Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition Video Card Review

Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1 (also known as BF1) is the fifteenth installment in the Battlefield Series developed by DICE and published by EA. The game is set during World War I. It was released world wide on October 21, 2016. The singleplayer campaign of Battlefield 1 takes place across six different “War Stories” which revolve around different people in different aspects of the Great War in campaigns such as the Italian Alps and the deserts of Arabia. We benchmark in Through Mud and Blood, which is the second mission in singleplayer campaign. Taking place late in the war, the player assumes the role of Danny Edwards, a British recruit joining the crew of a Mark V Landship named Black Bess as their new tank driver. New to the war and inexperienced in driving the unreliable vehicle, Edwards is given a trial by fire with his first mission: punch through the German line at Cambrai with a broken tank and a crew that has no trust in him.

Battlefield 1 features the Frostbite 3 game engine and has very good graphics with tons of destructibles. Maps also now feature dynamic weather systems, affecting combat in various ways; for example, The St. Quentin Scar can either start as a clear, sunny day, a dark, foggy day, or in the middle of a rainstorm, and switch between them during the round.

We tested BF1 at 1920 x 1080 with the ‘Ultra’ graphics quality preset in DX12 with the GPU Memory Restriction turned off. We also disabled VSync.

1080P Benchmark Results: At the popular 1080p gaming resolution the we were happy to see that all three graphics cards were able to average at least 60 FPS as the Sapphire NITRO Radeon R9 380X is pushing 2 years old. The new Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 8GB Limited Edition averaged 91.8 FPS and that is 39% improvement over the Nitro 380X and 23% faster than the EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 FTW 6GB graphics card.

1440P Benchmark Results: When we went up to a 1440P screen resolution on our display we found the Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 8GB Limited Edition graphics card was 40% faster than the Radeon R9 380X and 28% faster than the EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 FTW. It looks like the Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 LE might be a compelling upgrade for gamers with a graphics card over 2 years old, but this is just the first benchmark test of six games and three synthetic benchmarks, so let’s keep going.