AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB

Jarred Walton tries out AMD’s “just north of mid-range” graphics offering.

- Jarred Walton

GPU: Navi 14
Process: 7nm
Transistors: 6.4 billion
Cores: 1,408
Texture units: 88
ROPs: 32
Clock: 1,670MHz (Boost 1,845MHz)
Mem: 8GB GDDR6, 128-bit
Mem speed: 14Gbps
TDP: 130W
Ports: DisplayPort v1.4, HDMI v2.0

MD’s retail Radeon RX 5500 XT series of graphics cards is here, bringing additional options to the budget and mid-range market. AMD’s Navi architecture hasn’t changed, although Navi 14 cuts the potential number of compute units from a maximum of 40 down to a maximum of 24 – with the 5500 XT enabling 22 of those CUs. There are two versions of the 5500XT; the only difference is the VRAM and a £30 increase in price.

The 5500 XT 4GB card matches up against the GTX 1650 Super, and the two are effectively tied in performance. The 8GB card, meanwhile, has to take on the GTX 1660, and Nvidia’s card has the same number of GPU cores: 1,408. The problem for AMD is that Nvidia’s GPU cores tend to perform a bit better overall. At least the TDP is about the same – 130W versus 120W won’t matter either way.

There’s little difference in features. Technically, Nvidia’s GTX 1660 can enable ray tracing in games that support it. In practice, the 1660 isn’t fast enough to make ray tracing worthwhile. There are other facets of performance, but overall the two sides are evenly matched in the mid and lower markets.