The $999 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX arrived at BTR for evaluation last week from PowerColor. We have been comparing it against Nvidia’s new $1199 RTX 4080 Founders Edition (FE) and $1599 RTX 4090 FE plus five additional top cards. We focus on raw performance by benchmarking 42 PC and 10 VR games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

We will also compare the performance of these three new competing cards with the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT reference editions and their competitors, the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 FE.

Features & Specifications

Although launched at reference $999 XTX pricing, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has its factory Game Clock set 30MHz higher than the reference version’s 2300MHz. According to PowerColor specifications, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX can boost its Game Clock to 2330MHz (2270MHz Silent) with the OC BIOS. The Game Clock is the expected GPU clock while running average high-load gaming scenarios with a regular non-overclocked total graphics usage situation. However, the GPU Boost Clock can reach as high as 2525MHz – 25MHz higher than reference – by using the OC BIOS and we will test this.

Here are the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX features.

Additional Information from PowerColor

• The Hellhound has 2 modes, OC and Silent with a BIOS switch on the side of the card. Even on performance mode it’s said to be considerably quieter than reference board and the silent mode is indeed very quiet.
• The 14 layer high TG PCB board has 12+3+2+2+1 Phase VRM design. Hellhounds are over-spec’d in order to deliver the best stability and overclocking headroom. By having high quality VRMs, it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps are used without compromise.
• The cooler features three 9-blade ball bearing fans with 8 heat pipes (8X6?) across a high density heatsink with a copper base. The PCB is shorter than the cooler.
• It uses mute fan technology and the fans stop under 60C.
• The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX includes card stands for supporting it so as to not put extra strain on the PCIe slot.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s brand new RDNA 3 flagship card, and the Hellhound represents one of the best choices for a mildly factory overclocked $999 card by virtue of its high-quality components and carefully selected GPUs coupled with good support and great warranty service.

The Test Bed

We benchmark using FCAT VR and FrameView on Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 with Intel’s Core i9-13900KF, and 32GB of T-Force Delta RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS Prime-A Wi-Fi Z790 motherboard with fast SSD storage. All games and benchmarks are patched to their latest versions, and we use recent drivers.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX.

A Closer Look at the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX

Although the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX advertises itself as a premium 24GB card which features ray tracing, Radeon Boost, and Anti-Lag, the cover of the box uses almost no text in favor of stylized imagery.

The back of the box touts key features which include ray tracing, Anti-Lag, DisplayPort 2.1, RDNA 3, FidelityFX, Infinity Cache, streaming aids, and Boost, as well as states its 800W power and system requirements. There is no mention of VR Ready Premium. Also highlighted are PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, fan improvements, and output LEDs. The default LED color is an eye-pleasing amethyst.

We open the box and note there are parts for a card stand.

The complete package contents except for the anti-static bag are pictured above together with the card holder parts. Above the stand is fully assembled. Although the Hellhound is relatively heavy, it is not 4090-heavy, and we didn’t feel a need for it.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a large tri-fan card in a three slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s neutral colors and even more striking with the LED on.

Turning it over we see a sturdy backplate featuring the Hellhound logo which also lights up with amethyst being the default color.

Looking at either long edge, we see the entire PCB is covered by heatpipes and heatsink fins. Additional power is provided by the PSU’s 2 x 8-pin Molex cables to the card connectors. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS. We didn’t bother using the Silent BIOS as the card is really quiet anyway, but it is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

The card should perhaps be locked down with two thumbscrews instead of one because it is heavy or the stand can be used.

The Hellhound’s IO panel connectors include 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connection.

Below is the other end which is very plain.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX looks great inside a case.

The specifications look good and the card itself looks solid. Now let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-13900KF (HyperThreading and Turbo boost at stock settings)
• ASUS Prime-A Z790 LGA1700 motherboard (Intel Z790 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0, DDR5)
• T-Force Delta RGB PC5-51200 6400MHz DDR5 CL40 2x16GB kit, supplied by TeamGroup
• Valve Index, 90Hz / 100% SteamVR Render Resolution
• Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, 24GB, factory clocks, supplied by PowerColor
• RTX 4080 16GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 4090 24 GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• Gigabyte RX 6900 XT GAMING OC, 16GB, factory clocks
• RX 6800 XT Reference 16GB, factory clocks, supplied by AMD
• RTX 3080 Ti 12GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 3080 10 GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• 2 x 2TB T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 (5,000/4,400MB/s) PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSDs (one for AMD/one for Nvidia)
• T-Force M200 4TB USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C external SSD (2,000x2000B/s), supplied by TeamGroup
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan & 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz
• LG C1 48″ 4K OLED HDR 120Hz display

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 526.98 drivers for the RTX 4090/4080 and 527.27 for the RTX 3080/3080 Ti. Adrenalin 22.11.2 for the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT, and press drivers for the RTX 7900 XTX.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the Nvidia control panel.
• High Quality textures, all optimizations off in the Adrenalin control panel
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are Ultra Preset or highest with 16xAF always applied – no upscaling is used
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• VR charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom; higher is better)
• Windows 11 Pro edition; 22H2 recent clean install for GeForce and Radeon cards using separate but identical NVMe SSDs.
• Latest DirectX
• SteamVR latest beta

Games

Vulkan

• Sniper Elite
• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow Six: Siege

DX12

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Spiderman: Remastered
• F1 2022
• Ghostwire: Tokyo
• Elden Ring
• God of War
• Dying Light 2
• Forza Horizon 5
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
• Far Cry 6
• DEATHLOOP
• Chernobylite
• Resident Evil Village
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Hitman 3
• Godfall
• DiRT 5
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Watch Dogs: Legions
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• Borderlands 3
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

DX11

• Overwatch 2
• Total War: Warhammer III
• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Grand Theft Auto V

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa: Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Moss: Book II
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Synthetic

• Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• VRMark Blue Room
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 3.3.0 benchmark
• Geekbench
• Sandra 2020 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperfect 2020
• FCAT VR benching tool
• OpenVR Benchmark tool

Adrenalin Control Panel settings

Here are the Adrenalin Control Panel settings.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Overclocking, temperatures and noise

We spent little time overclocking the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX for this review as we encountered some unexpected results that require further investigation. The card is very quiet and its fans never spin up even under a heavy load so as to be irritating or even noticeable. It’s quieter than the Gigabyte 6900 XT or the RTX 3080 Ti.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is factory clocked 30MHz higher than the reference version at 2330MHz using the OC BIOS. According to its specifications, the Hellhound boost can clock up to 2565MHz out of the box. From our benching, we generally see it boosting even higher and it generally settles in above 2750MHz with peaks above 2780MHz.

The Hellhound temperatures stay in the low to mid-60s C with the fans quietly running well below 50% even using the OC BIOS under a full gaming load. It is an exceptionally well-cooled and quiet card.

Let’s head to the performance charts to compare the performance of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX with six other cards.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX vs. the RTX 4080 FE and 5 other cards benchmarked with 42 games

Here are the performance results of 42 games and 3 synthetic tests. The highest settings are used and are listed on the charts. The benches were run at 2560×1440 and 3840×2160. Click on each chart to open in a pop-up for best viewing. Gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font which represent a game’s average 1% lows (99th percentiles).

The first set of charts show the seven main competing cards. Column two represents the $999 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX performance in between the $1599 RTX 4090 FE in column one and the RTX 4080 FE, its $1199 primary competitor, in the third column. The RTX 3080 Ti results are in the fourth column next to Gigabyte RX 6900 XT OC version performance results in the fifth column, followed up by the RTX 3080 in the sixth and the RX 6800 XT in the seventh column.

“Wins” between the RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 are denoted by yellow text. If there is a tie, both values are in yellow.

Playing with the RX 7900 XTX, Elden Ring locked up the PC even after verifying files and reinstalling Adrenaline drivers and it appears a driver issue prevented ray traced Guardians of the Galaxy running on the RX 6800 XT.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are cards that are primarily suited for 4K and high-FPS 1440P gaming and they stand out from the other four cards. The RX 7900 XTX trades blows with the RTX 4080 in rasterized games – they are equivalent cards if ray tracing is not considered.

Although RX 7900 XTX ray tracing has greatly improved over the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT, it now appears to perform similarly to the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti but far behind the RTX 4080. FSR 2.0, although still not on the same image quality level as Nvidia’s DLSS 2, will almost double framerates for a very minor IQ hit and will make most of the games quite playable at Ultra/4K in this 52 game benching suite. Gamers who are not so impressed with ray tracing or who are not picky about image quality perfection may well prefer to save $200 on a $1000 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX over buying a $1200 RTX 4080.

Let’s look at synthetic benches.

Synthetic benches

We hold synthetic benches to be meaningless for predicting real world gaming performance versus competing cards with different architectures although they have other practical uses like overclocking and ranking. The RX 7900 XTX performs better in the synthetic tests than in gaming.

Let’s see how the Hellhound performs in ten popular VR (Virtual Reality) games next.

10 VR Games

For this review, we benchmarked the Valve Index using FCAT VR and set the SteamVR render resolution to 100% (2016×2240) which uses a factor of 1.4X (the native resolution is 1440×1600) to compensate for lens distortion and to increase clarity. We are going to compare the performance of the RX 7900 XTX with the RX 4080 and versus the RX 4090 at each game’s Ultra/Highest settings.

Unfortunately, FCAT VR still doesn’t work with MS Flight Simulator 2020 or with Star Wars Squadrons. Here are the ten VR games we tested.

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa: Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Moss: Book II
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Synthetic

• Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• VRMark Blue Room

IMPORTANT: BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS, measuring just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our 10 sim-heavy VR games’ performance using FCAT VR.

First up, Assetto Corsa: Competizione.

Assetto Corsa: Competizione (ACC)

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

Just like with Project CARS, you can save a replay after a race. Fortunately, the CPU usage is the same between a race and its replay so it is a reasonably accurate benchmark using the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. iRacing may be more accurate or realistic, but Assetto Corsa: Competizione has some appeal because it feels more real than many other racing sims. It delivers the sensation of handling a highly-tuned racing machine driven to its edge.

Here are the ACC FCAT VR frametimes using VR Ultra using the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, the RTX 4080 FE, and the RTX 4090 FE.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX managed 85.77 unconstrained FPS with 6339 (50%) synthesized frames with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 118.42 unconstrained FPS with 207 (2%) synthesized frames with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 164.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The ACC racing experience is best with the RTX 4090 although the RTX 4080 delivers a nearly constant 90 FPS on the Epic VR preset unlike the RX 7900 XTX which requires one-half of its frames to be synthesized.

Next, we check out Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Ultra Preset and we set the Field of View to its maximum.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX managed 185.21 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 230.98 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized frame and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 brings 296.16 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frames but with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

Although the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has the lowest performance, the experience playing Elite Dangerous at Ultra settings is not perceptibly different on any tested video card. However, the RTX 4090 has a lot more performance headroom to increase the render resolution or to use a higher resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2.

Let’s look at our newest VR sim, F1 2022.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 156.57 unconstrained FPS with 6 synthesized but no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 200.24 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 delivered 254.72 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus with 3 dropped frames and 3 Warp misses.

The experience playing F1 2022 using the Ultra preset is not very different on any of these video cards but the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 have considerably more performance headroom than the RX 7900 XTX to use 120Hz/144Hz or to use a higher resolution headset.

Kayak VR: Mirage

The outstanding near-photorealistic visual fidelity really sets Kayak VR: Mirage apart from other simulators. It boasts a wide range of locales with day/night/sunset options offering tropical, icy, desert, and even stormy scenarios with trips to Costa Rica, Antarctica, Norway, and Australia and occasional interactions with wildlife. It can be played as a relaxing sim or as a strenuous workout with competitive time trials which offer asynchronous multiplayer and ranking on global leaderboards.

We benchmark at 100% resolution with the highest “Cinematic” in-game settings but do not use DLSS or FSR.

Here is the frametime plot for Kayak VR: Mirage.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 198.98 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 257.16 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 got 329.35 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame and 1 dropped frame plus 1 Warp miss.

Kayak VR: Mirage looks fantastic at 100% resolution with maximum settings and would be well-suited for play on the Reverb G2 with any of our test cards.

Next, we look at Moss: Book II.

Moss: Book II

Moss: Book II is an amazing VR experience with much better graphics than the original game. It’s a 3rd person puzzle adventure game played seated that offers a direct physical interaction between you (the Reader) and your avatar, Quill, a mouse that bring real depth to the story. Extreme attention has been paid to the tiniest details with overall great art composition and outstanding lighting that make this game a must-play for gamers of all ages.

Moss II boasts very good visuals and we use the in-game highest settings.

Here are the frametimes plots of our four cards.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 189.29 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 308.44 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 436.34 unconstrained FPS no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

Unfortunately, the experience playing Moss II on the Valve Index using the RX 7900 XTX is marred by visual issues including artifacting and shimmering.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky (NMS)

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky frametime plot. We set the settings to Maximum which is a step over Ultra including setting the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgrading to FXAA. We did not use any upscaling method.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RX 7900 XTX brought 108.17 unconstrained FPS with 3536 (50%) synthesized frames but no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 159.10 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthesized frames but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 201.96 unconstrained FPS together with 17 synthetic frames but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

RX 7900 XTX gamers may want to lower some individual settings to remain above 90 FPS. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 have enough performance headroom to increase the refresh rate, render resolution, or to perhaps use a higher resolution headset.

Let’s continue with another VR game, Project CARS 2, that we still like better than its successor even though it is no longer available for online play.

Project CARS 2 (PC2)

There is still a sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur but picked SMAA Ultra instead of MSAA.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 194.77 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized nor dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 got 200.88 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames nor dropped frames and no Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 253.50 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 using maximum settings is similar for all three video cards.

Next we will check out a classic VR game, Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked vanilla Skyrim using its highest settings plus we increased the in-game Supersample option to maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX provided 218.2 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 239.08 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 delivered 337.76 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frame and with 2 dropped frames plus 1 Warp miss.

All cards deliver an identical vanilla Skyrim VR experience with a ton of extra performance headroom to add mods and, in addition, to raise the render resolution using the two faster cards.

Next we check out Sniper Elite VR.

Sniper Elite VR

Sniper Elite VR’s visuals are decent with good texture work that is well-realized. The building architecture and panoramas look good, explosions are convincing and the weapons convey a sense of weight, although not achieving realism. It is primarily an arcade style sniping game featuring its signature X-Ray kill cam, but it offers multiple ways to achieve goals including with explosives and by using three other main weapon choices besides your rifle.

We benchmarked using the Highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 197.98 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 223.33 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 brought 318.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

All three cards deliver a similar playing experience on High with the RTX cards offering more performance headroom. We recommend that any performance headroom be used for increasing the SteamVR render resolution.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are very good and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its High preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 198.93 unconstrained FPS with no synthetic nor dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 got 260.94 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frames and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 366.41 unconstrained FPS together with 6 synthetic frames and with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses.

The RX 7900 XTX experience was marred by artifacting and shimmering.

Let’s check out synthetic VR tests and unconstrained framerates.

Unconstrained Framerates & Synthetic VR Benchmarks

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates (the performance headroom) of our three cards using our 10 VR test games. In addition, we added recent RTX 3080 Ti and 6900 XT results for comparison. The preset is listed on the chart and higher is better. In addition, we present three synthetic VR benchmarks.

Although synthetic VR benches (except for OpenVR benchmark) predicted good VR performance, we were disappointed with our 7900 XTX VR experience, unlike with pancake games. In at least two games, we experienced distracting visual artifacting and texture shimmering. The 7900 series may benefit from some attention to VR from the Radeon driver team as in many cases it even falls behind the RX 6900 XT.

