SAPPHIRE Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT OC Review – 14Gbps Memory Without The Hassle

Ultrawide 1080P Gaming Performance

With the rise in popularity of Ultrawide resolutions and gamers pulling into that format rather than going up to the next resolution we wanted to take a look at how the SAPPHIRE Pulse RX 5600 XT OC performed when gaming at a slightly higher resolution.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, unlike its predecessor, does a good job putting DX12 to use and results in higher performance than the DX11 counterpart in this title, and because of that, we test this title in DX12.  I do use the second segment of the benchmark run to gather these numbers as it is more indicative of in-game scenarios where the foliage is heavy.

Rainbow 6 Siege

Rainbow 6 Siege has maintained a massive following since its launch and it consistently in Steams Top Ten highest player count game.  In a title where the higher the framerate the better in a tactical yet fast-paced competitive landscape is essential, we include this title despite its ludicrously high framerates.  We use the Vulkan Ultra preset with the High Defenition Texture Pack as well and gather our results from the built-in benchmarking tool.

Far Cry New Dawn

Far Cry New Dawn brings the DX11 powered Dunia 2 engine back for another beating in Hope County.  We test this game using the Ultra Preset and follow the built-in benchmarking tool for consistency's sake.

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics is the latest in the Gears franchise and takes things in a completely different direction with the gameplay design. It is built on a DX12 based Unreal Engine 4 build. We used the Maximum settings allowed but refrained from enabling Variable Rate Shading as all cards ar not capable of supporting this feature.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is powered by the latest iteration of the Anvil Next 2.0 game engine. This is the same engine that was used in Assassin's Creed Odyssey but in Breakpoint has been updated to support the Vulkan API. We performed our tests using the High Preset with the Vulkan API.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019)

Call of Duty Modern Warfare is back and this time on a new engine running DX12 to allow for some sick DXR Ray Traced Shadows, but we're not testing that here since this card isn't designed for that level of rendering. We tested in the 'Fog of War' mission where we tested our RT performance run. At 1080p we set the settings all to High.

Resident Evil 3

The Resident Evil 3 Remake has surpassed the RE2 Remake in visuals and is the latest use of the RE Engine.  While it does have DX12 support the DX11 implementation is far superior and because of that, we will be sticking to DX11 for this title.  We use the cutscene where Jill and Carlos enter the subway car for the first time and a 2 minute capture at that point.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 has made its way into the test lineup thanks to strong demand by gamers and simply delivering MORE Borderlands. This game is rather intensive after the Medium preset but since we're testing the 'Ultimate 1080p' card, High it is. We tested using the built-in benchmark utility

Total War Three Kingdoms

Total War Three Kingdoms is powered by their TW Engine 3 (Total War Engine 3) and in this iteration, they have stuck to a strictly DX11 release. We tested the game using the built-in benchmark using the Dynasty model that represents a battle with many soldiers interacting at once and is more representative of normal gameplay.

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

For those wanting to lay down the most frames for the dollar at this price point will do well to consider the SAPPHIRE Pulse RX 5600 XT OC model, especially those still on the RX 480/580 and GTX 1060.

Pros

• No BIOS updates required
• 14 Gbps memory out of the box
• Only $10 US Premium over RX 5600 XT MSRP ($289.99 US)
• Huge performance uplift versus Polaris cards
• Excellent Performance Per Watt
• Spectacular thermal performance
• Great factory overclock out of the box
• Aluminum metal backplate
• PCI-e Gen 4.0 Support

Cons

• Not fully DX12 Ultimate compliant
• Limited additional OC potential
• No dedicated hardware for Ray Tracing

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