Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5700 XT Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMARK

3DMARK is the go-to benchmark for all enthusiasts. It covers tests for everything from tablets and notebooks to gaming laptops and the most powerful gaming machines.

In both Time Spy Extreme and Firestrike Ultra, the results followed a similar pattern. In Time Spy Extreme, our Pulse RX 5700 XT came in just ahead of both the Radeon RX 5700 and the Radeon RX 5700 XT, and just behind the Radeon VII card. The Pulse RX 5700 XT achieved an overall score of 3920 on Time Spy Extreme and a graphics score of 3980. In fact, the Pulse RX 5700 XT achieved the same overall score as the reference 5700 XT. However, on Firestrike Ultra, our Pulse RX 5700 XT came out slightly ahead of its reference counterpart with an overall score of 6090 and a graphics score of 6114.

VR MARK

VR Mark consists of three separate tests, each more intensive on your system than the last. These tests are The Orange Room, the Cyan Room, and the Blue Room. The Orange Room test is the least intense and is meant to test a system that meets the minimum hardware requirements for VR Gaming. The Cyan Room shows the user how the use of an API with less overhead can provide the user with a great VR experience, even on less than amazing hardware. The Blue Room test is designed for the latest and greatest hardware. The Blue Room renders at a whopping 5k resolution and is designed to really push your system to the limits for an amazing VR experience.

On the VRMARK suite of benchmarks, Our Pulse RX 5700 XT did very well overall. In both the Cyan Room and Blue room, The Radeon Vega VII came out on top with an overall score of 10127 in the Cyan Room benchmark and an overall score of 2658 on the Blue Room benchmark. In Cyan Room, the reference 5700 XT came out slightly ahead of the Pulse 5700 XT with the reference card achieving an overall score of 9265 to the Pulse 5700 XT’s score of 9204. In the Blue Room benchmark, the Pulse 5700 XT achieved an overall score of 2523 and the reference card scored 2496. The Orange Room was the benchmark that threw me off the most. In the Orange Room benchmark, our Pulse 5700 XT came in dead last with an overall score of 9173. This was behind even the Radeon Vega VII that scored 9263, the reference 5700 with a score of 10186 and the reference 5700 XT with an overall score of 10217. These were the best out of about 7 or 8 results, all with a similar outcome.

Superposition

Superposition is another GPU intensive benchmark put out by Unigine, the makers of both the very popular Valley and Heaven benchmarks. Superposition is an extreme performance and stability test for graphics cards, power supplies, and cooling systems.

In both the Superposition 4k optimized and 8k optimized, the cards we tested followed a similar pattern. The Radeon Vega 2 came out on top in both tests scoring 7682 on the 4k optimized test and 3335 on the 8k optimized test. The Radeon RX 5700 was last on both tests scoring 5573 on the 4k test and 2293 on the 8k test. Next were our two different 5700 XT card. The Pulse 5700 XT came out on top of the reference card on the 4k test scoring 7155 to the 7072 of the reference 5700 XT. On the 8k test, the reference card came out ahead of the Pulse 5700 XT scoring 2922 to the 2981 of the Pulse 5700 XT.