At AMD’s press event in Las Vegas, the presenters noted that AMD drivers continue to improve for the entire life of the architecture – generally with an up to 10% performance gain – often compared to “fine wine” aging well. However, for VR enthusiasts today, the RX 7900 XTX is disappointing and it performs well behind the RTX 4080 not logging a single performance win.

We next look at creative, pro, GPGPU, and workstation apps.

Creative, Pro & Workstation Apps

Let’s look at non-gaming applications next to see if the RX 7900 XTX is a good upgrade from the other video cards that we tested starting with Blender.

Blender 3.3.0 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender 3.3.0 benchmarks which measure GPU performance by timing how long it takes to render production files. We tested seven of our comparison cards using CUDA, Optix, and OpenCL.

For the following chart, higher is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in samples per minute.

The RX 7900 XTX sits well ahead of the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT but well behind the GeForce cards.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.80

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days. CPU results are also shown for comparison with both the RTX 3070 and GTX 2080 Ti GPGPU benchmarks.

Here are the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX AIDA64 GPGPU results compared with an overclocked i9-13900KF.

Here is the chart summary of the AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks with seven of our competing cards side-by-side.

The RX 7900 XTX is a fast GPGPU card and it compares favorably with the competing cards being weaker in some areas and stronger in others. So let’s look at Sandra 2020 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2020

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2020 R10 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2020 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses. However, we see some very solid solid improvement of the RX 7900 XTX over the RX 6900 XT and the RX 6800 XT.

SPECworkstation3 (3.0.4) Benchmarks

All the SPECworkstation3 benchmarks are based on professional applications, most of which are in the CAD/CAM or media and entertainment fields. All of these benchmarks are free except for vendors of computer-related products and/or services.

The most comprehensive workstation benchmark is SPECworkstation3. It’s a free-standing benchmark which does not require ancillary software. It measures GPU, CPU, storage and all other major aspects of workstation performance based on actual applications and representative workloads. We only tested the GPU-related workstation performance as checked in the image above.

Here are our SPECworkstation 3.0.4 raw scores for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX. RTX 4080 raw scores are displayed below the XTX results for a detailed performance comparison.

Here are our RTX 4080 SPECworkstation 3.1 raw scores:

Here are the Hellhound XTX SPECworkstation3 results summarized in a chart along with six competing cards. Higher is better.

Using SPEC benchmarks, since the architectures are different, the cards each exhibit different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a new 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark recently that features updated viewsets, new models, support for both 2K and 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management.

We benchmarked at 4K and here are the summary results for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX benchmarks summarized in a chart together with six other cards.

Again we see different architectures with different strengths and weaknesses. After seeing these benches, some creative users may upgrade their existing systems with a new card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require.

The question to buy a new video card should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the reference and Hellhound RX 7900 XTXs are primarily gaming for gamers.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

The Conclusion

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX improves significantly over the last generation RX 6900 XT, easily exceeds RX 6800 XT performance, and it trades blows with the $200 more expensive RTX 4080 FE in rasterized games although overall it is slightly slower using our 42-game benching suite. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX beats all of the last generation cards including the RTX 3080 Ti although it still struggles with ray traced games compared with RTX cards.

For Radeon gamers, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a good alternative to GeForce Ada Lovelace cards for the vast majority of modern PC games that use rasterization. The RX 7900 XTX offers 24GB of GDDR6 to the 16GB of GDDR6X that the RTX 4080s are equipped with, but that 8GB of vRAM shouldn’t make any practical difference to game performance in the near future.

At its suggested price of $999, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX costs about $200 less than the RTX 4080 FE and offers a good value for Radeon gamers. Unlike with the RTX 4080 which increased from $700 for the RTX 3080 to $1200, the RX 7900 XTX is priced the same $999 as AMD’s last generation RX 6900 XT. For Radeon buyers, what makes the Hellhound XTX particularly attractive is that there is no price premium for this mildly overclocked PowerColor card.

The only real issue that we see with Radeon 7000 series cards is that AMD’s FSR solution is still inferior to Nvidia’s DLSS AI upscaling that delivers similar performance but with better image quality. On the flip side, there are still relatively few ray traced games released every year in comparison to thousands of rasterized games where the RTX 7900 XTX trades blows with the much more expensive RTX 4080.

One major issue although affecting relatively few gamers is poor VR RX 7900 XTX performance compared with the RTX 4080. It’s going to need some attention from AMD’s driver team before we can recommend the RX 7900 XTX for the best VR gaming.

We recommend the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX as a great choice out of multiple good choices, especially for any AMD PC gamer looking for good looks with LED lighting, an exceptional cooler, great performance for 2560×1440 or 4K, PowerColor’s excellent support, and overall better value compared with the slower RX 7900 XTX reference version.

Let’s sum it up:

Hellhound RX 7900 XTX Pros

• The PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is much faster than the last generation RX 6900 XT by virtue of new RDNA 3 architecture. It trades blows in the majority of rasterized games with the RTX 4080 FE for significantly less money ($200 less)
• The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has excellent cooling with very little noise and has a very good power delivery and a 3-fan custom cooling design that is very quiet when overclocked even using the OC mode
• Dual-BIOS give the user a choice of quiet with less overclocking, or a bit louder with more power-unlimited and higher overclocks
• FidelityFX 2.0 allows for upscaling and improved sharpness with almost no performance penalty, and there is a low latency mode for competitive gamers
• LED lighting and a neutral color allow the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX to fit into any color scheme
• 24GB vRAM compared with 16GB for the RTX 4080

Hellhound XTX Cons

• Cost. It’s still very expensive at $999
• VR performance is subpar
• Weaker ray tracing performance than the RTX 4080

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a good Radeon card choice for those who game at 2560×1440 or at 4K and want the best that AMD has to offer. It represents a good gaming alternative to the RTX 4080 albeit with weaker ray tracing performance. It is offered especially for those who prefer AMD cards and FreeSync2 enabled displays which are generally less expensive than Gsync displays. And if a gamer is looking for something extra above the reference version, the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a very well-made and good-looking card that will overclock better.

We are giving the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX BTR’s Recommended Award.

The Verdict:

• PowerColor’s Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a solidly-built handsome card with higher clocks out of the box than the same-priced reference version. It trades blows with the RTX 4080 in rasterized games. I t is a kick ass RX 7900 XTX.

Stay tuned, there is much more coming from BTR. We will soon return to VR with a mega performance evaluation to test the role of the CPU for VR performance. And we’ll retest the RX 7900 XTX using higher resolution headsets after AMD’s driver team has a chance to address it’s VR issues. We also plan to test Intel ARC video cards in VR.

Happy Gaming!

A new Hellhound RX 6650 XT arrived at BTR for evaluation from PowerColor as a premium and overclocked 8GB vRAM-equipped 128-bit card at $409 although the base models start at a rather high $399 considering it is targeting 1080P and with only a mild speed bump over the $379 RX 6600 XT. Using a borrowed PC GamerZ Hawaii ‘Blue Elixir’ 12700KF PC, we have been exhaustively comparing it versus the $399 RTX 3060 EVGA Black XC 12GB and versus the unavailable-at-any-resonable price, RTX 3060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition. Using AMD’s latest Preview public driver for Win 11, we test 38 games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

This editor is in Honolulu for the month of May on a working vacation, so we asked PC GamerZ for a 12700KF/DDR4 PC that we will compare with BTR’s flagship 12900K/DDR5 PC for an upcoming review next month. The owner kindly allowed us to switch out video cards and we brought along a EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black and a RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition (FE) for comparison with the Hellhound.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is factory clocked higher than the reference version using its OC BIOS. While the reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 2589MHz, its replacement reference RX 6650 XT has a Game clock up to 2410MHz and a Boost clock up to 2635MHz – a 2% improvement. The GDDR6 memory clocks of the RX 6650 XT (17.5Gbps) is clocked about 9% higher than that of the RX 6600 XT. The Hellhound RX 6650 XT game clocks up to 2486MHz and further boosts to 2689MHz. The RX 6650 XT board power is increased by around 13% over the RX 6600 XT so the Hellhound RX 6650 XT tames its thermals by using a dual fan design whose LED lights up in blue.

The Reference and Hellhound RX 6650 XT Features & Specifications

First let’s look at the Hellhound RX 6650 XT specifications:

Additional Information from PowerColor

PowerColor newest RX 6650 XT Hellhound, is positioned to compete with custom 3060 premium models.

• PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT is equipped with a dual fan design (2x 100mm), a cooler with 3X6Φ nickel-plated heatpipes, and a smooth nickel-plated copper base that enhances heat dissipation.
• The card has 2 modes, OC and Silent. There’s a BIOS switch on the side of the card. We designed this card to be very quiet, even on performance mode it’s considerably quieter than most silent cards. We advise trying the silent mode as it’s truly whisper quiet.
• The board has 10 Phase VS the 6+2 Phase VRM design on the standard designs meaning is over spec’d in order to deliver the best
  stability and overclock headroom, and by having such VRM it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMOS provides superior power efficiency and offers better thermal protection, and the 6+2 phases VRM guarantees better overclocking and stability, no compromises.
• Dual 100mm fans optimized static pressure fan design provides more air flow and longer circulation; at this TDP there is no need of oversized 3 fan coolers, better sized and yet efficient cooling!
• Hellhound features the blue LED lighting on the shroud and backplate that provides a cold color to light up in your case.
• Hellhound has Mute fan technology, fans stop under 60c!
• The metal backplate strengthens the card and improves the airflow through the cuts. It does not use thermal pads but instead the cuts allow the PCB to breath, which under high heat scenarios is more beneficial than having thermal pads as otherwise a back plate can become a heat trap.

RX 6000 features

AMD has their own ecosystem for gamers and many unique new features for the Radeon 6000 series including the FidelityFX 1.0 Super Resolution upscaler and the brand new 2.0 version that looks about as good as native resolution in Deathloop.

Infinity Cache and Smart Access Memory are two other important components of many included in Adrenalin software.

Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory

AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture includes the Infinity Cache which alters the way data is delivered to GPUs. This global cache allows fast data
access and increases bandwidth. This optimized on-die cache uses 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache delivering up to 2.5x the effective bandwidth compared to 256-bit 12Gbps GDDR6.

BTR is using an Intel 12th generation CPU, the i9-12700KF, which does not have this cache available so our results will probably be lower than what a gamer using a full Ryzen 5000 platform will achieve. In addition, we don’t have Smart Access Memory.

AMD’s Smart Access Memory is a new feature for the Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that enables additional memory space to be mapped to the base address register resulting in performance gains for select games when paired with an AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processor or with some Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. Using PCIe, the Base Address Register (BAR) defines how much GPU memory space can be mapped. Without using Smart Access Memory, CPUs can generally access up to 256MB of GPU memory restricting performance somewhat.

NVIDIA has worked with its partners and with Intel to enable Resizable BAR which currently is enabled for the ASUS H670-DDR4 motherboard. We also enabled it for the RX 6650 XT and tested all of our video cards and games with Resizable BAR.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 38 games and 5 synthetic game benchmarks at 1920×1080 as well as SPEC, workstation, and GPGPU benchmarks. Our latest games include Total War: Warhammer III, God of War, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Elden Ring, Dying Light 2 and CoD: Vanguard. The testing platform uses a recent installation of Windows 11 Pro Edition, and our CPU is an i9-12700KF, an ASUS TUF Gaming H670-PRO WIFI D4 motherboard, and 16GB of G.SKILL Trident DDR4 at 3600MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT.

A Closer Look at the Hellhound RX 6650 XT

Although the Hellhound RX 6650 XT advertises itself as a 7nm 8GB vRAM-equipped card on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture which features 1080P and PCIe 4.0, the cover of the box favors stylized imagery over text.

The back of the box touts key features which now include HDMI 2.1 VRR, ray tracing technology, FidelityFX, and VR Ready Premium as well as states its 600W power and system requirements. AMD’s technology features are highlighted and the box features PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, blue output LED, and a solid backplate with the Hellhound logo.

Opening the box, we see a video card inside a anti-static bag. It’s barebones.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a dual-fan card. Turning it over (below) we see a solid backplate that features the Hellhound logo.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a medium-sized dual-fan card (220mm long x 132mm tall x 45mm thick) in a 2 slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s colors and even more striking with the blue LED on.

The Hellhound uses one 1×8-pin PCIe connector. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS (below, left). We didn’t bother with the Silent BIOS as the card is very quiet using the OC BIOS, but a dual BIOS is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

We would suggest that with the current voltage limitations and low power draw, any extra connector besides what PowerColor included is completely unnecessary even for overclocking.

Looking at the edges, we can see it is all heatsink fins for cooling as is typical of Hellhound cards, and we expect it to run cool.

The Hellhound’s RX 6650 XT’s connectors include 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connector. The specifications look good and the Hellhound itself looks great with its default bright blue contrasting with the black backplate.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-12700KF (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On) supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• ASUS TUF Gaming H670-PRO WIFI D4 (Intel Z690 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0/5.0/3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• G.SKILL Trident Z 16GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• Hellhound RX 6650 XT 8GB, factory settings and overclocked, on loan from PowerColor
• EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• T-FORCE CARDEA A440 Pro Special Series 2TB SSD for C: drive, supplied by Team Group
• The T-FORCE M200 4TB USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C Portable SSD for game storage, supplied by Team Group
• EVGA 850B5, 850W Bronze PSU, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• ACER (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27″ 1920×1080/165Hz monitor, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• Lian-Li Galahad 360 AIO Cooler, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii
• CoolerMaster TD500 Mesh White, supplied by PC GamerZ Hawaii

Test Configuration – Software

• AMD Software Preview Driver May 2022 Driver Version 22.10.01.03 used for the RX 6650 XT
• GeForce 512.59 for the RTX 3060 and the RTX 3060 Ti.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel; Vsync off.
• All optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings in the AMD control panel.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better.
• Windows 11 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• God of War
• Ghostwire: Tokyo
• Elden Ring
• Dying Light 2
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Far Cry 6
• Chernobylite
• Resident Evil Village
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Hitman 3
• Godfall
• DiRT 5
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• F1 2021
• Borderlands 3
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

DX11

• Total War: Warhammer III
• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Overwatch
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 3.01 benchmark
• Sandra 2021 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECviewperf 2020

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Next the AMD settings.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

Overclocking, temperatures and noise

We spent a lot of time overclocking the Hellhound RX 6650 XT for this review. It is factory clocked higher than the reference specifications using its OC BIOS. While the reference RX 6650 XT has a Game clock up to 2410MHz and a Boost clock up to 2635MHz, the Hellhound RX 6650 XT game clocks up to 2486MHz and further boosts to 2689MHz.

We used Wattman for overclocking. The performance didn’t matter whether the power limit was set to default or higher even when overclocked. At default, we typically saw clocks vary between 2626MHz and 2642MHz and the GPU stayed cool, up to 73C. The fan speeds are tracked by Wattman and they remained low (around 1000 rpm) and we could not hear them over our other case fans using the OC BIOS.

The Wattman auto overclock feature is still mostly useless as it advised a very conservative low overclock so we used trial and error to find the Hellhounds’s maximum performance at the edge of stability. We settled on increasing the memory to the maximum allowed by the slider, 110% (from 2180MHz to 2400MHz; typically 2386MHz) and increasing the core clock by 9% as below.

At maximum overclock, the clocks run from 2850MHz to a peak of 2859MHz, but this time the temperatures drop below 70C as the fan speeds increase. Even while overclocked to the max, the Hellhound remains very quiet and cool with power consumption just approaching 152W (from 140W default) and fan speeds increasing from the default 1000 rpm to just over 2000 rpm.

