In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 11 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 51 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. This covers all of the games tested except Final Fantasy XV that we have a score rather than an FPS because they like to be different.

So how did the new RX590 Fatboy perform? Well, the big red bar in the 4K test confirmed what I already knew when it came to 4k performance. About half of the games were playable but not great and half weren’t playable at all at the settings I tested at. 1440P, on the other hand, was near half and half but with it all being playable but 9 were in the 30-59 FPS range and 7 were above 60 FPS, not bad but not perfect. Then at 1080p 12 of the games tested fell in the 60+ range, one was up over 120 FPS, and just three were playable but under 60 FPS. That seems to support AMD's push that the RX590 is an improvement on the RX580 where you will see even better 1080p performance with support for higher refresh rates on the esports focused titles.

Before getting into the other results, there is one test that didn’t fit into our resolution breakdown above, that is the Final Fantasy XV benchmark that only gives a score rating. Here the RX590 came in above the GTX 1060 but the RX580 didn’t. To be fair though the high setting that my testing was run at does include hairworks which is Nvidia focused, so keep that in mind with these results.

As for the rest of the results I have them all for all of the craziest of the crazy to sort through just like I did. With the exception of DOOM with OpenGL the last four cards on the graphs were consistent with the GTX 1070 always above the RX590, the RX580 below that, and the GTX 1060 at the bottom.  At 1080p and 1440p the gap between them was fairly consistent but going up to 4k you can see the GTX 1070 pull out a larger gap. Beyond that, the DOOM results do a great job of showing why you should always run Vulkan over OpenGL the RX590 went from 95 FPS to 151 at 1080p. DX12 over DX11 was similar in Hitman, but not as significant of a jump, but 5 additional FPS isn’t bad.