The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Review, Feat. Sapphire Pulse: Navi For 1080p
by Ryan Smith on December 12, 2019 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
While we’ve already had our an in-depth at Navi with the launch of the RX 5700 series earlier this year, new GPUs within the family sometimes expose bottlenecks that we haven’t seen before. So our synthetic tests can help to highlight these bottlenecks, as well as any other changes that the GPU designers may have made in the process of scaling down their GPUs.
The RX 5500 XT does surprisingly well in our pixel fillrate benchmark. Even though it only has half the ROPs and half of the memory bandwidth of the more powerful RX 5700, it’s able to deliver ~79% of the pixel fillrate in this test. This is much better than I was expecting. It may be a sign that AMD’s ROP partitions aren’t seeing great scaling from 32 to 64 pixels per clock, or alternatively that AMD has made some significant efforts in keeping the RX 5500 XT from diving too hard due to its more limited resources.
Meanwhile texture fillrates are more in line with our expectations. The RX 5500 XT has 14 fewer CUs than the RX 5700 but a slightly higher clockspeed, and its results reflect that.
Our buffer compression ratios are also relatively consistent with what we’ve seen on the RX 5700 cards. AMD does have capable delta color compression technology; however it seems to struggle under intensive synthetic workloads. Under lighter workloads we see better compression ratios, but lower throughput overall.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
97 Comments
View All Comments
YB1064 - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Poor man's NVidia indeed.flashbacck - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
What do you mean by that?Valantar - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Apparently the same performance at the same price with a better encode/decode block and better idle power usage but slightly worse gaming power usage and buggy OC controls equals "poor man's Nvidia". Who knew?assyn - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Actually the Nvenc is better encode/decode because has wider format support and can decode 8K videos, while the AMD only capable of 4K.Valantar - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
The 1650 and 1650S have a cut-down NVENC block lacking pretty much every single improvement made with the Turing generation. Not all NVENC is equal.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
1650S has a full NVENC block. It's based on TU116, not TU117.jgraham11 - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Seems like this will be similar to the GCN cards in the past (RX5XX Series), at the beginning its ok, then over the years AMD's fine wine kicks in. Making incremental improvements that improve overall performance with every driver release. Do realize they are still using the GCN instruction set but RDNA is a new architecture, an architecture that will be in both the Xbox and PlayStation systems.WaltC - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
I feel as though AMD has hobbled this card. They put the GDDR6 VRAM onboard, effectively doubling more or less the bandwidth of GDDR5, but then they took it all back with the 128-bit bus...;) I think they missed an opportunity here--but I'm not privy to the manufacturing particulars for the product--so maybe not. Anyway, it seems like they might have made the 5500XT a GDDR6 8GBs, 256-bit bus GPU for $279; then made the 5500 with 4GB, and a 128-bit bus for ~$129 or so. The SPs by themselves are sufficiently cut down to the degree that even a 256-bit bus GPU like I've dreamed up here is going to be sludge next to a 5700--or, that should certainly be the case, I would think. The card almost seems "overly hobbled" to my way of thinking. I think that @ 256-bit 5500XT, 8GBs of GDDR6 might've been a smash seller for AMD @ a ~$279 MSRP, leaving the 5700 still clobbering it simply based on the much higher number of SPs. I just see a lot of potential here that seems overlooked--unless they have plans for a 5600XT, maybe, early 1 Quarter 2020....;)WaltC - Sunday, December 22, 2019 - link
Will someone please set me straight on whether this is an 8-lane PCIe card? I'm reading this stuff you-know-where but it doesn't make any sense at all to me. It's claimed that accordingly the 5500XT runs much faster on PCIe4 than PCIe3. Eh?https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/edo4u8/rx_55...
RX-480/580/590 are all PCIex16 GPUs with 256-bit buses running GDDR5. Is the article linked here factual? thanks--to whomever can answer....;) Doesn't sound probable to me--but if it's true then AMD has hog-tied this card six ways to Sunday--trussed up tighter than a Christmas piglet...;)
WaltC - Sunday, December 22, 2019 - link
OK, I saw the one line in the review I missed first time about "I suspect 8 PCIe lanes"--just very strange--I don't understand this product at all! Perhaps the full incarnation of the GPU is going into the PS5/XBox 2, it's just weird. To have to hobble it that much, the GPU must be very robust.