There is a small performance increase from overclocking the Hellhound’s core by 9% and increasing the memory by 10%. Unfortunately, AMD has again locked all RX 6650 XT cards overclocking down in an attempt to maximize overall performance by limiting the voltage We would also suggest that the RX 6650 XT is rather voltage constrained and the Hellhound could benefit by more voltage. No doubt some enthusiast gamers will use MPT (More Power Tool) and risk their warranty to gain a potentially higher overclock although we cannot recommend it.

We believe that the Hellhound’s overclock will not degrade over time as its PCB components are fit to run all the time at the highest overclock settings – perhaps unlike entry level versions which are not engineered for ultimate maximum reliability.

Of course, many gamers will want to fine-tune their own overclock and undervolting is a possibility although the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is no power hog. Check the overclocking chart in the next section for performance increases using ten key games.

Let’s head to the performance charts to see how the performance of the Hellhound RX 6650 XT compares with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.

Performance summary charts

Here are the performance results of 38 games and 5 synthetic tests comparing the factory-clocked 8GB Hellhound RX 6650 XT with the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black 12GB (reference) and versus the RTX 3060 Ti FE 8GB at their factory set clocks. The benches were run at 1920×1080. Click on each chart to open in a pop-up for best viewing.

All gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates (1% lows/99-percentiles) are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. We did not use any upscaling for any game – no DLSS and no FidelityFX.

The Red Devil RX 6650 XT vs. the RTX 3060 & RTX 3060 Ti

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is faster overall than the RTX 3060 EVGA Black (reference) version but it is still in a similar class, trading blows depending on the games tested. Being able to handle ultra ray tracing is still a weakness of AMD’s 6000 series compared with the GeForce 3000 series although rasterized games – the vast majority of current PC games – have no issues.

Since we do not have Smart Access Memory, we expect that some games would shift in favor of the Radeon using a Ryzen 5000 platform. However, it is outclassed by the much more expensive RTX 3060 Ti, winning only two games against it.

The RX 6650 XT gets outperformed overall when compared with the slightly less expensive RTX 3060 after ray tracing is enabled in many of our test games – even when NVIDIA’s DLSS is not used. However, AMD has recently introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) which is their answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS.

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

FSR improves performance by first rendering frames at a lower resolution and then by using an open-source spatial upscaling algorithm with a sharpening filter in an attempt to make the game look nearly as good as at native resolution. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a more mature temporal upscaling solution that uses AI/Deep Learning. With DLSS, data is accumulated from multiple frames and combined into the final image with the AI reconstruction component running on GeForce RTX Tensor cores.

In contrast, FSR is basically a post-process shader which also makes it easy for game developers to implement across all graphics cards and not just for Radeons. So far, there are about a dozen games that use it and we have tested three games that use FSR. Although Ultra FSR is not the equal of DLSS – and especially not of DLSS 2.0 Quality which rivals and sometimes improves on the native image – it is still a very solid non-AI/temporal upscaler that provides good performance improvements.

Ultra FSR is far more than a standard Lanczos implementation plus sharpening and it brings good value to Radeons (and for all video cards!) for higher “free” performance with a minimal hit to visuals. We were especially impressed with the Ultra FSR implementation in Chernobylite. although the image quality still not up to Quality DLSS standards. However, AMD has just released FSR 2.0 which we briefly got to compare using Deathloop.

By comparing FSR 2.0 with DLSS, we were pleasantly surprised to see a massive IQ improvement of FSR 2.0 over 1.0. It’s only one game, but there is a lot of promise for increased performance, especially with ray traced games.

Next we look at overclocked performance.

Overclocked benchmarks

These ten benchmarks were run with both Hellhound RX 6650 XT overclocked as far as it can go while remaining stable as described in the overclocking section. The factory-clocked results are in the first column and the overclocked results in the second column.

There is a reasonable performance increase from manually overclocking the Hellhound RX 6650 XT beyond its factory clocks up to around 10%.

Let’s look at non-gaming applications next to see if the RX 6650 XT is a performer in creative/workstation tasks starting with Blender.

Blender 3.01 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender benchmarks which measure GPU performance by measuring samples per second by render production files. We tested our comparison cards using OpenCL for the Radeons and CUDA on GeForce running on the GPU and the comparing with a 12700KF CPU.

For the following chart, higher is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in samples per second.

OpenCL is not as well-optimized for Radeons compared with CUDA for GeForce but all three video cards are significantly faster than a 12700KF CPU.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.70

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days. CPU results are also shown for comparison.

Here are the Hellhound RX 6650 XT AIDA64 GPGPU results compared with an overclocked i9-12700KF and the two competing GeForce cards.

The RX 6650 XT is a fast GPGPU card and it compares favorably with competing RTX 3060/Ti cards, being weaker in some areas and stronger in others. So let’s look at Sandra 2021 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2021R13

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2021. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper”.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2021 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2021 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran the latest version of Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark that features updated viewsets, new models, support for up to 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management. We use 1900×1060 display resolution for midrange cards like the RX 6650 XT.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Hellhound RX 6650 XT benchmarks summarized in a chart together with our two competing cards.

Again we see different architectures with different strengths and weaknesses.

After seeing these benches, some creative users may upgrade their existing systems with a new card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require. The question to buy a new video card should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is primarily 1080P gaming for gamers.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Final Thoughts

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT boasts a mild speedup over the RX 6600 XT and it trades blows with and overall it beats the RTX 3060 in most of the rasterized games we tested. The RX 6650 XT like the RX 6600 XT beats the last generation cards including the RX 5600 XT although it struggles with ray traced games compared with competing GeForce cards. We somewhat handicapped the RX 6650 XT by not being able to use Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory and we expect that performance would be higher if we used a Ryzen 5000 platform.

FSR brings a great value to the RX 6650 XT as an alternative to DLSS, although it cannot quite match it in visual quality. We look forward to critically comparing further side-by-side improvements in FSR 2.0 and hope many more games use it as it also works on GeForce cards.

For Radeon gamers, the $409 Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a great alternative to the $399 RTX 3060 for the vast majority of modern PC games that use rasterization. However, although the RX 6650 XT offers 8GB of GDDR6 to the 12GB of GDDR6 that the RTX 3060 is equipped with, 12GB appears to be wasted for that card.

At its suggested price of $409, and significantly less than the street price of the RTX 3060 Ti – beginning around $550 – the RX 6650 XT offers a good value. Now that the Russian scalpers have been cut out of the market, cryptocurrency is crashing and mining with new cards is dead, gamers are returning to work in the new COVID-19 normal, and the supply chain is starting to normalize, supply of AMD cards at near or even below MSRP/SEP has drastically improved over the past 18 months.

We think that AMD has set pricing too high on the RX 6650 XT. They appear to forget that the competing GeForce is much stronger in ray traced games – with over 150 games featuring DLSS – and that FSR 1.0 doesn’t match it although FSR 2.0 is very promising with only a single game to show now. At $120 more than what the RX 5600 XT launched at, AMD has jacked-up the price of 1080P gaming and it is not a consumer friendly move. However, for practical terms – since the RX 6650 XT can be found at MSRP/SEP – it is a good value as most other competing GeForce cards are still selling for well above MSRP except for the 3060 which is a slower card at rasterized games.

We recommend the Hellhound RX 6650 XT as a great choice out of multiple good choices, especially if you are looking for good looks with blue lighting, an exceptional cooler, and great performance for 1920×1080, PowerColor’s excellent support, and overall good value. We are convinced that PowerColor is an outstanding AMD AIB, and we never hesitate to recommend their cards to our friends. When we have a choice, we pick and have picked PowerColor video cards for our own purchases.

Let’s sum it up:

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT Pros

• The PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT like the RTX 6600 is much faster than the last generation RX 5600 XT by virtue of new RDNA 2 architecture. It beats the RTX 3060 in most raster games and is a great ultra 1080P card.
• FSR is an awesome added value that can greatly improves performance without impacting visuals significantly and FSR v2.0 looks to be a significant improvement.
• The Hellhound RX 6650 XT has excellent cooling and it is a very quiet card even when overclocked to its maximum
• The Hellhound has a very good power delivery system and dual-fan custom cooling design
• Dual-BIOS give the user a choice of quiet with less overclocking, or a bit louder with more power-unlimited and higher overclocks. It’s also a great safety feature if a BIOS flash goes bad
• FreeSync2 HDR eliminates tearing and stuttering
• Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory give higher performance with Ryzen 5000 platform
• A blue LED and a neutral color allow the Hellhound to fit into most color schemes.

Hellhound RX 6650 XT Cons

• Pricing. $399 for a midrange 1080P card is $120 more than AMD’s RX 5600 XT launch price.
• Weaker ray tracing performance than the RTX 3060

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a good card choice for those who game at 1920×1080, and it represents a good alternative to the RTX 3060 albeit with weaker ray tracing performance. They are offered especially for those who prefer AMD cards and FreeSync2 enabled displays which are generally less expensive than Gsync displays; and Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory are a real plus for gamers using the Ryzen 5000 platform.

If a gamer is looking for something beyond the reference version, the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a very well made, solid and handsome card that will overclock decently and it should last a long time without performance degradation.

The Verdict:

PowerColor’s Hellhound RX 6650 XT is a solidly-built good-looking RGB card with higher clocks out of the box than the reference version and it overclocks decently. It trades blows with and overall beats the RTX 3060 in most rasterized games. PowerColor has made a kick-ass RX 6650 XT.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT offers a good alternative to the RTX 3060 for solid raster performance in gaming, and it also beats the performance of AMD’s last generation by a good margin. A bonus is that availability is excellent and pricing is at MSRP.

Stay tuned, there is much more coming from BTR. Stay tuned for Rodrigo’s upcoming GeForce 512.77 driver performance analysis! We will follow up with a T-FORCE SSD review and then a review of PC GamerZ Hawaii 12700KF/RTX 3080 ‘Blue Elixir’ PC.

Happy Gaming!

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT arrived at BTR for evaluation from PowerColor as a premium and overclocked 8GB vRAM-equipped 128-bit card with no manufacturer recommended (SEP/MSRP) pricing as yet although the base models start at a rather high $379 considering it is targeting 1080P. We have been exhaustively comparing it versus the $329 RTX 3060 EVGA Black 12GB and versus the $399 RTX 3060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition using 32 games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

We will also compare the performance of these competing cards with the RX 6600 XT’s bigger brother, the Red Devil RX 6700 XT (the reference card SEP is $479), and also with its predecessor the ASUS TUF Gaming X3 RX 5600 XT (at $309 which is $30 above AMD’s entry-level pricing of $279); and also with the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition ($499/$449 reference at launch).

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is factory clocked higher than the reference specifications using its OC BIOS. While the reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 2589MHz, the PowerColor Red Devil game clocks up to 2428MHz and boosts to 2607MHz. It also looks different from older generation classic Red Devils, arriving in a more neutral gray color instead of in all red and black. The Red Devil RX 6600 XT features a RGB mode whose LEDs default to a bright red which may be customized by PowerColor’s DevilZone software.

The Reference and Red Devil RX 6600 XT Features & Specifications

First let’s look at the Red Devil RX 6600 XT specifications:

Additional Information from PowerColor

PowerColor newest 6600 XT Red Devil card, is positioned to compete directly with the custom 3060 premium models.

• The card has 2 modes, OC and Silent. 145W / 135W Power target. There’s a bios switch on the side of the card. We designed this card to be very quiet, even on performance mode is considerably quieter most silent cards, but we also advise to try the silent mode as it’s truly whisper quiet, with a normal case with a optimal airflow, you most likely see the card run around 1000 Rpms under this mode.
• The board has 10 Phase VS the 6+2 Phase VRM design on the standard designs meaning is over spec’d in order to deliver the best
  stability and overclock headroom by having such VRM it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps are used on our Design, no compromises.
• DUAL FAN, at this TDP there is no need of oversized 3 fan coolers, better sized and yet efficient cooling!
• Our cooler features 2 x 100mm ,all with two ball bearing fans with 4 heat pipes (4X6Φ) across the high density heatsink with large nickel plated base.
• RGB is enhanced, Red Devil now connects to the motherboard aRGB (5v 3 pin connector) for RGB Sync.
• Red Devil has Mute fan technology, fans stop under 60c!
• The ports are LED illuminated. Now you can see in the dark where to plug.
• The card back plate does not have thermal pads but instead we did cuts across the backplate for the PCB to breath, which under high
  heat scenarios is more beneficial than having thermal pads as the back plate can become a heat trap.
• Red Devil buyers will be able to join exclusive giveaway as well access to the Devil Club website. A membership club for Devil users only which gives them access to News, Competitions, Downloads and most important instant support via Live chat.

RX 6000 features

AMD has their own ecosystem for gamers and many unique new features for the Radeon 6000 series. However, the above slide from AMD does not mention two features – the Infinity Cache and Smart Access Memory.

Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory

AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture includes the Infinity Cache which alters the way data is delivered to GPUs. This global cache allows fast data
access and increases bandwidth. This optimized on-die cache uses 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache delivering up to 2.5x the effective bandwidth compared to 256-bit 12Gbps GDDR6.

BTR uses Intel’s 10th generation flagship CPU, the i9-10990K which does not have this cache available so our results will probably be lower than what a gamer using a full Ryzen 5000 platform will achieve. In addition, we don’t have Smart Access Memory.

AMD’s Smart Access Memory is a new feature for the Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that enables additional memory space to be mapped to the base address register resulting in performance gains for select games when paired with an AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processor or with some Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. Using PCIe, the Base Address Register (BAR) defines how much GPU memory space can be mapped. Without using Smart Access Memory, CPUs can generally access up to 256MB of GPU memory restricting performance somewhat.

NVIDIA has worked with its partners and with Intel to enable Resizable BAR which currently is enabled for the EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard but it only works for GeForce cards. When we tried to enable it for the RX 6600 XT, our PC refused to boot after following AMD’s instructions using a clean installation of Windows. So we disabled it and tested all of our video cards and games without Resizable BAR.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 32 games and 3 synthetic game benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, as well as SPEC, workstation, and GPGPU benchmarks. Our latest games include Chernobylite and F1 2021. The testing platform uses a recent installation of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition, and our CPU is an i9-10900K which turbos all 10 cores to 5.1/5.0GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32GB of T-FORCE Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Red Devil RX 6600 XT.

A Closer Look at the Red Devil RX 6600 XT

Although the Red Devil RX 6600 XT advertises itself as a premium 7nm 8GB vRAM-equipped card on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture which features 1080P and PCIe 4.0, the cover of the box favors stylized imagery over text.

The back of the box touts key features which now include HDMI 2.1 VRR, ray tracing technology, FidelityFX, and VR Ready Premium as well as states its 600W power and system requirements. AMD’s technology features are highlighted and the box features PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, RGB software and output LEDs, and a solid backplate with the Red Devil logo that also lights up.

Opening its very well-padded box, we see a quick installation guide, a RGB LED cable, and an invitation to join PowerColor’s Devil’s Club.

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a dual-fan card. Turning the Red Devil over (below) we see a solid backplate that features the devil logo that also lights up.

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a medium-sized dual-fan card (251mm long x 133mm tall x 54mm thick) in a 2 slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s colors and even more striking with the RGB on.There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS (above, right). Using the OC BIOS the card has a 145W power target and using the Silent BIOS it has a 135W power target. We didn’t bother with the Silent BIOS as the card is very quiet using the OC BIOS, but it is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

The Red Devil uses one 1×8-pin and 1×6-pin PCIe connections while the reference version uses 1×8-pin. We would suggest that with the current voltage limitations and low power draw, the extra connector is probably not really necessary even for overclocking unless the end user circumvents the power restrictions using MPT at their own risk. Looking at the edges, we can see it is all heatsink fins for cooling as is typical of Red Devil cards, and we expect it to run cool.

