AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Review: A Top-Notch 1080p Gaming GPU

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 21, 2020, 09:00 AM EDT

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AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT - 3DMark Time Spy And Fire Strike

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from Futuremark. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multithreading. Time Spy is designed to test the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the Futuremark Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards and other system resources driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

3DMark Time Spy

Direct X 12 Performance

3DMark Time Spy

time spy 1

In the DX12-based 3DMark Tme Spy benchmark, the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 2060 when using the Performance mode BIOS, but the Silent mode BIOS ends up slotting in just behind the 2060. It isn't too far behind, though, and still manages to outrun Vega 56.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

In the DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark, the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT jumps out to much bigger lead over the GeForce RTX 2060 regardless of which BIOS is used. And the GeForce GTX 1660 cards trail by much wider margins. In this benchmark, of the crop of graphics cards we tested, only the more expensive, higher-end Radeon RX 5700 outpaces the new Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT.