AMD has been trading blows with Nvidia for decades now, and the two are entering all-out grudge match territory with AMD's release of the $279 Radeon RX 5600 XT.
Despite our frustrating testing experience, Sapphire's version of the new "Navi"-architecture graphics card exceeded expectations set by the company itself and can punch well above its weight class to compete with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060, as well as flat-out trouncing cost-comparative entries like the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Super.
If you're on the hunt for the ultimate 1080p gaming engine (and one that will still keep 1440p titles churning along nicely), the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT should be the next purchase on your list and easily earns an Editors' Choice.
Graphics Cards Get Granular
AMD has positioned the Radeon RX 5600 XT as a top-end 1080p gaming engine, one that can technically power some games at medium quality at 1440p.
But it's really made for players who want to max out a 1080p AAA title, or get above the 240Hz threshold in multiplayer titles like Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Rainbow Six: Siege.
At a base price of $279, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is set to compete with higher-end variants of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 Super and some lower-end variants of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
However, likely as a direct result of AMD's announcement, Nvidia has released a GeForce RTX 2060 at an identical $279.
The EVGA RTX 2060 KO (a moniker that could be a reference to what Nvidia hopes this new card will do to the RX 5600 XT) will debut at $299 with an immediate $20 rebate, while the overclocked version, the RTX 2060 KO Ultra, will go for slightly more at $319 with a $20 rebate.
Nvidia hopes that the GeForce RTX 2060's frame rates will outclass AMD's at the same price-performance ratio, while also including the option to turn on ray tracing in games such as Minecraft or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
That's an important story in this release: the launch of the Radeon RX 5600 XT has finally forced Nvidia to get competitive with the price of its lowest-end RTX cards.
Until now the GTX 1600 series has held up the company in the eyes of most midrange buyers, but the barrier to entry to RTX was just always slightly out of reach.
Now RTX has entered the midrange, but the Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT on our test bench today still comes out looking like the better value—or at least the most accessible one, since every discounted RTX 2060 card is already sold out.
For anyone who did manage to get their hands on that card, though, AMD has a real fight on its hands right out of the gate.
So to start this bout, let's see how its latest 1080p gaming card stacks up in specs.
Key Specs: How Does the Radeon RX 5600 XT Compare?
In AMD's press materials, the company pits the Radeon RX 5600 XT against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti.
But because of Nvidia's aggressive price drop on the RTX 2060, it's only fair to throw that GPU as well into our specifications showdown.
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Versus Relevant GeForce Cards
While the RX 5600 XT has a lower base clock than both the GTX 1660 Super and Ti, it edges out the RTX 2060 in this department by 10MHz.
Other than that, the RX 5600 XT appears on the surface to be the more powerful card, with more processing power, more transistors than the two GTX 1660 cards, and a larger memory bus width and bandwidth spec than the GTX 1660 Ti.
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Versus Relevant Radeon Cards
At first glance, it seems as though in every respect, apart from TDP and the number of transistors, the RX 5600 XT is a step down from the card it's set to replace, the RX 590.
But as we learned throughout 2019, the architecture improvements that have been made between "Polaris" and "Navi" count for just enough to keep the new card competitive in this race.
It's likely that even though the RX 590 looks like it could beat the RX 5600 XT on raw horsepower alone, sometimes in the case of gaming performance it really is about working smarter, not harder.
Sapphire Shines Bright: A Tour of Our Test Card
As with the Radeon RX 5500 XT the first time I saw it, I was shocked to see just how large the Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT was out of the box.
Aesthetically, the two cards are identical in every respect, including the backlit Sapphire logo on the side of the card facing toward the panel.
However, the RX 5600 XT shroud is even longer than the already-large 9.15-inch Sapphire RX 5500 XT.
Measuring 10.53 inches end to end, it takes up just over another inch of space in our testbed, which we hope translates to lower temperatures once we get into heat testing later on.
Looking at AMD's press materials, it also seems this could end up being one of the smallest models we see in the stack.
Third-party manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte are going for the gusto, releasing tri-fan models for a card that in theory could be as small as some competing compact cards like Zotac's twin-fan GeForce GTX 1660 Super.
Compact PC builders of the world, look elsewhere; this is not the GPU for you.
The back of the card has three DisplayPort 1.4b ports and one HDMI 2.0 port, and you'll need a single eight-pin connector capable of delivering 150 watts of power to keep the logo lit up.
This is quite a bit more than competing cards in the category, which we hope doesn't translate into too much heat at load.
Adrenalin Gets a Big Boost
As a part of its Adrenalin 2020 Edition refresh, AMD has added a new feature to its Radeon software suite: Radeon Boost.
Named for the effect it has on a very select number of games (eight in all, as of this writing), Radeon Boost works by adaptively downsampling the render quality of a title such as Overwatch while you're quickly moving the camera around.
In doing so, it increases your frame rate during critical moments, like when you're trying to line up a headshot with Widowmaker, and adds an overall increase to the frame rate bottom line when recorded over time.
I tried the feature and have to say that while it sounds like it would be more trouble than it's worth, in practice it's quite useful.
Admittedly, Overwatch is already heavily optimized to run well on most GPUs, so the effect only gave me more speed than I (or my monitor) knew what to do with, but for lower-end AMD GPUs that support it, Boost could be just what players need to get their kill count over that one-to-one K/D golden ratio.
Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) has also had a big change: the addition of an intensity slider.
Nvidia has had a 0 to 100 percent intensity slider throughout the Freestyle sharpening tool's history, but until the release of Adrenalin 2020, AMD users were only given two options, on or off.
The slider is important because these days, whoever is using a sharpening tool is doing it down to the per-game level.
I know I am.
For example, I wanted to get PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds running at above 120fps (the refresh rate of my Acer Predator X34P) at 3,440 by 1,440.
That meant I needed to render the scene down 15 percent to get the performance above that rate, and then re-sharpen the image another 20 percent.
In doing so, I lost no effective visual fidelity, but gained nearly a 15 percent boost in performance through software optimizations alone.
Nvidia's Freestyle, especially with its recent integration of ReShade, is a worthy contender to RIS, but in our testing we've found that the way AMD sharpens an image differs from Nvidia's approach, which is why RIS produces fewer artifacting, haloing, and blurring issues than Freestyle.
A Great Value Against All Challengers
PC Labs ran the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
Our test rig is equipped with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Aorus Z370 Gaming 7 motherboard.
In benchmarking, we wanted to focus some of our efforts on the esports aspect of the Radeon RX 5600 XT's abilities, as much of the messaging from AMD has centered around this card's ability to push 1080p multiplayer games to their highest possible frame rates.
See How We Test Graphics Cards
We also ran the card through our standard GPU benchmarks, which test a card's abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings.
The 5600XT is being billed as a card that can handle almost any AAA title at above 60fps in 1080p, so let's see how the results of our benchmarks hold up to that promise.
Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance.
Futuremark's circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to for 4K gaming.
We're looking only at the test's Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score.
Right out of the gate, the RX 5600 XT performed well above expectations—though we should qualify this statement a bit.
In typical AMD graphics-card release fashion, after we had already finished benchmarking this card to completion, we got an email from the company saying that it had a BIOS update we needed to apply for better performance.
I begrudgingly had to go back and rerun every game and synthetic test, as well as overclocking, to get an accurate picture of how the card performed.
So while these results are certainly impressive, as we'll explain in more detail below, they may not be representative of what every new RX 5600 XT owner should expect when they get their card in the mail.
3DMark Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme
This is Futuremark's DirectX 12-enabled benchmark for predicting the performance of DX12 games.
It uses major features of the API, including asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading.
Things came back into perspective once we moved on to these tests.
Here, the Radeon RX 5600 XT proved just a little slower than the GeForce RTX 2060, but dominant over any competing GTX cards based on Nvidia's "Turing" architecture.
Unigine Superposition
Our last synthetic benchmark is Unigine's 2017 release, Superposition.
This benchmark does incorporate ray tracing, but it's done in software, not hardware.
Again, while the RX 5600 XT is just a bit slower than the RTX 2060, in the 4K optimized tests it slaughters the GTX 1660 Ti.
Real-World Gaming
The following benchmarks are games that you can play.
The charts themselves outline the settings we used (typically, the highest in-game presets and DirectX 12 if available).
As alluded to earlier, we've got a mix of AAA titles in here as well as some more optimized, multiplayer-focused games.
A quick note: Though most of our game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, competitive multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate.
As such, we've kept CS:GO and Rainbow Six: Siege tuned to a lesser combination of settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower resolution rendering scales, for example), with the aim of keeping frame rates for 1080p games above the coveted 144Hz mark set by many of the high-refresh-rate monitors out there.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
The 2015 predecessor to Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still a great benchmark.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT is in a near dead heat with the GeForce RTX 2060 on these tests, and even manages to edge ahead in 4K results.
Far Cry 5 & Far Cry Primal
The fourth and fifth installments in the Far Cry series are based on DirectX 11, but still demanding.
We're looping the benchmark charts together since they yield similar results.
Far Cry 5 shows a clear win for the RX 5600 XT over any card that Nvidia (or AMD of previous years) throws its way.
Far Cry Primal showed yet another dead heat in 4K results, while 1080p and 1440p results were effectively a tradeoff of margins of error.
Final Fantasy XV
Let's take a break from frames-per-second benchmarks for Final Fantasy XV.
As most graphics card enthusiasts probably know by this point, the Final Fantasy XV benchmark always favors Nvidia cards over AMD, primarily due to the former company's close participation with Square Enix during the PC port process.
World of Tanks Encore
This is another non-fps-based benchmark that's available as a free download.
It's not overly demanding, but is still a reliable test.
At 1080p resolution, the Radeon RX 5600 XT trailed the GeForce RTX 2060 by a fairly significant amount, the first time the card has been visibly behind in this horse race.
Even the GTX 1660 Ti came within firing distance at that resolution.
Our 1440p and 4K tests were less conclusive, however, with the RX 5600 XT maintaining the same pace it's set throughout these benchmarks.
Hitman
Based around third-person, stealth-based takedowns, Hitman (2016) is the sixth entry in the franchise, centering around a series of assassination contracts that need to be carried out for the International Contract Agency (ICA).
Though it originally launched as an episodic game, the game can now be purchased as a "Complete First Season" package.
Hitman's built-in benchmark opens from the game launcher that pops up when you start the game.
The Hitman benchmarks weren't even close: the RX 5600 XT is the dominant choice at both 1080p and 1440p resolution, though our 4K run saw the card losing by just one frame to the RTX 2060.
Three Legacy Games
These three games still offer an AAA gaming experience, despite being more than a few years old by this point.
The legacy tests include runs of Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider (2013), and Bioshock: Infinite, the last being a game that no one expected to still be as well-optimized as it is in 2020.
AMD's drivers aren't exactly known for their, er, consistency, and these legacy games show those issues in action.
In two of the three games here, the Radeon RX 5600 XT not only loses to the GeForce RTX 2060 but even slips behind the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti—a card it's been beating handily up until this point.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive
A golden oldie, yet still super-popular around the globe, Counter Strike: Global Offensive has changed almost nothing about its core gameplay since 1999—and gamers wouldn't have it any other way.
The engine is considered one of the best-optimized in all of PC gaming, which makes it easy to see major gaps in any one GPU's abilities versus another.
This test showed that at 1080p resolution, the RX 5600 XT could even power a 360Hz display if you tweaked just one or two settings down, and will keep gamers playing on 144Hz monitors at 4K...