Above, the PowerColor Red Devil RX 6600 XT’s other end also lights up giving the card an aggressive look.

The Red Devil’s RX 6600 XT’s connectors include 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connector. There is an LED that illuminates this panel for making easier connections in the dark.

The Red Devil looks great when it is running in a PC.

The specifications look good and the Red Devil itself looks great with its default RGB bright red contrasting with the black backplate and its aggressively lit-up front end perhaps is stylistically reminiscent of an automotive grill or perhaps teeth. The end user may enhance and coordinate the RGB colors by connecting to the motherboard using a supplied aRGB (5v 3-pin) connector using the DevilZone RGB software.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.9 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Devil RX 6600 XT 8GB, factory settings and overclocked, on loan from PowerColor
• Red Devil RX 6700 XT 12GB, factory settings and overclocked, on loan from PowerColor
• ASUS TUF Gaming X3 RX 5600 XT 6GB, stock settings, on loan from ASUS
• Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB Anniversary Edition, stock AE clocks.
• EVGA RTX 3060 Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 2 x 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive; one for AMD and one for NVIDIA
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1GB T-FORCE Delta MAX SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27″ 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• Adrenalin 2021 Edition 21.7.1 press drivers used for the RX 6600 XT and 21.7.2 used for the other Radeons except for 21.2.3 used for the RX 5700 XT.
• GeForce 471.41 for the RTX 3060 and the RTX 3060 Ti.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel; Vsync off.
• All optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings in the AMD control panel.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• F1 2021
• Resident Evil Village
• Hitman 3
• Cyberpunk 2077
• DiRT 5
• Godfall
• Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Borderlands 3
• Metro Exodus & Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Forza 7

DX11

• Chernobylite
• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Far Cry New Dawn
• Assetto Corsa: Competitione
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 2.931 benchmark
• Sandra 2021 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperf 2020

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Next the AMD settings.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

Overclocking, temperatures and noise

We spent a lot of time overclocking the Red Devil RX 6600 XT for this review. The Red Devil is factory clocked higher than the reference specifications using its OC BIOS. While the reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 2589MHz, the PowerColor Red Devil game clocks up to 2428MHz and boosts to 2607MHz.

Above are the reference RX 6600 XT Wattman default settings which include leaving the power limit at default. The performance didn’t matter whether the power limit was set to default or higher even when overclocked. Although the Red Devil boosts to 2607MHz, we typically saw clocks at around 2575MHz and the GPU stayed cool. The fan speeds are not tracked by Wattman but they remained low and we could not hear them over our other case fans.

The Wattman auto overclock feature is useless as it gave an extremely low overclock so we used trial and error to find Red Devil’s maximum performance at the edge of stability. We settled on increasing the memory to 115% (2284MHz) and increasing the core clock by 7% (2776MHz) as below.

At maximum overclock, the clocks run from 2686MHz to a peak of 2720MHz, but this time the temperatures drop below 60C as the fan speeds increase. Even while overclocked to the max, the Red Devil remains very quiet and cool with power consumption just approaching 140W.

There is a small performance increase from overclocking the RX 6600 XT core by 7% and increasing the memory by 15%. Unfortunately, AMD has again locked all RX 6600 XT cards overclocking down in an attempt to maximize overall performance by limiting the voltage to 1150mV. We would also suggest that the RX 6600 XT is rather voltage constrained and the Red Devil could seriously benefit by more voltage. We suspect that some enthusiast gamers will use MPT (More Power Tool) and risk their warranty to gain a substantially higher Red Devil overclock although we cannot recommend it.

We believe that the Red Devil’s overclock will not degrade over time as its PCB components are fit to run all the time at the highest overclock settings – perhaps unlike entry level versions which are not engineered for ultimate maximum reliability.

Of course, many gamers will want to fine-tune their own overclock and undervolting is a possibility although at 140W the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is not a power hog. Check the overclocking chart in the next section for performance increases using ten key games.

Let’s head to the performance charts to see how the performance of the RX 6600 XT compares with five other cards.

Performance summary charts

Here are the performance results of 32 games and 3 synthetic tests comparing the factory-clocked 8GB Red Devil RX 6600 XT with the EVGA RTX 3060 Black 12GB (reference) and versus the RTX 3060 Ti FE 8GB at their factory set clocks. Three other cards are added for comparison in the Big Picture. The highest settings are used and are listed on the charts. The benches were run at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. Click on each chart to open in a pop-up for best viewing.

Most gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. The games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes in ms where lower numbers are better.

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT vs. the RTX 3060 & RTX 3060 Ti

The first set of charts show our three main competing cards. Column one represents the RTX 3060 EVGA Black (reference speed) version ($329) performance, column two is the Red Devil RX 6600 XT (no SEP/reference $379), and column three represents the RTX 3060 Ti FE ($399) performance.

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is faster overall than the RTX 3060 EVGA Black (reference) version but it is still in the same class, trading blows depending on the games tested. Since we do not use Resizable BAR or have Smart Access Memory, we expect that some games would shift in favor of the Radeon using a Ryzen 5000 platform. However, it is outclassed by the $20 more expensive RTX 3060 Ti, winning no games against it.

Let’s see how the reference and Red Devil RX 6600 XT fit in with our expanded main summary chart, the “Big Picture”, comparing a total of six cards.

The Big Picture

Here is how the Red Devil 6600 XT fits into a larger chart with six cards. The ASUS RX 5600 XT is in column one, the RX 5700 XT (Anniversary Edition) is in column 2, the EVGA Black RTX 3060 is in column 3, the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is in Column 4, the RTX 3060 Ti FE is in column 5, and the Red Devil RX 6700 XT is in column 6.

We see that the RX 6600 XT is a fair upgrade from the RX 5600 XT, but it is hard to believe that AMD has increased the price by $100 over the last midrange 1080P generation. The RX 6600 XT basically trades blows with the RX 5700 XT which launched at $399. We have to wonder what AMD was thinking when they set their pricing so high.

Ray Traced Benchmarks

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is next compared with our other two main competing cards when ray tracing is enabled in ten games. No DLSS or FSR technologies are used.

The RX 6600 XT gets outperformed overall when compared with the $50 less expensive RTX 3060 after ray tracing is enabled. However, AMD has recently introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) which is their answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS.

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

FSR improves performance by first rendering frames at a lower resolution and then by using an open-source spatial upscaling algorithm with a sharpening filter in an attempt to make the game look nearly as good as at native resolution. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a more mature temporal upscaling solution that uses AI/Deep Learning. With DLSS, data is accumulated from multiple frames and combined into the final image with the AI reconstruction component running on GeForce RTX Tensor cores.

In contrast, FSR is basically a post-process shader which also makes it easy for game developers to implement across all graphics cards and not just for Radeons. So far, there are about a dozen games that use it and we have tested three games that use FSR. Although Ultra FSR is not the equal of DLSS – and especially not of DLSS 2.0 Quality which rivals and sometimes improves on the native image – it is still a very solid non-AI/temporal upscaler that provides good performance improvements.

Ultra FSR is far more than a standard Lanczos implementation plus sharpening and it brings good value to Radeons (and for all video cards!) for higher “free” performance with a minimal hit to visuals. We were especially impressed with the Ultra FSR implementation in Chernobylite. Below is a performance comparison of Quality DLSS 2.0 versus Ultra FSR.

We see the RX 6600 XT improve its framerates using Ultra FSR to match the RTX 3060 which uses Quality DLSS in Chernobylite.

Again, we see solid performance improvements with Godfall and in Resident Evil Village using Ultra FSR.

Next we look at overclocked performance.

Overclocked benchmarks

These ten benchmarks were run with both Red Devil RX 6600 XT overclocked as far as it can go while remaining stable as described in the overclocking section. The Red Devil manually overclocked card results are presented first and the factory-clocked results are in the second column.

There is a reasonable performance increase from manually overclocking the Red Devil RX 6600 XT beyond its factory clocks from about 2% up to around 10%.

Let’s look at non-gaming applications next to see if the RX 6600 XT is a good upgrade from the other video cards we test starting with Blender.

Blender 2.931 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender benchmarks which measure GPU performance by timing how long it takes to render production files. We tested our comparison cards using OpenCL for the Radeons and CUDA on GeForce – all running on the GPU instead of using the CPU.

For the following chart, lower is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in minutes and seconds.

OpenCL is not as well-optimized for Radeons compared with CUDA for GeForce.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.32

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days. CPU results are also shown for comparison.

Here are the Red Devil RX 6600 XT AIDA64 GPGPU results compared with an overclocked i9-10900K.

Here is the chart summary of the AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks with five of our competing cards side-by-side.

The RX 6600 XT is a fast GPGPU card and it compares favorably with Ampere cards, being weaker in some areas and stronger in others, and it’s a solid improvement over the last generation RX 5600 XT. So let’s look at Sandra 2020 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2020

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper”.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2021 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2020 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses. However, we see solid improvements of the RX 6600 XT over the RX 5600 XT.

SPECworkstation3 (3.0.4) Benchmarks

All the SPECworkstation3 benchmarks are based on professional applications, most of which are in the CAD/CAM or media and entertainment fields. All of these benchmarks are free except for vendors of computer-related products and/or services.

The most comprehensive workstation benchmark is SPECworkstation3. It’s a free-standing benchmark which does not require ancillary software. It measures GPU, CPU, storage and all other major aspects of workstation performance based on actual applications and representative workloads. We only tested the GPU-related workstation performance as checked in the image above.

Here are our raw SPECworkstation 3.0.4.summary and raw scores for the Red Devil RX 6600XT that were tested at 1900×1060.

Here are the Red Devil SPECworkstation3 results summarized and included in a chart of our five competing cards. Higher is better.

Using SPEC benchmarks, since the architectures are different, the cards each exhibit different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark last year that features updated viewsets, new models, support for both 2K and 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management. We use 2K display resolution for midrange cards like the RX 6600 XT.

Here are the summary results for the Red Devil RX 6600 XT.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Red Devil RX 6600 XT benchmarks summarized in a chart together with four other cards.

Again we see different architectures with different strengths and weaknesses. The Red Devil RX 6600 XT is significantly faster than the RX 5600 XT.

After seeing these benches, some creative users may upgrade their existing systems with a new card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require. The question to buy a new video card should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is primarily 1080P gaming for gamers.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Final Thoughts

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT improves significantly over the RX 5600 XT and it trades blows with and overall it beats the RTX 3060 in multiple rasterized games. The Red Devil RX 6600 XT beats the last generation cards including the RX 5600 XT although it struggles with ray traced games compared with GeForce cards. We somewhat handicapped the RX 6600 XT by not being able to use Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory and we expect that performance would be higher if we used a Ryzen 5000 platform.

FSR brings a great value to the RX 6600 XT as an alternative to DLSS, although it cannot quite match it in visual quality. We look forward to further improvements in FSR and hope many more games use it.

For Radeon gamers, the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a good alternative to the RTX 3060 for the vast majority of modern PC games that use rasterization. However, the RX 6600 XT offers 8GB of GDDR6 to the 12GB of GDDR6 that the RTX 3060 is equipped with. The RTX 3060, although it has 12GB of vRAM, appears to be wasted for that card.

At its suggested price of $379, or $20 less than the RTX 3060 Ti, the reference RX 6600 XT offers much less value – if the GeForce can be found at all at SEP. PowerColor has promised that the supply of the RX 6600 XT will be plentiful, but we are skeptical. This same thing has been promised for Ampere cards where the stock is still trickling in and being purchased the instant it’s available from etailers that are not hesitating to mark the prices up to double the SEP.

We think that AMD has set pricing too high on the RX 6600 XT by about $50. If it sold for $329 like the RTX 3060, it would be a really good value. They seem to forget that the competing GeForce is much stronger in ray traced games – with over 60 games featuring DLSS – and that FSR is brand new with only a dozen games supporting it so far. At $100 more than what the RX 5600 XT launched at, AMD has jacked up the price of 1080P gaming – pandemic shortages or no shortages – and it is not a consumer friendly move. However, for practical terms – if the RX 6600 XT can be found at MSRP/SEP – it is a good value for now as most other competing cards are still selling for double MSRP.

PowerColor hasn’t set any pricing on the Red Devil RX 6600 XT allowing the resellers to set theirs. They claim that their margins are actually below their usual historical low double-digit (10-12%) for a new product. Unfortunately, it’s hard to recommend any card with no suggested price even though it is overclocked, very nicely equipped, and well-built over a well-designed reference version for $379. We wish that we could say that “PowerColor thinks their Red Devil is worth $30 more than the reference version” – and we would agree. But now there is no pricing frame of reference.

We recommend the Red Devil RX 6600 XT as a great choice out of multiple good choices, especially if you are looking for good looks with RGB, an exceptional cooler, and great performance for 1920×1080, PowerColor’s excellent support, and overall good value assuming that the stock and price stabilizes. We are convinced that PowerColor is an outstanding AMD AIB, and we never hesitate to recommend it to our friends. When we have a choice, we pick and have picked PowerColor video cards for our own purchases.

Let’s sum it up:

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT Pros

• The PowerColor Red Devil RX 6600 XT is much faster than the last generation RX 5600 XT by virtue of new RDNA 2 architecture. It beats the RTX 3060 in many raster games and is a great ultra 1080P card that can handle 1440P with lower settings.
• FSR is an awesome added value that can greatly improves performance without impacting visuals significantly.
• The Red Devil RX 6600 XT has excellent cooling and it is a very quiet card even when overclocked to its maximum
• The Red Devil has a very good power delivery system and dual-fan custom cooling design
• Dual-BIOS give the user a choice of quiet with less overclocking, or a bit louder with more power-unlimited and higher overclocks. It’s also a great safety feature if a BIOS flash goes bad
• FreeSync2 HDR eliminates tearing and stuttering
• Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory give higher performance with Ryzen 5000 platform
• Customizable RGB lighting and a neutral color allow the Red Devil to fit into any color scheme using the DevilZone software program.

Red Devil RX 6600 XT Cons

• Pricing. $379 for a midrange 1080P card is $100 more than AMD’s RX 5600 XT. And PowerColor has set no SEP
• Weaker ray tracing performance than the RTX 3060

If they can be found at suggested pricing, the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a good card choice for those who game at 1920×1080, and it represents a good alternative to the RTX 3060 albeit with weaker ray tracing performance. They are offered especially for those who prefer AMD cards and FreeSync2 enabled displays which are generally less expensive than Gsync displays; and Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory are a real plus for gamers using the Ryzen 5000 platform.

If a gamer is looking for something extra beyond the reference version, the Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a very well made and handsome RGB customizable card that will overclock decently and last a long time without performance degradation.

The Verdict:

• PowerColor’s Red Devil RX 6600 XT is a solidly-built good-looking RGB card with higher clocks out of the box than the reference version and it overclocks decently. It trades blows with and overall beats the RTX 3060 in many rasterized games. Although we have no price, it is a kick-ass RX 6600 XT. Hopefully there will be some solid supply and the market pricing will normalize after the cryptocurrency pandemic ends (relatively soon!).

The Red Devil RX 6600 XT offers a good alternative to the RTX 3060 for solid raster performance in gaming, and it also beats the performance of AMD’s last generation by a good margin. However, everything will depend on pricing and availability.

This is what PowerColor boldly stated to us last week:

“There will be plenty of cards in the channel and we will have our base model Fighting that starts at 379$ at launch!

No Scalping prices, eTailers will have enough cards, if they raise the prices, someone else will sell for less.”

Good advice! We hope there is good availability, and if so, we can recommend the Red Devil RX 6600 XT even if it is sold even at AMD’s inflated SEP pricing because the competing cards are mostly unavailable for even double their MSRP. Do not reward scalpers or etailers who sell at inflated prices and who do not deserve our business. We can outwait them.

