PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil Review: Custom Navi Arrives

Name: PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil
Brand: PowerColor

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, August 15, 2019, 04:00 AM EDT

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 some background on the happenings in Middle Earth.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Action

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

sow1

The Shadow Of War benchmark shows the PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil in OC mode overtaking the RTX 2060 Super at 1440p. With the card configured for Silent mode, however, it trails just slightly. In both modes it's faster than the reference Radeon RX 5700 XT, however. At 4K, it's a 4-way tie between the RX 5700 XTs and RTX 2060 Super.

The frame and render times jibe with the average framerate results, but the finer granularity of the data shows the GeForce RTX 2060 Super just barely edging out the PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil at 4K, regardless of which BIOS was used.

F1 2019

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

F1 2019 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise also adds support for DirectX 12 (previous editions used DirectX 11). We tested the game with its Ultra graphics preset with TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what the graphics cards could do.

F1 2019

F1 2019 behaved somewhat strangely. The PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil outpaced the reference Radeon RX 5700 XT at 1440p, as you would expect. It trailed at 4K, though, which doesn't make much sense -- we will have to investigate this one further. Still, performance is right about in-line with the GeForce RTX 2070 Super.

The frame time data in F1 2019 is inversely proportional to the average frame rate data, but shows essentially the same thing.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, GPU, Powercolor, navi, red devil, 5700 xt

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com