In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our recently updated benchmark suite that tests 10 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). I also slipped in a few variations on the same games for comparisons like DX11 to DX12, OpenGL to Vulkan, and a couple of games are just tested at their highest setting and lower but still high detail options to show the performance difference when things are turned down slightly. In total, each video card is tested 41 times and that makes for a huge mess of graphs when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start off with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read the result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So how did the XFX RX 570 RS perform? Well the resolution you would be most likely looking at playing at with a card like this is 1080p and at that resolution, it did extremely well. Only one game was in the sub 30 FPS category. Four are playable at 30-60 but may need some tweaking to be smooth and 8 came in above 60 FPS. One of those is even up over 120 FPS though unless you are playing games like LoL, CS:GO, and Overwatch I don’t see this being the best card for someone looking to game on a 120 or higher Hz refresh rate monitor. Going up to 1440p the performance dropped but really it was still mostly playable with a majority of the games being in the 30-60 range. Then of course at 4k, a resolution I would never recommend trying with a mid-range card like this, only a few games were playable at all and most were really bad.

As for the actual results, I have those as well. When comparing the RX 570 RS against the other cards, the results were similar to the synthetic tests with it falling in between a lot of the 470’s most of the time. It did outperform the GTX 1060 in Doom Vulkan and Hitman in DX11 though. The performance between DX11 and DX12 was minimal in Hitman but the doom results show Vulkan giving a huge jump from 72 FPS all the way up to 115 FPS. In Deus Ex and Wildlands dropping down to the High settings was the difference between 30 FPS and 60 or nearly 60 FPS in both games so that is good information to keep in mind. One bump down in a few of today's more demanding games was the difference between smooth and iffy gameplay.