Stay tuned, there is much more coming from BTR. This weekend we will return to VR with a performance evaluation comparing the Red Devil RX 6600 XT with the RTX 3060. And stay tuned for Rodrigo’s upcoming 471.68 driver performance analysis!

Happy Gaming!

The Red Devil RX 6700 XT arrived at BTR for evaluation from PowerColor as a 12GB vRAM-equipped card last week with no manufacturer recommended (SEP/MSRP) pricing. We have been comparing it with the just released $479 RX 6700 XT reference card from AMD, and also versus the GeForce $499 RTX 3070 Founders Edition (FE) and the $399 RTX 3060 Ti (FE) using 35 games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

We will also compare the performance of these competing cards with the RX 6700 XT’s bigger brother, the RX 6800; with its predecessor the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition (AE); and also with the $329 RTX 3060; but especially versus the RTX 2060 and the GTX 1060/6GB to see how older cards fare to complete BTR’s 9-card Big Picture.

The Red Devil RX 6700 XT is factory clocked higher than the reference version (below) using its OC BIOS.

According to its specifications, the Red Devil RX 6700 XT can boost up to 2622MHz out of the box or 41MHz higher than the reference RX 6700 XT which clocks to 2581MHz. It also looks different from older generation classic Red Devils, arriving in a more neutral gray color instead of in all red and black. The Red Devil RX 6700 XT features a RGB mode whose LEDs default to a bright red which may be customized by PowerColor’s DevilZone software.

The Reference and Red Devil RX 6700 XT Features & Specifications

First let’s look at the reference RX 6700 XT specifications compared with its predecessor, the RX 5700 XT

From what we can see from the specifications, the new card should be solidly faster than its predecessor.

Here are the Red Devil RX 6700 XT specifications according to PowerColor:

Specifications

Features

Here are the Red Devil RX 6700 XT features.

Additional Information from PowerColor

• The card has 2 modes, OC and Silent 203W / 186W Power target. There’s a bios switch on the side of the card. We designed this card to be very quiet, even on performance mode is considerably quieter than reference board but we also advise to try the silent mode as it’s truly whisper quiet, with a normal case with a optimal airflow, you most likely see the card run around 1000 Rpms under this mode.
• The board has 12 Phases (10+2 Dr.Mos) VS the 9 (7+2) Phase VRM design on the reference design meaning is over spec’d in order to
  deliver the best stability and overclock headroom, not only capable of well over 250w but by having such VRM it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps are used on our Design, no compromises.
• Our cooler features 2 x 100mm with a center 1x90mm fan, all with two ball bearing fans with 6 heat pipes 6Φ across the high density heatsink with coper base. As you might notice the PCB is shorter than the cooler, this design is a continuation of what we already implemented in many generations previously and just now has become almost a industry standard.
• RGB is enhanced, Red Devil now connects to the motherboard aRGB (5v 3 pin connector).
• Red Devil has Mute fan technology, fans stop under 60c!
• The ports are LED illuminated. Now you can see in the dark where to plug.
• The card back plate does not have thermal pads but instead we did cuts across the backplate for the PCB to breath, which under high heat scenarios is more beneficial than having thermal pads as the back plate can become a heat trap.
• Copper Base Direct Touch – A smooth copper base with direct contact to the GPU and VRAMs provides for optimized heat transfer and dissipation
• Buyers or Red Devil Limited edition will be able to join exclusive giveaway as well access to the Devil Club website. A membership club for Devil users only which gives them access to News, Competitions, Downloads, and most important, instant support via Live chat.

The Big Navi 2 Radeon 6000 family

The reference Radeon 6700 XT at $479 competes with the RTX 3070 FE ($499) and is priced $20 lower, but it sits $80 higher than the RTX 3060 Ti ($399). This should tell us that it is expected to trade blows with the RTX 3070, but be solidly faster then the RTX 3060 Ti.

The RX 6800 at $579 competes below the RX 3080 at $699 while the RX 6900 XT at $999 is AMD’s flagship and sits below the $1499 RX 3090. Of course, as PowerColor would have us understand, none of these “suggested” prices have any meaning to gamers currently because of the supply issues and extreme demand caused by the dual pandemics – COVID 19 and cryptocurrency mining.

Above is a die shot of the GPU powering the Radeon RX 6700 XT courtesy of AMD.

AMD has their own ecosystem for gamers and many unique new features for the Radeon 6000 series. However, the above slide from AMD does not mention two very important features – the Infinity Cache and Smart Access Memory.

Infinity Cache & Smart Access Memory

AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture includes the Infinity Cache which alters the way data is delivered to GPUs. This global cache allows fast data
access and increases bandwidth with higher performance and better power efficiency. This highly optimized on-die cache uses 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache delivering up to 2.5x the effective bandwidth compared to 256-bit 12Gbps GDDR6.

Unfortunately, BTR uses Intel’s latest 10th generation flagship CPU, the i9-10990K which does not have this cache available so our results will probably be lower than what a gamer using the Ryzen 5000 platform will see. In addition, we don’t have Smart Access Memory.

AMD’s Smart Access Memory is a new feature for the Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards that enables additional memory space to be mapped to the base address register resulting in performance gains for select games when paired with an AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processor or with some Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. Using PCIe, the Base Address Register (BAR) defines how much GPU memory space can be mapped. Until now, CPUs can only access a fraction of GPU memory, often limited to 256MB. With less efficient data transfer, performance is restricted.

NVIDIA has worked with its partners and with Intel to enable Resizable BAR which currently is enabled on the EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard but only works with selected games and with the RTX 3060 for now. When we tried to enable it for the RX 6700 XT, our PC refused to boot. So we had to disable it and test all of our video cards and games without Resizable BAR limiting the RX 6700 XT’s performance.

Last Friday, AMD explained that we would have to do a clean installation of Windows 10 if we wanted to use it, but we simply had no time. Here are their instructions for enabling Resizable BAR for our Intel Z490 motherboard that we shall follow for our future reviews:

If you would like to enable Resizable BAR, we recommend re-installing Windows 10 with these steps:

• Open the BOOT menu and select CSM (Compatibility Support Module)
• Set this value to DISABLED
• Open the ADVANCED menu and choose PCI Configuration
• Set Above 4G Decoding to Enabled
• Set Re-Size BAR Support to Enabled
• Save your changes and install Windows 10

So our performance results may be lower for selected games that can take full advantage of Resizable BAR or Smart Access Memory. Hopefully we will upgrade to a Ryzen 5950X when they become available at a reasonable price and we will retire our i9-10900K. We already are very unhappy with being limited to PCIe Generation 3 using fast SSDs just because Intel chose to hold back the feature until their upcoming 11th generation.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 35 games and 3 synthetic game benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, as well as SPEC, Workstation, and GPGPU benchmarks. Our latest games include Hitman 3, Cyberpunk 2077, DiRT 5, and Godfall. The testing platform uses a recent installation of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition, and our CPU is an i9-10900K which turbos all 10 cores to 5.1/5.0GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32GB of T-FORCE Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Red Devil RX 6700 XT which we shall compare with the reference RX 6700 XT.

A Closer Look at the Reference and PowerColor Red Devil RX 6700 XT

Although the Red Devil RX 6700 XT advertises itself as a premium 7nm 16GB vRAM-equipped card on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture which features 1440P and PCIe 4.0, the cover of the box uses almost no text in favor of stylized imagery.

The back of the box touts key features which now include HDMI 2.1 VRR, ray tracing technology, and VR Ready Premium as well as states it’s 700W power and system requirements. AMD’s technology features are highlighted and the box features PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, RGB software and output LEDs, and a solid backplate.

Opening its very well-padded box, we see a quick installation guide, RGB LED cable, and an invitation to join PowerColor’s Devil’s Club. PowerColor has a nicer presentation than AMD’s reference RX 6700 XT which is rather barebones.

AMD directs you to their website for installation instructions while PowerColor includes detailed instructions.

The Red Devil RX 6700 XT is a large tri-fan card in a 2.5 slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s colors and even more striking with the RGB on. Here is the Red Devil next to a reference RX 5700 XT and flanked on both sides by a RTX 3060 Ti FE and a RTX 3070 FE to show how much larger and beefier a card it is than the other three cards.

The Red Devil uses two 1×8-pin PCIe connections while the reference version uses 1×8-pin and 1×6-pin. Looking at the other edge, we can see it is all heatsink fins for cooling as is typical of Red Devil cards.

Below, the PowerColor Red Devil RX 6700 XT’s sturdy backplate features a stylized custom devil symbol that lights up in the color of your choice if synced, red being the default. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS. We didn’t bother with the Silent BIOS but it is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

Compare with the reference RX 6700 XT backplate which is rather plain-Jane.

The Red Devil’s RX 6700 XT’s connectors include 2 DisplayPorts, 1 HDMI connection, and a USB Type C connector. There is an LED that illuminates this panel for making easier connections in the dark.

It shares the same IO connectors with the reference RX 6700 XT below, but the Red Devil has a better system exhausting hot air out of the back of the PC.

The specifications look good and the Red Devil itself looks great with its default RGB bright red contrasting with the black backplate and its aggressively lit-up end perhaps is stylistically reminiscent of an automotive grill.

Unlike with the reference version that only lights up the logo, you may also enhance and coordinate the RGB colors by connecting to the motherboard using a supplied aRGB (5v 3-pin) connector using the DevilZone RGB software. It looks awesome.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.9 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Devil RX 6700 XT 12GB, factory settings and overclocked, on loan from PowerColor
• Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB, reference version stock clocks and overclocked, on loan from AMD
• Radeon RX 6800 Reference version 16GB, stock settings, on loan from AMD
• Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB Anniversary Edition, stock AE clocks.
• EVGA RTX 3060 Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3070 Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA/EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA/EVGA
• RTX 2060 Founders Edition 6GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB, factory SC clocks, on loan from EVGA
• 2 x 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive; one for AMD and one for NVIDIA
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27″ 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan) – All benchmarking and overclocking performed with the case closed

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 461.72 for the RTX 3070; and GeForce 461.64 drivers for the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti. GeForce 461.40 drivers are used for the older two GeForce cards.
• Adrenalin 2021 Edition 20.50.11 press drivers used for the RX 6800, the RX 6700 XT reference and Red Devil editions, and 21.2.3 used for the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition (AE).
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel; Vsync off.
• All optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings in the AMD control panel.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v10.0.1942. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• Hitman 3
• Cyberpunk 2077
• DiRT 5
• Godfall
• Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• F1 2020
• Gears 5
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Metro Exodus
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Project CARS 2
• Forza 7

DX11

• Crysis Remastered
• Mech Warriors 5: Mercenaries
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Borderlands 3
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Far Cry New Dawn
• Assetto Corsa: Competitione
• Monster Hunter: World
• Overwatch
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 2.912 benchmark
• Sandra 2020/2021 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperf 2020

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Next the AMD settings.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

This overclocking showdown is the final follow-up to the two Red Devil RX 6900 XT reviews last week versus the RTX 3090 Founders Edition (FE). Today, we have optimized our overclocks with all performance options set to their highest limits to get the most performance from each card.

At stock, the Red Devil $1139/1179 RX 6900 XT trades blows with the $1499 RTX 3090 FE in rasterized games although it is slower overall. The Red Devil 6900 XT also provided a better VR experience than the RX 6800 XT although its performance again fell short of the RTX 3090 FE’s VR performance. This time, we will overclock the each card as far as they will go to see where they stand in relation to each other when manually overclocked.

Overclocking the Red Devil RX 6900 XT

The Red Devil version of the RX 6900 XT is factory overclocked 90MHz higher than the reference version at 2250MHz using the OC BIOS. According to its specifications, the Red Devil RX 6900 XT boost can clock up to 2340MHz out of the box. We benched it using out of the box settings at its default Power Limit setting of 280W and looped Heaven 4.0 in a 1440P window at max settings to load the GPU to 98%.

We generally see it boosting even higher than its rated specs, and it generally settles in above 2380MHz with peaks above 2400MHz. Increasing the Power Limit to its maximum (320W) we see a small increase in performance.

It will boost about 35MHz higher with a maxed out Power Limit slider, and we tested its 320W performance compared with out of the box 280W performance using synthetic benches which are sensitive to overclocking and also very accurate.

There is approximately a 1-3% performance increase with 40W added, so some enthusiasts may prefer to undervolt rather than overvolt their Red Devil depending on their preferences.

This isn’t much performance additional performance to be gained either with the RTX 3090 that gains about 2-5% by increasing its power limit. But we want to see how a maximum core and memory overclock will increase the Red Devil’s performance without consideration for the power usage.

We maxed the Power Limit, added the maximum voltage, maxed the memory OC slider to the right to add 7% more frequency, and moved the Max Frequency slider to 2750MHz after testing each +25MHz increment between 2600 and 2800MHz. Each increase in the maximum core frequency increased performance slightly which we confirmed as we looped Heaven 4.0. We were stopped dead at 2775MHz when the PC locked up.

We were disappointed with the performance increases until we also increased the fan profile to keep the GPU below 74C. Although, the fans started to become more audible, the performance stabilized and the GPU no longer throttled. With a cooler running GPU, the core clocks stayed relatively steady just below 2700MHz which is about 250MHz above the default Red Devil core clocks and the voltage pegged at 1175mV as the card consistently drew more than 300W, peaking above 320W.

Before we compare the Red Devil’s overclocked performance with the RTX 3090 FE, let’s look at its chief competitor’s overclock.

Overclocking the RTX 3090 FE

We devoted a separate evaluation to the RTX 3090 which you can read here. After testing multiple combinations further, our RTX 3090’s final stable overclock for this review to achieve the highest overall performance adds +55 MHz offset to the core and +600 MHz to the memory to perform above 1950MHz

The RTX 3090 FE is power-limited, and to achieve a higher overclock will take more voltage than what adding .1mV can deliver. But before we compare the RTX 3090 at stock and overclocked with the Red Devil RX 6900 XT, please check out our testing platform and configuration.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.9 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Devil RX 6900 XT 16GB, stock and overclocked, on short term loan from PowerColor
• RTX 3090 Founders Edition 24GB, stock and overclock, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan) – All benchmarking and overclocking performed with the case closed

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 461.09 for the RTX 3090
• Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.12.2 drivers used for the Red Devil RX 6900 XT
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel.
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v2004. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• Precision X1
• Wattman

Games

Vulkan

• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Metro Exodus

DX11

• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Far Cry New Dawn

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

We used Precision X1 to set the GeForce card’s power and temperature limits to maximum and used Wattman for the Radeon.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are configured so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi and Navi 2 cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s overclock both of our cards to their maximum and check out their performance.

Performance summary charts

Below is the summary chart of 10 games and 3 synthetic tests. The highest settings are always chosen and DX12 was picked above DX11 where available. Specific settings are listed on the performance charts. The benches were run at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160.

All results, except for the synthetic benchmarks show average frame rates and higher is always better. Minimum frame rates are shown when they are available next to the averages but they are in italics and in a slightly smaller font. The Red Devil RX 6900 XT’s stock results are in the first column and its overclocked results are in the second column, while the third column represents the overclocked RTX 3090’s results with its stock-clocked results in the fourth column.

There isn’t much change in the overall ranking by overclocking both cards although each card scales decently. Horizon Zero Dawn gave inconsistent benching results at 4K (between 77 and 84 FPS) which may still indicate some throttling for the Red Devil. Although both cards are constrained by their respective power limits and tiny voltage increases, the Red Devil is an aftermarket card that should not be so power-limited.

