AMD Raises The Curtains and Unveils The Radeon RX 5500 Navi Graphics Card
For months rumors have circulated that AMD may release entry-level based Navi Radeon graphics cards to market. Well, those rumors are now put to rest as AMD makes it official by announcing their new Radeon RX 5500 family. The new graphics cards are a level below the current Radeon RX 5700 variants that currently on the market.
AMD will have two versions of the Radeon RX 5500 available for consumers; the Radeon RX 5500 Series for the desktop and the Radeon RX 5500M, which will be the very first for AMD to have a 7nm Navi-based GPU installed into a laptop. Both versions have similar specs featuring a total of 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors, and a 128-bit memory interface. Where the GPU's varies is clock speed and GDDR6 memory.
The Radeon RX 5500 desktop version features a 1717MHz maximum Game Clock, a 1845MHz boost clock, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The GPU rating is up to 5.2 TFLOPs. On the other hand the Radeon RX 5500M will have 1448 MHz Game Clock and a 1645MHz boost clock respectively, and 4GB of GDDR6, with compute performance topping out at 4.6 TFLOPs.
Now it's not out of the norm for any company who manufacture hardware boast about performance gains, which is what AMD has done. They state that the Radeon RX 5500 will offer 12-percent improvement in gaming performance over the Radeon RX 480 all while having a 30 percent reduction in power consumption. AMD has also put the Radeon RX 5500 and Radeon RX 5500M right up against NVIDI’s latest Turing based GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 mobile graphics cards.
In their benchmark test AMD selected Fortnite and Rainbow Six Seige. The benchmark numbers show that the Radeon RX 5500 has a 37 percent performance gain over the GeForce GTX 1650, with 90 fps in Fortnite and up to 173 fps in Rainbow Six Seige at 1080p.
When it comes to the laptop, the Radeon RX 5500M will make its way into the MSI Alpha 15, equipped with a Ryzen 3750H processor and a 144Hz display. AMD states that the Radeon RX 5500M will deliver up to 30 percent performance over the GeForce GTX 1650 mobile graphics card.
According to AMD, the Radeon RX 5500 will be installed into the following systems; the HP OMEN Obelisk, HP Pavilion, Lenovo Legion, and Lenovo Idea Centre T540 gaming desktops. Shipping will begin in November. The MSI Alpha 15 will ship later this month. As far as the standalone graphics card goes, it will also ship later this month. As of now, AMD has not disclosed retail prices, but I'm pretty sure it will come close to the GeForce GTX 1650 which is sub $400.
