SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 8G Review

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Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2

In Red Dead Redemption 2 we are playing at 1080p with a custom “High” graphics setting enabled.  These are not the highest game settings the game supports.  Those settings are very much not playable.  Even at “High” settings, playability is on the border.

The SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 8G is providing the lowest performance here, averaging around 43FPS.  The ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER O4G GAMING is right on par with a performance at 44FPS.  These two video cards are neck-and-neck at their default factory overclocks.  The 8GB doesn’t seem to make any advantage just yet. 

When we overclock them both performance goes up in this game, but not tremendously.  Overclocking the SAPPHIRE PULSE improves performance by just 6%.  It’s not enough however to exceed the performance of the overclocked ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER O4G GAMING which is about 3% faster than the overclocked SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 5500 XT 8G when both are overclocked.  

In this game, it doesn’t seem 8GB has made any real advantage at these settings of “High.”  We noticed that in the VRAM counter for the game, in the game graphics settings window, it was within the “4GB” of VRAM usage area.  For this game, it’s all about the clock speed and how high you can push it to give the game a real performance advantage.  Perhaps if we could run the game at “Ultra” settings, but performance is way too low at “Ultra” for that to be a possibility on the Radeon RX 5500 XT, even overclocked.      

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus

In Metro Exodus, we are running the game at the “High” setting.  Now, this is two notches down from the highest game setting.  However, we do have everything else turned on and at the highest values. 

With the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 8G, its performance is right at 47FPS average, which is exactly the same as the ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER O4G GAMING.  It is amazing how exactly the two cards are in performance, even though the Radeon RX 5500 XT has 8GB of VRAM.

When we overclock the SAPPHIRE PULSE performance improves by 5%.  This performance, however, is still shy of the ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER when overclocked.  The ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER overclocked is 5% faster than the SAPPHIRE PULSE overclocked.    

Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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