Gameplay Performance
We are now going to dive into 1440p performance on the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT BLACK video card. Note that Ray Tracing testing will be combined in this section in the games that support it. We will show first without Ray Tracing, then with it enabled for the games that support it. This means multiple graphs per game. The OVERCLOCKED card data represents our overclock shown on page 3 of this review.
Metro Exodus Enhanced
We are using Metro Exodus Enhanced, which launched on May 6th. This game requires Ray Tracing support, it doesn’t have an option to disable Ray Tracing. Ray Tracing is its default setting. However, you can change the quality level of Ray Tracing to affect performance. You can also change the shader quality level to change performance. In all of our testing these options remain constant: Reflections “Raytraced”, Variable Rate Shading “1X”, HairWorks and PhysX turned off, Tessellation “Full.” We are using the benchmark.
In this first graph we have the Shader Quality set on “Extreme” and the Ray Tracing set on “Ultra.” These are the highest possible game settings, and very demanding at 1440p. We notice that the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT is only slightly faster than the Radeon RX 6700 XT, and overclocking it doesn’t do much at these intense settings. The video card is very bottlenecked at this high Ray Tracing setting. It is not playable. The best video card for the job at these settings would be the GeForce RTX 3070 FE. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti beats the XFX MERC 319 RX 6700 XT by 18%.
To relieve some of the graphics burden in this graph we have turned down the Ray Tracing quality to “Normal.” Normal Ray Tracing is the lowest Ray Tracing setting the game has. This definitely helps improve FPS and we can finally see that the XFX MERC 319 RX 6700 XT is about 3% faster than the reference RX 6700 XT. Overclocking doesn’t yet do much here either for it, we are still bottlenecked. The GeForce RTX 3070 FE does a lot better though, and the game is mostly playable.
Finally, in this graph, we have lowered the Shader Quality down to “High” and also put the Ray Tracing quality on “High.” High Ray Tracing is right in the middle for the quality of Ray Tracing. By doing this combination of settings in this way the game is now playable on the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT at 1440p with Ray Tracing. Overclocking it also makes a good bit of difference finally, 4% which helps keep the minimums up. The XFX card is also faster than the reference card by 4%. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is faster still and brings it to nearly 60FPS, and the RTX 3070 FE is the best card for the job at near 70FPS. It’s clear the RX 6700 XT suffers in this game, but it is not as horrible of a defeat as you’d think, and the game can be made to be playable on it by lowering settings as such.
Cyberpunk 2077
For Cyberpunk 2077 we are using patched version 1.22 for testing. We use the in-game graphics presets for testing at “Ultra” settings and enabling Ray Tracing. In order to do an apples-to-apples comparison, we test either without DLSS and just Ray Tracing to Ray Tracing performance or we include DLSS as an added comparison. We do a manual run-through in the game for the benchmark data.
In this graph, we are running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p at the Graphics Preset “Ultra” setting. This means Ray Tracing and DLSS are disabled. The results here are very interesting, but we do find the game playable on the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 RX 6700 XT at 1440p in this game. It’s actually 7% faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE and 2% faster than the reference RX 6700 XT. When we overclock it performance increases by 7% which puts the video card on par exactly with GeForce RTX 3070 FE performance. Overclocking made a big difference here for the comparison. The game is much smoother with the card overclocked, near 60FPS.
In this graph we have turned on Ray Tracing for Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p. However, we are using the “Medium” Ray Tracing setting, not the “Ultra” setting. We did try “Ultra” but the performance was bad on every single video card here, it was very bottlenecked and just didn’t show much scaling. At “Medium” performance is still pretty low, and it goes to show how demanding Ray Tracing is in this game. No video card is playable here, but the RTX 3070 FE does the best at it. Overclocking the XFX card made a little impact, but not enough to make any real difference. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE and GeForce RTX 3070 FE are much better at Ray Tracing performance.
Dirt 5
In Dirt 5 we set all the graphics options to the highest values. We manually select the resolution and do not let the game manage automatic resolution scaling, we hard set the resolution in all three categories to the resolution being tested. We use the built-in benchmark. With the latest patch, this game now supports Ray Tracing, which we will test.
In this first graph, we have the game set at the highest graphics settings, but Ray Tracing is turned off. This game performs extremely well on all the video cards at 1440p. Every single one here is playable, so that isn’t a problem. The XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT is faster than the reference RX 6700 XT by 3%. When we overclock the video card performance improves by 5%. Before the overclock it’s on par with the RTX 3060 Ti FE, but overclocked it is 6% faster. Overclocking it helps it come closer to the RTX 3070 FE, but the RTX 3070 FE still takes a big lead.
In this graph, we have now turned on Ray Tracing. You can see that performance has come down roughly 15% for the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 RX 6700 XT BLACK video card by enabling Ray Tracing. All in all, this is not bad at all. In fact, every video card here is playable with Ray Tracing enabled at 1440p and they all average above 70FPS still. Interestingly, with Ray Tracing enabled, the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT is 3% faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE with Ray Tracing on. This doesn’t happen much, but it does here. Overclocking the XFX card improves performance by 4%. The GeForce RTX 3070 FE is still ultimately faster.