Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start off my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card. Going into testing the RX 5700 XT Thicc III Ultra there are a few things I should note. I did retest ALL of our RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT cards during this one. Drivers were updated and numbers weren’t making sense. This is on top of the normal driver issues that I have been having with this launch that sometimes mean rebooting part of the way through my testing after results randomly drop in performance. This includes the Thicc II and it did change the performance I saw on the Thicc II down slightly, this wasn’t in any way to make the Thicc III look better, it was only to remedy numbers that didn’t make sense (every RX 5700 was testing slower than when I first tested them).

So the Thicc III Ultra has a monster overclock on both the base clock and the boost clock so I am excited to see how it compares to the other 5700 XT’s that I previously reviewed. Most of the other cards didn’t set themselves out much from the reference. Anyhow my first round of tests was 3DMark Fire Strike, all three detail settings. These are DX11 and the RX 5700’s have done really well on these, or more specifically the Nvidia counterparts haven’t done very well on these. In the Performance detail test, the Thicc III gained just over 500 points over the Gaming OC which was enough to compete with the RTX 2080 FE here. As the detail went up the Radeon VII and 2080’s improved but the Thicc III still stood out compared to the three other 5700 XT’s.

Now with the DX12 focused Time Spy tests you can see how the newer Nvidia RTX cards catch up again. Where before the 5700 XT was running with the 2070 SUPER and the RTX 2080 here the highest overclocked 2060 SUPER was still out ahead of the Thicc III, but only by a small margin in the base test. The higher detail Extreme setting however the 5700 XT’s fall down the chart. Again the Thicc III is out ahead of the other RX 5700 XT’s in both tests.

Then the last synthetic benchmark is Superposition which is a Unigine engine based test. At the medium detain the RX 5700 XT’s did really well but the Thicc III did the best, even outperforming the Radeon VII. The extreme detail setting however they drop down from being out in front of the RTX 2060 SUPER by a nice amount to running with the stock RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition.