Within the case of graphics enjoying playing cards, AMD’s owned the sub-$200 value stage for years. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 and 1660 assortment graphics enjoying playing cards couldn’t keep a candle to the price proposition of the Radeon RX 570 and 580, nor its predecessors, notably as quickly as AMD started bundling them with video video games galore. These Polaris-powered GPUs are downright historic, nonetheless, and suck down obscene portions of vitality compared with modern graphics enjoying playing cards.
Enter the model new $169 Radeon RX 5500 XT, launching presently after being teased in October.
The Radeon RX 5500 XT brings AMD’s “Navi” GPU, constructed using the company’s next-gen RDNA graphics construction, to the tons. Navi debuted inside the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT, which immediately grew to change into our go-to ideas for 1440p gaming. Navi’s loaded with cutting-edge tech: The Radeon RX 5500 XT is among the many first shopper GPUs constructed using 7nm course of experience, and to assist the bleeding-edge PCIe 4.zero interface. It’s upgraded to ultra-fast GDDR6 memory. The cardboard packs AMD’s latest and largest media encoders, and up to date present utilized sciences that enable 4K, 144Hz shows with out the need for messy chroma subsampling (though you gained’t recreation at wherever shut to those ranges with this humble graphics card). It’s tremendously additional power-efficient, too.
However no matter all these advances, and all AMD’s earlier wins with Polaris and Navi, the Radeon RX 5500 XT can’t lay declare to the mainstream crown. Nvidia’s just-launched $160 GeForce GTX 1650 Tremendous locations up a tough fight for the worth vary graphics card market. Whereas AMD’s card is simply $169, it’s nonetheless priced too extreme for the effectivity it delivers.
AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT specs, choices, and price
As talked about above, the Radeon RX 5500 XT makes use of a cut-down mannequin of AMD’s “Navi” GPU.
AMDThe place the Radeon RX 5700 assortment packed 2,304 stream processors into the $350 Radeon RX 5700, and a few,560 SPs inside the sooner $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT, AMD’s mainstream-focused Radeon RX 5500 XT reduces that to 1,408 stream processors. The Radeon RX 5500 XT’s environment friendly clock velocity all through play splits the excellence between the two RX 5700 enjoying playing cards, with a rated 1,717MHz Recreation Clock. A bug in AMD’s new Radeon Software program program Adrenalin 2020 Model prevented us from verifying that velocity beneath load, nonetheless have to be mounted shortly after this card’s launch, the company says.
As compared with the “Polaris” GPU-based graphics enjoying playing cards that the Radeon RX 5500 XT replaces, the shift to Navi is a gigantic deal, delivering all these snazzy new choices along with vastly improved vitality effectivity. Nonetheless the change in memory helps cut back vitality needs, too. AMD’s latest GPU packs ultra-fast, energy-efficient GDDR6 memory. Paired with a 128-bit bus, it’s good for an complete memory bandwidth of 224GBps. For comparability, the older Radeon RX 570 with GDDR5 memory hit the equivalent velocity nonetheless required a quite a bit wider 256-bit bus to take motion, whereas Nvidia’s $160 GeForce GTX 1650 Tremendous achieves 192GBps with its 4GB of GDDR6 memory.
Every 4GB and 8GB fashions will possible be obtainable starting at $169 and $199 respectively. AMD says that 4GB is the upper price-to-performance selection for most people, and it must ship an equivalent physique fees in a lot of video video games—nonetheless not all. The AMD-supplied slide underneath reveals the 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT outpunching the 4GB model in some key video video games. We’ve got been despatched a 4GB model for overview.
