The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT has finally arrived and the first impression is that it’s very good indeed. For a card priced in the mid-range the specification is strong, there are 2,304 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs and a base clock speed of 1355MHz with a boost of 1750MHz. This would have it almost on par with the RX 5700, but the notable compromise is with the RAM, 6GB GDDR6 on a 192-bit interface, that’s where the money is saved, but it’s not an especially painful concession.
The Sapphire Pulse card we tested comes out significantly faster than the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti and finds itself in closer competition with the Nvidia RTX 2060 in our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. The RX 5600 XT lacks ray-tracing hardware and so far this feels like a fairly small issue, although longer term it could end up being a problem as AMD have made it clear they want to implement it on their next generation of cards and this will doubtless make it much more common in games.
There’s a comprehensive graphics card group coming soon so we’re going to get to the bottom of this generation of cards, see what’s good, what’s bad, and what order everything else stacks up in.