PowerColor claims that their Red Devil can handle 400W, but is limited to 320W which means a lot of performance is left on the table by AMD’s lockdown. It is possible to circumvent this power limit with overclocking tools like MorePowerTools, but we have not tested it as our sample had to be returned to PowerColor in working condition after two weeks of intensive benchmarking.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Conclusion

This has been quite an interesting exploration for us, evaluating the overclocked $1139/$1179 Red Devil RX 6900 XT versus the overclocked $1499 RTX 3090 FE. The Red Devil is a slower card, but it also costs about $350 less. We are very disappointed that the Red Devil’s voltage and power limit has been locked down, but the blame for this lays with AMD for an illogical decision for their partner cards – not with PowerColor who would love to be able to allow enthusiasts to push their card much harder.

PowerColor has taken the RX 6900 XT GPU and over-engineered it with a 16 Phase design versus the 11+2 Phase VRM design on the reference design. Red Devils are over-spec’d in order to deliver the best stability and overclocking headroom. It’s not only capable of using well over 400W, and by having the best VRMs, it will run cooler and last longer than any reference version

The Red Devil is the equivalent of a Ferrari – and AMD has forcibly installed a limiter on it. This is a poor decision by AMD foisted on their partners and we respectfully disagree with them. We really like the Red Devil and will continue to recommend it as among the very best of the AIB RX 6900 XTs, and a great choice for AMD gamers.

Next week, we will return to benching Virtual Reality (VR). Sean has sent us a Reverb G1 Pro for evaluation to compare with a Reverb G2 that Hewlett Packard is also sending us for evaluation versus the Vive Pro. And Sean is working on his Assetto Corsa: Competizione review also.

Rodrigo’s next review is a GeForce 461.09 driver performance analysis using Ampere and Turing, and his following feature review will cover Windows 10 ‘Game Mode’, On vs. Off. Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy Gaming!

The Red Devil RX 6800 XT arrived at BTR for evaluation on a short-term loan from PowerColor on Wednesday, the same day the card launched for sale with very limited supply and with no manufacturer recommended pricing although it has been listed out of stock for $799.99 at Newegg. We have been benching it versus the $699 RTX 3080 Founders Edition (FE) and the $649 RX 6800 XT reference card that we got that same day from AMD using GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, 37 games and synthetic benchmarks. We concluded from our preliminary 9-game PC and PCVR 15-game review relative to the RTX 3080, that the reference RX 6800 XT is probably faster at pancake gaming than at VR gaming.

We will also compare the performance of these competing cards with the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition (AE) and the GTX 1080 Ti FE to see how older cards fare, and we also include all of the GeForce Turing Super cards and the Ampere cards to complete BTR’s 10-card Big Picture.

The Red Devil RX 6800 XT is factory clocked 90MHz higher than the reference version using the OC BIOS. According to its specifications, the Red Devil RX 6800 XT boost can clock up to 2340MHz out of the box. It also looks different from older generation classic Red Devils, arriving in a more neutral gray color instead of in all red and black. The Red Devil RX 6800 XT features a RGB mode whose LEDs default to a bright red which may be customized by PowerColor’s DevilZone software.

The Red Devil RX 6800 XT Features & Specifications

Here are the Red Devil RX 6800 XT specifications according to PowerColor:

Specifications

Features

Here are the Red Devil RX 6800 XT features.

Additional Information from PowerColor

• The card has 2 modes, OC and Silent. 281W / 255W Power target. There’s a bios switch on the side of the card. Even on performance mode it’s considerably quieter than reference board but the silent mode is truly whisper quiet, with a normal case with a optimal airflow, you most likely see the card run around 1000 rpm.
• The board has 16 Phase VS the 11+2 Phase VRM design on the reference design meaning is over spec’d in order to deliver the best stability and overclock headroom,not only capable of well over 400w but by having such VRM it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps are used with no compromises.
• The cooler features 2 x 100mm with a center 1x90mm fan, all with two ball bearing fans with 7 heat pipes (3X8Φ and 4X6Φ heatpipes) across a high density heatsink with a copper base. The PCB is shorter than the cooler.
• RGB is enhanced, Red Devil now connects to the motherboard aRGB (5v 3 pin connector).
• Red Devil has Mute fan technology, fans stop under 60C.
• The ports are LED illuminated. Now you can see in the dark where to plug.
• The card back plate does not have thermal pads but instead there are openings across the backplate for the PCB to breathe.
• Red Devil RX 6800 XT Graphics Card Limited Edition provides the unique and high quality crafted Red Devil keycap to make your keyboard look Devilish.
• Buyers or Red Devil Limited edition will be able to join exclusive giveaway as well access to the Devil Club website. A membership club for Devil users only which gives them access to News, Competitions, Downloads and most important instant support via Live chat.

The Big Navi 2 Radeon 6000 family

The Radeon 6800 competes with the RTX 3070 and is priced a little higher at $579 while the RTX 6800 XT at $649 competes with the RTX 3080 at $699. Next week, the RTX 6900 XT releases at $999 to compete with the $1499 RTX 3090.

Here is a die shot of the GPU powering the Radeon 6000 series courtesy of AMD

AMD has their own ecosystem for gamers and many unique new features for the Radeon 6000 series.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 37 games and 3 synthetic game benchmarks at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160 as well as SPEC, Workstation, and GPGPU benchmarks. Our latest games include Watch Dogs: Legions, Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. The testing platform uses a clean installation of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition, and our CPU is an i9-10900K which turbos all 10 cores to 5.1/5.0GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32GB of T-FORCE Dark Z DDR4 3600MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Red Devil RX 6800 XT.

A Closer Look at the PowerColor Red Devil RX 6800 XT

Although the Red Devil RX 6800 XT advertises itself as a premium 7nm card on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture which features FidelityFX, FreeSync 2 HDR and PCIe 4.0, the cover of the box uses almost no text in favor of stylized imagery.

The back of the box touts key features which now include HDMI 2.1 VRR, ray tracing technology, and VR Ready Premium as well as states it’s 850W power and system requirements although there are a lot of blank and unused space on the box. AMD’s technology features are highlighted, but the box does not even mention PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, RGB software and output LEDs and backplate.

Opening its very well-padded box, we now see advertising that instead probably should have been on the box’s outside. Also inside are a quick installation guide, RGB LED cable, and an invitation to join PowerColor’s Devil’s Club. In addition, a couple of key caps are included which could prove useful for benchmarking while wearing a HMD. PowerColor’s is a nicer presentation than AMD’s reference RX 6800 XT.

The Red Devil RX 6800 XT is a large tri-fan card in a three slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s colors and even more striking with the RGB on. Here is the Red Devil next to a RTX 3080 FE to show how much larger and beefier a card it is.

It uses two 1×8-pin PCIe connections. Above is the reference RX 6800 XT backplate.

The PowerColor Red Devil RX 6800 XT’s sturdy backplate features a stylized custom devil symbol that lights up in the color of your choice if synced, red being the default. This card is number 41 out of a 1000 limited edition set. We do not know what this means. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS. We didn’t bother with the Silent BIOS but it is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

The Red Devil’s RX 6800 XT’s connectors include 2 DisplayPorts, 1 HDMI connection, and a USB Type C connector. There is an LED that illuminates this panel for making easier connections in the dark.

The specifications look good and the card itself looks great with its default RGB bright red contrasting with the black backplate and its aggressively lit-up end perhaps stylistically reminiscent of an automotive grill.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.9 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Radeon RX 6800 XT Reference version 16GB, stock settings, on loan from AMD
• Red Devil RX 6800 XT 16GB, stock and overclocked, on short term loan from PowerColor
• RTX 3080 Founders Edition 10GB, stock, on loan from NVIDIA
• Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB Anniversary Edition, stock AE clocks.
• RTX 3090 Founders Edition 24GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3070 Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 2080 SUPER Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 2070 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32″ 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27″ 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan) – All benchmarking and overclocking performed with the case closed

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 456.96 for the RTX 3070, the RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 2070/2080 SUPER; and GeForce 456.16 Press drivers and GeForce 456.38 public drivers (functionally identical) are used for the other GeForce cards. GeForce GRD 457.30 is used for games released in late October and November although otherwise there were no general game performance driver improvements since Ampere launched.
• Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.11.2 public launch drivers used for the RX 6800 XT reference and Red Devil editions at their factory clocks and the Red Devil was also overclocked. Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.10.1 drivers used for the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition (AE) at AE clocks.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel.
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v2004. DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• MSI’s Afterburner, 4.6.3 beta to set the RTX 3070’s power and temperature limits to their maximums

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War
• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• F1 2020
• Mech Warrior 5: Mercenaries
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare
• Gears 5
• Anno 1800
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Metro Exodus
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Assetto Corsa: Competitione
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Project CARS 2
• Forza 7

DX11

• Crysis Remastered
• A Total War Saga: Troy
• Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
• The Outer Worlds
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Borderlands 3
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Far Cry New Dawn
• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Monster Hunter: World
• Overwatch
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 2.90 benchmark
• Sandra 2020 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperf 2020

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

We used MSI’s Afterburner to set all video cards’ power and temperature limits to maximum.

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. All Navi cards are capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

BTR received and benchmarked a Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB ($289.99 MSRP) review sample from PowerColor versus the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC 6GB ($309.99), and versus the RTX 2060 6GB Founders Edition ($299.99). Although these cards are designed for Ultra 1080P, 50 game benchmarks were also run at 2560×1440 to stress them beyond their limits.

We posted our Tuff Gaming X3 ASUS RX 5600 XT EVOC OC 6GB review in January where it solidly beat the GTX 1660 Ti and the Super, and nothing has changed since then. The new vBIOS updated the memory from 12Gbps to 14Gbps, and every Red Dragon RX 5600 XT for sale already comes with the faster 14GBps memory. Although its MSRP is $289, Amazon and Newegg are each selling the Red Dragon RX 5600 XT for $299. Newegg has the better deal since they include a game bundle with RE3, Monster Hunter World, and 3-month XBox PC game pass. The GeForce competitor to the RX 5600 XTs ($279-$309) are the entry level RTX 2060 ($299) video cards.

The PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 8GB

Although there is no AMD reference design, the Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB shares the same specifications including the maximum Boost clock, but its game/Boost clock is set higher at 1560MHz/1620MHz which is also 10MHz faster than the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC.

The Red Dragon specs look great and it should be a good match up versus the RTX 2060 Founders Edition, and versus the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC, a bigger and a more expensive card.

Unboxing the Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 8GB

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB comes in an medium box that advertise its features. The Red Dragon is an 6GB RX 5600 XT built on 7nm using AMD’s latest RDNA architecture and it features 4.0 PCIe support, Fidelity FX and FreeSync 2. “Memory clock at 14Gbps” makes it clear that it already uses the fastest memory.

The features and the minimum system requirements including the need for a 500W power supply are detailed on the back of the box. VR readiness, power efficiency, up to 8K video streaming, image sharpening, FreeSync 2 HDR, and other Radeon key features are listed.

Mute fan technology means the dual axial fans will come to a dead stop below 60℃ under a light gaming load providing silent gaming while reducing power consumption. PowerColor stresses that lower temperatures mean better performance. The cooling fan is equipped with two-ball bearings which increases longevity.

Opening the box we see a well-packed card and a quick start guide.

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB is a handsome basic black non-RGB card with a dragon logo on the fan as well as one on the back. One 8-pin PCIe connector is required.

Turning it over, we see the Red Dragon logo on a solid metal 1.5mm backplate that protects the PCB against flexing and prevents damaging the traces.

There is a dual-BIOS switch that either automatically overclocks or downclocks slightly depending on user noise/performance preferences. We used the OC BIOS for maximum performance, and the card remained very quiet even under load.

Looking at the Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB from one edge we see the large heatsinks with many dense fins that extend for much of the length of the PCB with the heatpipes connecting the heatsinks.

On one end, the connectors consist of three DisplayPorts and a HDMI connector. We like this setup better for SteamVR platforms than those with a DVI connector.

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB looks good from any angle.

Before we explore overclocking and then performance testing, let’s take a closer look at our test configuration.

Test Configuration, Settings, Benching Suite, Overclocking & Noise

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-8700K (HyperThreading and Turbo boost is on to 4.8GHz for all cores; Coffee Lake DX11 CPU graphics).
• EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard (Intel Z370 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB, dual channel at 3866 MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB at Red Dragon clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• TUF Gaming X3 ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC 6GB, at factory settings, on loan from ASUS/AMD
• RTX 2060 Founders Edition 6GB, at FE clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC 6GB, at XC clocks, on loan from EVGA
• EVGA GTX 1660 SUPER XC 6GB at EVGA factory settings, on loan from EVGA
• EVGA GTX 1660 XC 6GB at EVGA XC factory settings, on loan from EVGA
• EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB, factory SC clocks, on loan from EVGA
• Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse OC 4GB on loan from Sapphire
• PowerColor Red Devil RX 5500 XT 8GB on loan from PowerColor
• PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 8GB on loan from PowerColor
• Red Devil RX 570 4GB, at Red Devil factory overclocked settings, on loan from PowerColor
• 2 x 480GB Team Group SSDs – one for AMD, and one for NVIDIA
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SSD
• 2TB Micron 1100 enterprise class SSD
• T-FORCE 500GB Vulkan SSD, supplied by Team Group
• EVGA 1000G 1000W Gold power supply unit
• Cooler Master 240mm CPU water cooler
• EVGA Nu Audio PCIe soundcard, supplied by EVGA
• Edifier R1320T Active speakers
• EVGA DG-77, mid-tower case supplied by EVGA
• Monoprice Crystal Pro 4K

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 445.87 used for the RTX 2060. GeForce 441.87 used for all other NVIDIA cards except 441.41 used for the GTX 1660 and 436.48 drivers used for the GTX 1060 SC. Game Ready 441.41 drivers are used for the GTX 1660. See NVIDIA Control Panel image below.
• AMD Adrenalin Software 20.4.2 used for both RX 5600 XTs. 20.1.2 is used for the RX Vega 56 and 19.12.2 is used for the RX 5500 XTs and the Red Devils RX 590 and RX 570. See the AMD Control Panel image below.
• VSync is forced off.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by the 99th percentile frametime in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 10 64-bit Home edition. DX11 titles are run under DX11 render paths. DX12 titles are generally run under the DX12 render path unless performance is lower than with DX11; and Borderlands 3, Total War Warhammer II, and Hitman 2 are tested on DX11 and on DX12. Seven games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• All 50 games are patched to their latest versions at time of posting.
• The Adrenalin 2020 control panel is used to set Radeon options
• The NVIDIA control panel is used for GeForce settings
• OCAT, latest version
• Fraps, latest version
• Afterburner, latest non-beta version
• Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark

50 PC Game benchmark suite & 3 synthetic tests

Vulkan Games

• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• Star Control Origins
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Doom

DX12 Games

• Call of Duty Modern Warfare
• Borderlands 3
• Gears 5
• Control
• F1 2019
• Anno 1800
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Metro Exodus
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Warhammer: Vermintide 2
• Total War: Warhammer II
• Forza 7
• Sniper Elite 4
• Civilization VI
• Ashes of the Singularity Escalation

DX11 Games

• Mech Warrior 5: Mercenaries
• Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
• Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Borderlands 3
• Devil May Cry 5
• FarCry New Dawn
• Anthem
• Resident Evil 2
• Just Cause 4
• Hitman 2
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
• Conan Exiles
• Far Cry 5
• Final Fantasy XV
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Monster Hunter: World
• Star Wars: Battlefront II
• Middle Earth: Shadow of War
• Total Wars: Warhammer II
• Project CARS 2
• Prey
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• For Honor
• Overwatch
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Fallout 4
• The Witcher 3
• Grand Theft Auto V

Synthetic

• Firestrike – Basic & Extreme
• Time Spy DX12
• Superposition

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so as to be apples-to-apples when compared to NVIDIA’s control panel settings – all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings.

