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

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of War, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at its lower quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we used the game’s Ultra quality preset and ran the benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K -- or, excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there. All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with Temporal AA and Camera Blur. We should note this is the latest installment in the successful game series and our review of Shadow of War is right here, if you'd like to catch up on the happenings in Middle Earth.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War Performance Glorious Orc-Slaying Action

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider DirectX 12 Benchmarks

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a sequel to the 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, which takes protagonist Lara Croft back to her explorative “tomb raiding” roots in a deep origin story. The game, however, was updated and enhanced with new gameplay and combat mechanics. The engine was updated as well, and offers DirectX 12 support, along with some stunning visuals. The benchmark outputs results from a number of maps; we’re reporting numbers from the “Geothermal Valley” here, along with the average score of all the maps. The game’s maximum “Very High” graphics preset was used, and all graphics-related options were enabled as well.


Shadow Of The Tomb Raider shows the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT (with either BIOS) outrunning the GeForce RTX 2060 and Vega 56 at both resolutions, though the Radeon RX 5700's increased memory bandwidth and capacity gives it a marked advantage versus the 5600 XT here.

The 95% frame rate data shows a similar trend, though when using the Silent mode BIOS the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT ties with the GeForce RTX 2060 at 1440P. At 1080P, however, the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT once again finishes in a better position than the RTX 2060 and clearly outpaces the GTX 1660-series cards.

Strange Brigade DirectX 12 (Or Vulcan!) Benchmarks

Strange Brigade is a third-person action game set in Egypt in the 1930s that takes gamers on an various adventures to explore ruins, solve puzzles, and uncover valuable treasures, while also blasting through an array of un-dead enemies. This game has both DirectX and Vulcan code paths and makes use of Asynchronous Compute as well. We tested Strange Bridge with its Ultra graphics preset with A-Sync compute enabled at a couple of resolutions.
The new Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT put up good numbers in the Strange Brigade benchmark. Once again we see the card outpacing the GeForce RTX 2060 at both resolutions, regardless of which BIOS is used.
Render times in Strange Brigade show essentially the same performance trend, with the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT rendering frames faster than the GeForce RTX 2060 on average, at both resolutions, with either BIOS.