaces the $499 RTX 2070 (but not the new $499 RTX 2070 SUPER).

These results have proven rather fun so far, so let’s see if it continues: