AMD's Radeon RX 5500 challenges Nvidia in the budget gaming and Notebook markets

RDNA is bringing Radeon to more OEM systems and Notebooks

| Source: AMD Author: Mark Campbell

AMD's Radeon RX 5500 challenges Nvidia in the budget gaming and mobile markets

It's official, AMD has finally revealed its Radeon RX 5500 series of graphics cards, bringing Navi to the mainstream PC market. The RX 5500 series aims to push AMD further into the OEM and notebook markets, while also challenging Nvidia in the budget gaming market.



The Radeon RX 5500 is based on the same Navi/RDNA architecture as AMD's groundbreaking RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT series of graphics cards. The Radeon RX 5500 will release with support for GDDR6 memory, PCIe 4.0, and Radeon's latest Display and Media Engines. With Navi, AMD promises strong media encoding/decoding and support for DSC compression.



Like other Radeon Navi series graphics cards, the AMD RX 5500 will support FidelityFX, Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) on DX9, DX12 and Vulkan titles, Radeon Anti-Lag and Radeon FreeSync/FreeSync 2 HDR.







AMD's Radeon RX 5500 will release in two forms, each of which are optimised for desktop and mobile use cases. The RX 5500 is the desktop variant, which features higher clock speeds and a TDP of 150W while the mobile version features a lower TDP that can be configured by notebook manufacturers.



With this release, AMD has decided not to release base clock data for their RX 5500. This is due to the confusion which the spec presented to end-users with the RX 5700 series. In gaming workloads, AMD's gaming clock is what's expected from Radeon's RDNA series GPUs, reserving the base clock for power-virus like scenarios.



The RX 5500 will feature 154Gbps GDDR6 memory and a 128-bit memory bus. This will give the graphics card similar levels of raw memory bandwidth as an RX 580 series graphics card. Combine this with better memory compression and Navi's other architectural changes, and the RX 5500 will deliver users more effective bandwidth than AMD's Polaris series of graphics cards, despite using a smaller memory bus.









AMD Radeon

RX 5700 XT 50th AMD Radeon

RX 5700 XT AMD Radeon

RX 5700 AMD Radeon

RX 5500 (Desktop) AMD Radeon

RX 5500M (Mobile) Process Tech/ Architecture 7nm Navi 7nm Navi 7nm Navi 7nm Navi 7nm Navi Stream

Processors 2560 2560 2304 1408 1408 Base

Clock

1680MHz 1605MHz 1465MHz - - Gaming Clock 1830MHz 1755MHz 1625MHz 1717MHz 1448MHz Boost

Clock

1980MHz 1905MHz 1725MHz 1845MHz 1645MHz Memory 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 4/8GB GDDR6 4GB GDDR6 Memory

Bus

256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit 128-bit Memory Clock 14Gbps 14Gbps 14Gbps 14Gbps 14Gbps Memory

Bandwidth 448GB/s 448GB/s 448GB/s 224GB/s 224GB/s Cooler Design Blower Fan Blower Fan Blower Fan - - UK Pricing (OCUK) £429.99 £379.99 £329 - - US Pricing (MSRP) $449 $399 $349 - -





AMD's RX 5500 is designed to replace Radeon's ageing Polaris series of graphics cards, offering users a 1.6x increase in performance per watt and a 1.7x increase in performance per unit of die area. The Radeon RX 5500 is roughly 12% more powerful than AMD's RX 480 while consuming 30% less power.



The RDNA RX 5500 acts as a replacement for AMD's RX 500 series of graphics cards, offering users greater levels of efficiency and the architectural advantages of AMD's Navi architecture. AMD's power consumption improvements will help allow AMD to enter more OEM systems and notebooks, two areas which AMD had difficulty entering previously. This will, in turn, open up avenues for AMD to increase their sales volumes.







In AMD's slides, they compared their RX 5500 to Nvidia's GTX 1650, showcasing huge performance advantages with team Radeon. Sadly, AMD has not listed any pricing data for their RX 5500, so at this time, it is hard to know valid these comparisons are.



When it comes to OEM systems, Nvidia's GTX 1650 remains incredibly popular because of its low power requirements. Perhaps this slide is designed to bring more OEM system builders into the Radeon camp. Ultimately, we need pricing for AMD's RX 5500 to know how impactful it will be on the PC gaming market.







In Esports games, AMD states that their RX 5500 is 37% faster than Nvidia's GTX 1650 on average, showcasing a huge potential win for team Radeon. However, without pricing data, it is hard to know how valid these results are. If the RX 5500 isn't priced to match Nvidia's GTX 1650, it begs the question of why the GTX 1660 isn't included here. AMD has given us too little data to form proper opinions on their RX 5500 GPUs.









Please go to the next page for more information, including retail availability

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