We pick the above Custom Global Performance settings for our benchmarking which has to be precisely repeatable, so Surface Format and other optimizations are disabled. Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings that match AMD’s settings.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures, and noise next.

Overclocking, temperatures & noise

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB is a low-power and quiet card even when overclocked. At stock settings, we could not hear it over the fans of our PC even when it ramps up, unlike with the Red Devil RX 590 or even the RX 570.

Above default tuning settings used maxed-out Heaven 4.0 running at stock clocks which allowed the Boost clocks to stay right around 1739MHz which is well above AMD’s typical clocks and also 10MHz higher than the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC’s average 1729MHz clock.

The Red Dragon stayed cool generally at or below 75℃ even under a heavy load so its dual fans never became intrusive although it is slightly louder than the ASUS card. The RTX 2060 is another quiet card and it’s hard to pick based on (lack of) noise. At stock fan settings, the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB runs about 15℃ warmer than the ASUS card’s temperatures but we couldn’t hear either card over our PC’s cooling fans.

Overclocking is locked down to +2% on the core (1787MHz) and a max memory speed of 1860MHz. However, maxing out the overclock uses 25W more power and the temps go up.

If the power limit is set to maximum, performance increases by a small fraction, but the extra power used generates extra heat. For each user, we would recommend finding their GPU’s sweet spot for undervolting with max performance.

We will check performance compared with two other competing cards using 50 games, and then head for our conclusion.

Performance Summary Charts & Conclusion

Here are the performance results of 50 games and 3 synthetic tests comparing the PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB with the ASUS RX 5600 EVO OC 6GB, and versus the RX 2060 Founders Edition 6GB. Although the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT is designed for Ultra 1080P, the benches were also run at 2560×1440 to push the card beyond its limits.

Most gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. The games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the .1 minimums are expressed by frametimes in ms where lower numbers are better.

The first column gives the ($299) RTX 2060 FE performance results versus the Red Dragon RX 5600 XT ($289) in the second, and versus the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC ($309) in the last. Performance “wins” are given by yellow text; yellow is also used for ties.

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT is consistently faster than the more expensive ASUS EVO OC XT, probably due to its higher game/boost clocks. And it also does very well against the more expensive RTX 2060 where they trade blows.

Of course, the bigger picture adds the less expensive GTX 1660 Super and Ti cards into the mix. However, the Ti was almost made instantly irrelevant by the Super card which was not only fractionally slower, but much less expensive

The Big Picture

In this larger view, we add a few more cards – the EVGA GTX 1660 Super XC as well as a Red Devil RX Vega 56. In addition, we benchmark a Red Devil RX 590 and a vanilla EVGA RTX 1660 XC and a EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB as well as the lower end Pulse and Red Dragon RX 5500 XTs and the Red Devil RX 570.

We can see that the ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC is much faster than either the GTX 1660 Super or the Ti winning most of the benches. Although the GTX 1660 Ti has never justified its $50 more expensive price tag against the Super, the RX 5600 XT gives much more performance for its $289 price tag. The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT trades blows with the RTX 2060. Considering that it is priced $10 cheaper than the RTX 2060 and $20 cheaper than the slower ASUS RTX 5600 XT, we’d say it is a good value.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB at $289/$299 (PowerColor’s MSRP is $289; we find it for sale at $299) brings an incrementally higher level of performance than the $309 ASUS RX 5600 T EVO OC, and it does very well against the RTX 2060. Any of these three cards would be an excellent upgrade from a RX 560/570 level of card. For playing older games, they are OK for 1440P gaming although they may require lowering settings for some modern titles.

AMD brings some great new features with Adrenalin 2020 software that turns it into an all-in-one platform for launching games, streaming, and sharing. And there is currently a great gaming bundle that really adds to the Red Dragon’s value at Newegg. Bundled RE3, Monster Hunter World, and a 3 month Xbox PC Pass bundle are very tempting free add-ons. The RTX 2060 that are priced at $299 do not come with any game bundles. For some gamers, their choice may come down to deciding if ray tracing effects with an entry level card are worth it now for the few games that implement some of these features coupled with a performance hit.

The PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB is a very handsome and solid modern Navi card with improving performance potential for AMD gamers that no longer happens with the older Polaris and Vega cards.

Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB Pros

• The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB brings great new features at $289 and it’s faster than the more expensive ASUS RX 5600 XT EVO OC
• 14Gbps memory out of the box with no need to update the BIOS
• New RDNA architecture brings higher performance per clock and per watt
• Twenty new or updated features include anti-lag technology and Radeon Boost for competitive gamers and image sharpening for everyone with Adrenalin 2020 drivers
• The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT 6GB is a fast card for ultra 1080P gaming, high 1440P gaming, and a performance and power improvement over the Polaris series
• The Red Dragon RX 5600 XT trades performance blows with the RTX 2060
• Comes bundled with RE3, Monster Hunter World, and with the XBox PC Pass by some resellers

Cons: None

Nitpicks: No hardware ray tracing; overclocking locked down

The Verdict: Good Value

• 7nm hardware and new architecture brings 1080P RX 5600 XT AMD graphic cards to a higher playing field. RDNA will power several more years of Radeon PC graphics
• The RX 5600 XT brings a solid improvement over AMD’s last Polaris generation, and Adrenalin 2020 Edition software brings welcome new and improved features for AMD gamers

Extra new choices arriving with the RX 5600 XT benefit 1080P/1440P gamers looking for an upgrade. PowerColor makes an exceptionally nice offering with the Red Dragon, and together with its bundled games at Newegg for a limited time sweeten the deal.

We are going to take a short break to set up a Z390 motherboard with a clean installation of Win 10 in anticipation of an upcoming T-Force 2x32GB DDR4 memory kit review. Mario will post an Autonomous L-Shaped standing desk review in the meantime.

Happy Gaming!

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, will be showing off it’s PowerColor Red Dragon and Red Devil models based on AMD’s latest RX 5600 XT with 6GB GDDR6 at their off-CES 2020 suite for the next two days. Here are the specifications of the PowerColor Red Dragon and Red Devil 5600 XT with pictures.

The Red Devil RX 5600 XT is PowerColor’s premium card.

The Red Dragon also looks great!

2020 has just begun and there are a lot of exciting products and events coming up. We are hoping to bring BTR’s readers a PowerColor RX 5600 XT review soon.

For more product information, visit: www.powercolor.com.

Happy 2020 and Happy Gaming!

BTR received a PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB ($199 – Updated by PowerColor to $219.99) review sample on Friday, and we have benchmarked it using 46 games versus the ($169) Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB. Although the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB is designed for High/Ultra 1080P, BTR’s 46 game benchmarks were run at Ultra 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440 to stress it beyond its limits.

We already posted our Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse 4GB OC review earlier this morning and we will not repeat all the same information here. We are benchmarking the same cards, but now with the addition of the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB we are placing a special emphasis on comparing the performance of 4GB vs. 8GB of vRAM of similarly clocked RX 5500 XTs.

The PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB

Although there is no AMD reference design, the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB shares the same specifications including the 1845MHz maximum Boost clock, but its game clock is set 20MHz higher at 1437MHz which also matches its core clocks with the Sapphire RX 5500 XT 4GB Pulse.

The specifications look good, it is fully featured, and the card looks awesome, so let’s unbox it and look more closely at it before we benchmark it.

Unboxing the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB

The Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB comes in an small box that advertise its features. The Red Dragon is an 8GB RX 5500 XT built on 7nm using AMD’s latest RDNA architecture and it features 4.0 PCIe support, Fidelity FX and FreeSync 2.

The features and the minimum system requirements including the need for a 450W power supply are detailed on the back of the box. Power efficiency, 8K video streaming, and other Radeon key features are detailed.

Mute fan technology means the dual axial fans will come to a dead stop below 60℃ under a light gaming load providing silent gaming while reducing power consumption. PowerColor stresses that lower temperatures mean better performance and we shall see that it runs almost 10C cooler than the Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse. The cooling fan is equipped with two-ball bearings which increases longevity.

Opening the box we see a quick start guide.

The Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB is a handsome card.

Turning it over, we see the Red Dragon logo on a solid metal 1.5mm backplate that protects the PCB against flexing and prevents damaging the traces.

Looking at the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB from one edge we see the large heatsink with many dense fins that extend for much of the length of the PCB. Note that one 8-pin PCIe connector is required unlike the 6-pin+8-pin connectors required for the Red Devil RX 590.

We see the heatpipes connecting the heatsinks.

On the one end, the connectors consist of one DisplayPorts, one DVI connector, and a HDMI connector. We don’t like this setup as well as the cards that use three DisplayPort connectors which is better for VR setups.

The Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB looks great from any angle. But before we explore overclocking and then performance testing, let’s take a closer look at our test configuration.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-8700K (HyperThreading and Turbo boost is on to 4.8GHz for all cores; Coffee Lake DX11 CPU graphics).
• EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard (Intel Z370 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB, dual channel at 3866 MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB at Red Dragon clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse OC 4GB, on loan from Sapphire
• EVGA GTX 1660 XC 6GB at EVGA factory settings, on loan from EVGA
• Red Devil RX 570 4GB, at Red Devil factory overclocked settings, on loan from PowerColor
• EVGA GTX 1060 SC 6GB, factory SC clocks, on loan from EVGA
• 2 x 480GB Team Group SSDs – one for AMD, and one for NVIDIA
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SSD
• 2TB Micron 1100 enterprise class SSD
• 500GB Vulkan SSD, supplied by Team Group
• Seasonic 850W Gold Focus power supply unit
• Cooler Master 240mm CPU water cooler
• EVGA Nu Audio PCIe soundcard, supplied by EVGA
• Edifier R1320T Active speakers
• EVGA DG-77, mid-tower case supplied by EVGA
• LG 43″ HDR 4K TV
• Monoprice Crystal Pro 4K

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 436.48 drivers used for the GTX 1060 SC. Game Ready 441.41 drivers are used for the GTX 1660. See NVIDIA Control Panel image below.
• AMD Adrenalin Software 19.12.2 (press drivers) is used for the Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB, the RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB, the Red Devil RX 590 8GB and the RX 570 4GB. See the AMD Control Panel image below.
• VSync is forced off.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by the 99th percentile frametime in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 10 64-bit Home edition. DX11 titles are run under DX11 render paths. DX12 titles are generally run under the DX12 render path unless performance is lower than with DX11; and Borderlands 3, Total War Warhammer II, and Hitman 2 are tested on DX11 and on DX12. Five games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• All 46 games are patched to their latest versions at time of posting.
• The Adrenalin 2020 control panel is used to set Radeon options
• The NVIDIA control panel is used for GeForce settings
• OCAT, latest version
• Fraps, latest version
• Afterburner, latest non-beta version
• Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark

46 PC Game benchmark suite & 3 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• Firestrike – Basic & Extreme
• Time Spy DX12
• Superposition

DX11 Games

• Grand Theft Auto V
• The Witcher 3
• Fallout 4
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Overwatch
• For Honor
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Project CARS 2
• Total Wars: Warhammer II
• Middle Earth: Shadow of War
• Star Wars: Battlefront II
• Monster Hunter: World
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Final Fantasy XV
• Far Cry 5
• Conan Exiles
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
• Hitman 2
• Just Cause 4
• Resident Evil 2
• Anthem
• FarCry New Dawn
• Devil May Cry 5
• Borderlands 3
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• The Outer Worlds

DX12 Games

• Civilization VI
• Sniper Elite 4
• Forza 7
• Total War: Warhammer II
• Warhammer: Vermintide 2
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Hitman 2
• Battlefield V
• Metro Exodus
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Anno 1800
• F1 2019
• Control
• Gears 5
• Borderlands 3
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare

Vulkan Games

• DOOM
• Strange Brigade
• World War Z
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• Red Dead Redemption 2

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so as to be apples-to-apples when compared to NVIDIA’s control panel settings – all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings.

We pick the above Custom Global Performance settings for our benchmarking which has to be precisely repeatable, so Surface Format and other optimizations are disabled. As above, Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings that match AMD’s settings.

We did not adjust any card’s Power and Temperature limits since it does not benefit low-power cards.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures, and noise next.

Overclocking, temperatures & noise

The Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB is a low-power and quiet card even when overclocked. We could not hear it over the fans of our PC even when it ramps up, unlike with the Red Devil RX 590 or even the RX 570. Because of extreme time pressure, we will spend more time manually overclocking and testing performance in a follow-up overclocking showdown.

Here is Heaven 4.0 running at stock clocks which allowed the Boost to stay locked between 1828MHz and 1838MHz which is well above AMD’s typical game clock of 1717MHz and very slightly higher than the Sapphire Pulse XT GPU clocks. Under a heavy gaming load, we never saw it hit AMD’s maximum boost clock of 1845MHz after it warmed up.

The card stayed cool generally at or below 61℃ even under a heavy load so its dual fans never became intrusive. The Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB runs about 8-10℃ cooler than the Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse temperatures although we couldn’t hear either card over our PC’s cooling fans.

We will check performance compared with five other competing cards using 46 games while focusing on 4GB vs. 8GB performance, and then head for our conclusion.

Our friends at PowerColor have announced they are bringing back their popular Water cooled series, now the Liquid Devil RX 5700 XT. It is targeted to a very specific gamer that already has or planning to have a custom water cooling loop.

The Liquid Devil RX 5700 XT comes with special binned GPUs with it’s boost clock factory set up to 2070Mhz and it uses a nickle plated copper base for excellent thermal transfer.

The Liquid Devil features 10 Phase VRM versus 7 on the Reference design and 8 on most other AIBs. And PowerColor has built it with a new 12-layer PCB designed with 10 VRMs, utilizing DrMOS and high-polymer capacitors capable of handling over 300W of power for an overclocker who wants to utilize its Unleash BIOS to full potential.

Priced at 599$ / 599€ / 569£, the Liquid Devil is the only RX 5700 XT in this price range with ultra performance that is watercooled by a premium waterblock.

The Red Devil RX 5700 arrived yesterday at BTR for evaluation priced at $389. We have been benching it versus the $349 RTX 2060 Founders Edition (FE) and the $399 RTX 2060 SUPER FE video cards using 44 games and 3 synthetic benchmarks.

We will also compare the performance of these three competing cards with the RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition (AE), the RTX 2070 SUPER FE, the liquid-cooled Vega 64 and the Red Devil RX Vega 56. Ten other cards’ recent performance results are also included to complete BTR’s Big Picture.

The Red Devil RX 5700 is factory clocked +25MHz higher than the reference version. According to its specifications, the Red Devil RX 5700 boost can clock up to 1750MHz while the reference card clocks up to 1725MHz. It also looks different from the classic Red Devils, arriving in a more neutral gray color instead of in all red and black. For the first time, the Red Devil RX 5700 features a RGB mode which is supported in AMD’s drivers. Its LEDs default to a bright red which may be customized by the included DevilZone software.

The Red Devil RX 5700 Features & Specifications

Here are the Red Devil RX 5700 features according to PowerColor:

Features

• The card has 2 modes, Overclock and Silent which have a 180W and 160W power target respectively. These modes are activated by a a BIOS switch on the side of the card. It is designed to be very quiet. The overclock mode is considerably quieter than the reference RX 5700’s blower, but the silent mode is whisper quiet.
• The board has 10 Phase VS; the 7 Phase VRM design on the reference design is over spec’d in order to deliver excellent stability and overclocking headroom. The difference is the 300W of the Red Devil versus the 220W of the reference design.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps
• The cooler features 2 x 100mm ball bearing fans with 5 heat pipes across a high density heatsink with a copper base. The PCB is shorter than the cooler – 240mm for the PCB and 300mm for the cooler. Besides having more dissipation area, because the PCB is shorter than the cooler, its efficiency is improved since the hot air isn’t trapped as easily.
• The Red Devil RX 5700 now has RGB lighting! Full RGB support is targeted by the next Adrenalin Software driver release.
• The Red Devil RX 5700 cooler shroud is now more neutral and it’s easier for buyers to customize their gaming color scheme with RGB lighting. And the ports are LED illuminated.
• All Red Devil RX 5700 are bundled with the AMD promotional Xbox Game pass for 3 months.
• A Devil Club invitation is included to give access to PowerColor news, competitions, downloads, and instant support via live chat.

