AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Review: Look out, RTX 2060

1660 Ti-like pricing and better-than-2060 performance!

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

Starting off where AMD markets the card -- at 1080p resolutions using ultra settings -- what you may first notice is the card competing with and in 8 out of 11 titles, beating out a reference-clocked RTX 2060. While the margin of victory wasn’t big in most titles (an average of about 3 fps across all games) the new AMD card is still faster overall by about three-percent. 

Compared to the GTX 1660 Ti, which starts out around $20 less than the $289 Sapphire Pulse OC, the 5600 XT is about 19% faster on average. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t expect this card was going to punch up a weight class and reach 2060 performance levels, but it undoubtedly does.

Part of the reason for this performance level is due to using the OC BIOS on the card. After we received an updated BIOS (our card was shipped with reference clocks and tested there initially), the card ran close to 1,700 MHz during the testing. This is compared to the 1,550 MHz the card ran with the reference BIOS or an increase of over 9-percent. Memory speeds were also boosted from the 1,500 MHz (288 GB/s) reference speeds to 1,750 MHz, increasing bandwidth by over 16-percent (288 GB/s to 336 GB/s). The performance will vary by card as each AMD partner card will have different clock speeds. 

Division 2

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

Borderlands 3

Gears of War 5

Strange Brigade

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Far Cry 5

Metro: Exodus

Final Fantasy XIV

Forza Horizon 4

Battlefield V

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: GPU Benchmarks

MORE: All Graphics Content

Joe Shields
Staff Writer, Components

Joe Shields is a staff writer at Tom’s Hardware. He reviews motherboards and PC components.