Specifications

Here are PowerColor’s Red Devil RX 5700 specifications.

The Test Bed

BTR’s test bed consists of 44 games and 3 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. Our newest game is Wolfenstein: Youngblood which we just validated for benching yesterday. The testing platform is a recent install of Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition, and we are using an i7-8700K which turbos all 6 cores to 4.8GHz, an EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard, and 16GB of T-FORCE XTREEM DDR4 3866MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700.

A Closer Look at the PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700

The Red Devil RX 5700 advertises itself as a premium 7nm card on AMD’s RDNA architecture which features FidelityFX, FreeSync 2 HDR and PCIe 4.0.

The back of the box touts its key features as well as it’s 650W power and system requirements. AMD’s technology features are highlighted, and the box also emphasizes PowerColor’s cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, RGB software, and output LEDs.

Opening its very well-padded box, we see a quick installation guide, driver CD, and an invitation to join PowerColor’s Devil’s Club. In addition, a code for a 3-month XBox Game Pass is included.

The Red Devil RX 5700 is a large tri-fan card in a 2.5 slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s new colors and even more striking with the RGB on. Although it is the same size as the Red Devil RX Vega 56, it is about 1/2 inch thinner. It uses two PCIe connections, a 1×8-pin and a 1×6-pin. From the other side we can see the cooler fins overhanging the PCB.

The PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700’s sturdy backplate no longer features a pentagram. Instead there is a stylized custom devil symbol that lights up in the color of your choice.

The Red Devil’s RX 5700’s connectors include 3 DisplayPorts, 1 HDMI connection, and a Dual-Link DVI connector. They are conveniently LED lit for plugging in cables without needing to turn on the lights.

The specifications look good and the card itself looks great with its default RGB bright red contrasting with the black backplate.

Finally here is an image of the PCB courtesy of PowerColor.

Let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-8700K (HyperThreading and Turbo boost are on to 4.8GHz for all cores; Coffee Lake DX11 CPU graphics).
• EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard (Intel Z370 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE XTREEM (2×8 GB, dual channel at 3866 MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Red Devil RX 5700 8GB, at Red Devil clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• RX 5700 XT Anniversary Edition 8 GB, at stock AE speeds
• Red Devil RX Vega 56 8GB, at Red Devil clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• Gigabyte RX Vega 64 8GB, Liquid-cooled edition, at liquid cooled edition clocks
• GeForce RTX 2060 6GB Founders Edition, at Founder Edition clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB Founders Edition, at Founder Edition clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB Founders Edition, at Founder Edition clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 9 other cards are included in the Big Picture as listed on its chart. The RX 5700 XT is the Anniversary edition at stock RX 5700 XT clocks (the only difference is that the Anniversary edition GPU is binned, overclocked 75MHz, and with a 10W higher board power).
• EVGA Nu Audio PCIe soundcard, supplied by EVGA
• 480 GB Team Group SSD
• 1.92 TB San Disk enterprise class SSD
• 2 TB Micron 1100 SSD
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD, supplied by Team Group
• Seasonic 850W Gold Focus power supply unit
• EVGA CLC 280mm CPU water cooler, supplied by EVGA
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• Edifier R1280T active speakers
• EVGA DG-77, mid-tower case supplied by EVGA
• Monoprice Crystal Pro 4K

Test Configuration – Software

• AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 19.8.1 for the RX 5700/XT and the RX Vega 56/64. The Big Picture chart lists the driver used for each of the other Radeons.
• NVIDIA’s GeForce 431.16 drivers used for the RTX 2060 and 2060/2070 SUPER cards. The Big Picture chart lists the driver used for each of the other GeForce cards.
• VSync is forced off.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 10 64-bit Home edition v1903. All DX11 titles were run under DX11 render paths. DX12 titles are generally run under the DX12 render path unless performance is lower than with DX11; Hitman 2 and TW: Warhammer II are run on both pathways. Three games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• Wattman
• OCAT
• Fraps

44 PC Game benchmark suite & 3 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• Firestrike – Basic & Extreme
• Time Spy DX12
• Superposition

DX11 Games

• Grand Theft Auto V
• The Witcher 3
• Fallout 4
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Overwatch
• For Honor
• Ghost Recon Wildlands
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• Prey
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Project CARS 2
• Middle Earth: Shadow of War
• Total War: Warhammer II
• Destiny 2
• Star Wars: Battlefront II
• Monster Hunter: World
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Final Fantasy XV
• Far Cry 5
• Conan: Exiles
• F1 2018
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
• Hitman 2
• Just Cause 4
• Resident Evil 2
• Anthem
• Devil May Cry 5
• Far Cry New Dawn

DX12 Games

• Gears of War 4
• Civilization VI
• Sniper Elite 4
• Forza 7
• Total War: Warhammer II
• Total War: Vermintide II
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Battlefield V
• Hitman 2
• Metro Exodus
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• F1 2019
• Anno 1800

Vulkan Games

• DOOM
• Wolfenstein: The New Colossus
• Strange Brigade
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood

AMD Control Center Radeon Settings

All AMD settings are set so as to be apples-to-apples when compared to NVIDIA’s control panel settings – all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings.

We used Wattman to set power, temperature and fan limits are set to their maximums to prevent throttling for all Radeons.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

We used MSI’s Afterburner to set our GeForce cards’ highest Power and Temperature targets. By setting the Power Limits and Temperature limits to maximum for each card, they do not throttle, but they can each reach and maintain their individual maximum clocks, stock or overclocked.

This overclocking showdown is the follow-up to BTR’s launch review of the EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black versus the PowerColor Red Devils RX 590 and RX Vega 56, and versus the GTX 1070. Today we have optimized and maxed-out all individual overclocks with all performance options set to their highest limits to get the most performance from each card.

At stock, the GTX 1660 Ti won nearly all of the 40 games we tested over the Red Devil RX 590, and it also beat the GTX 1070, but it fell short of the premium Red Devil RX Vega 56’s performance. This time, we will overclock all four cards manually each as far as they will go to see where they stand in relation to each other and to see if anything changes.

The GTX 1660 Ti OC

We found our own final stable manual overclock was much higher than Precision X1’s +114MHz scan recommendation. We added 175MHz to the core to boost the clocks close to 2050MHz. We also added 800MHz to the GDDR6 memory overclock, and although it could probably go higher, we found that our core overclock began to destabilize possibly due to the comparatively limited power delivery capabilities of an EVGA entry-level Black GTX 1660 Ti.

Our core overclock of the GTX 1660 Ti seems to be in line with what is expected from Turing GPUs.

The Red Devil RX Vega 56 OC

The premium PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 uses the same two 8-pin PCIe power connectors as the reference RX Vega 56. However, we saw the original reference RX Vega 56 throttle its clocks regularly under load as its power delivery was apparently insufficient for overclocking vs. the GTX 1070 Ti. In contrast, the Red Devil RX Vega 56 features a 12-phase power delivery system plus a huge heatsink and three fans. The Red Devil’s clocks flatline at maximum boost unlike the reference RX Vega 56 which tends to throttle under load.

For our own gaming, we undervolt our RX Vega 56 and take a slight performance hit for big power savings, but for overclocking maximum-performance-damn-the-power-consumption, it requires brute force. We set the power limit and voltages up as high as they can go and set the clocks right to the edge of instability while using a somewhat loud and aggressive fan profile.

Our PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 uses Hynix memory which doesn’t overclock particularly well in this case so we found an offset of +150MHz is its ceiling for stable performance paired with a stock-clocked core. However, for overall rock solid stability and overall maximum performance, we settled on a 4.0% overclock for an average boost above 1625MHz with its memory clocks overclocked +135MHz to 935MHz.

The GTX 1070 OC

Overclocking the Founders Edition of the GTX 1070

We devoted a separate evaluation to overclocking the GTX 1080 Founders Edition which also applies to the GTX 1070. Our Founders Edition’s final stable offset was +140 MHz to the core which settled in around 2012MHz with GPU Boost, and we added 520MHz to achieve a 4519MHz final stable memory clock.

We did not need to adjust the fan profile, but left it on automatic. The fan never becomes obtrusive as we left its profile at stock, and the GPU remained relatively cool and did not throttle under overclocking.

The Red Devil RX 590 OC

The $279 Red Devil of the RX 590 8GB is clocked up from the reference 1545MHz to its maximum boost speeds of 1576MHz. The details of our original overclocking may be found here. We found that as long as the the Power and Temperature limits are maximized, it will not throttle even with the Silent BIOS profile.

We settled on a 2.5% overclock or +40MHz to the core for a 1615MHz boost, with memory clocks overclocked +175MHz to 2175MHz. We found that higher memory clocks gained significant performance over a slightly higher core overclock. Adjusting the voltage – undervolting or undervolting – made no practical difference, and we achieved stability in all of our 40 tested games again using overclocking brute force.

Testing Platform

We test 40 games and 3 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440. Our platform is a recent installation of Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition, and we are using an i7-8700K which turbos all 6 cores to 4.7GHz, an EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 3333MHz. The games, settings, and hardware are identical except for the cards being compared.

Before we run our overclocked benchmarks, let’s check out the test configuration.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-8700K (HyperThreading and Turbo boost is on to 4.7GHz for all cores; Coffee Lake DX11 CPU graphics).
• EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard (Intel Z370 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• HyperX 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB, dual channel at 3333 MHz), supplied by HyperX
• EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black 6GB, stock GTX 1660 Ti clocks, on loan from EVGA
• GTX 1070 8GB Founders Edition, stock FE clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• Red Devil RX Vega 56 8GB, at factory overclocked settings, on loan from PowerColor
• Red Devil RX 590 8GB, at factory overclocked settings, on loan from PowerColor
• 2 x 480GB Team Group SSDs – one for AMD, and one for NVIDIA
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SSD
• 2TB Micron 1100 enterprise class SSD
• Seasonic 850W Gold Focus power supply unit
• EVGA CLC 280mm CPU water cooler, supplied by EVGA
• EVGA Nu Audio PCIe soundcard, supplied by EVGA
• Edifier R1320T Active speakers
• EVGA DG-77, mid-tower case supplied by EVGA
• LG 43″ HDR 4K TV
• Monoprice Crystal Pro 4K

Test Configuration – Software

• Nvidia’s GeForce 418.91 press drivers and 419.17 which have the same functionality and performance. See NVIDIA Control Panel image below.
• AMD Adrenalin Software 19.2.3 drivers. See the AMD Control Panel image below.
• VSync is forced off.
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 10 64-bit Home edition. All DX11 titles were run under DX11 render paths. DX12 titles are generally run under the DX12 render path unless performance is lower than with DX11. Three games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• All 40 games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication.
• WattMan used to set Radeon cooling and power options.
• Precision X1 used for all GeForce settings and for overclocking.
• OCAT, latest version
• Fraps, latest version
• Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark

40 PC Game benchmark suite & 4 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• Firestrike – Basic & Extreme
• Time Spy DX12
• Superposition

DX11 Games

• Grand Theft Auto V
• The Witcher 3
• Fallout 4
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Battlefield 1
• For Honor
• Ghost Recon Wildlands
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• Prey
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Project CARS 2
• Total Wars: Warhammer II
• Middle Earth: Shadow of War
• Destiny 2
• Star Wars: Battlefront II
• Monster Hunter: World
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Final Fantasy XV
• Far Cry 5
• The Crew 2
• Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
• Hitman 2
• Just Cause 4
• Resident Evil 2

DX12 Games

• Tom Clancy’s The Division
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Hitman
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Deus Ex Mankind Divided
• Gears of War 4
• Civilization VI
• Sniper Elite 4
• Forza 7
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Battlefield V
• Metro Exodus

Vulkan Games

• DOOM
• Wolfenstein: The New Colossus
• Strange Brigade

AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so as to be apples-to-apples when compared to NVIDIA’s control panel settings – all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings.

We use Wattman to set the Radeons’ power, temperature and fan settings to their maximums.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings that match AMD’s settings.

We used the latest beta of Precision X1 to set all GeForces’ highest Power and Temperature targets and for our overclocks.

By setting the Power Limits and Temperature limits to maximum for each card, they do not throttle, but they can each reach and maintain their individual maximum clocks. This is particularly beneficial for high power cards.

Let’s check out the performance of our 4 target cards to conclude how they stand each manually overclocked in relation to each other.

Performance summary charts

Here are the performance results of 40 games and 3 synthetic tests comparing the stock and overclocked GTX 1660 Ti XC Black versus the Red Devils RX Vega 56 and RX 590 and versus the GTX 1070 Founders Edition. The highest settings are always chosen and the settings are listed on the charts. The benches were run at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1440.

Most gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. A few games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the .1 minimums are expressed by frametimes in ms where lower numbers are better. All overclocked numbers are represented by yellow text while stock values are in white text.

The first four columns are devoted to the Red Devil RX 590 versus the GTX 1660 Ti. The next two columns are devoted to the GTX 1070 and the final two columns to the Red Devil RX Vega 56. “OC” refers to the overclocked cards’ performance and the overclocked results are shown by yellow text. As always, open each chart in a separate tab for the best viewing.

We see three of our cards each gain decent performance from manual overclocking while the Red Devil RX 590 gains a bit less as it doesn’t appear to have a lot of headroom. The Red Devil is a premium RX Vega 56 that is in a higher performance and price range than the other three cards and its performance should not be considered representative of a reference RX Vega 56, stock or overclocked.

The stock or overclocked GTX 1660 Ti Black wins more benchmarks than it loses against the GTX 1070 FE and it beats the Red Devil RX 590 in 39 of the 40 games we benchmarked. Nothing has changed significantly from overclocking although a few of the individual results have shifted their positions due to overclocking variability.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

This has been a fun and interesting overclocking exploration evaluating the manually overclocked EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black versus the overclocked Red Devils RX 590 and RX Vega 56 and versus the overclocked GTX 1070 FE. All four cards appear to scale well with each of their respective overclocks although their overall ranking has not changed from the stock values reported in our original GTX 1660 Ti launch review.

The EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Ti Black is the quietest of the four cards. It is quieter than the GTX 1070 FE and significantly quieter than either Red Devil RX Vega 56 or RX 590 especially when all of the cards are overclocked and under full load. The Radeons also tend to use a lot of power when overclocked especially if undervolting isn’t also used.

The overall pricing hasn’t changed from ten days ago when the GTX 1660 Ti launched. The EVGA GTX 1660 Ti Black sits at $279 with the entry-level cards although it distinguishes itself by bundling a racing game, Grip. The Red Devil RX 590 is at $259 generally with a 3-game bundle, the GTX 1070 is still priced pretty high at $359, and the aftermarket RX Vega 56 cards are still in the $349 and up range price in the USA market. There are a lot of good choices for mainstream gamers and now may be an excellent time to upgrade from an older generation card.

Later this week, we will continue our Driver Performance Analyses series with a new post as a GeForce driver has dropped this morning. Let us know in the comments below which two GeForce cards you would like to see benchmarked.

We will also continue our VR performance benching series next week.

Happy Gaming!