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.
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skizlock - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Should be fine.TheSkullCaveIsADarkPlace - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
The 5500XT should be alright. But, you didn't say what you are doing, you just said what you are not doing (no gaming). So, i assume you care only about 2D. In which case you could probably select an even more inexpensive GPU that does 4K/60Hz. But then again, it's you who is calling the shots about the things you want to purchase. I am not daring to further step into the line of fire there... ;-)PixyMisa - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
I have a 580 driving two 4K monitors for work, and it's great.Ranguvar - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Hey Ryan, thank you for the excellent reviews...July 7th, you posted on the 5700 (XT) review that you had "15 pages of notes" on deeper RDNA details that you'd be posting later.
Is this ever coming to fruition? Holding out hope!
Cheers.
TEAMSWITCHER - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
I seriously question your motives in this review... Excluding all 1440p results, but then including the Radeon 5700 (a card priced well above this range) just to ensure that AMD has the top position in all the graphs. And your conclusion page make ZERO reference to the GTX 1660 Super card, which can be had for a very good price - $230. I'm seeing this trend all over .. tilting reviews to benefit AMD. I get it.. everyone loves an underdog... but these GPU's are just dogs.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
The Radeon 5700 is the next card up in AMD's current-generation stack. It's important to include it to show where the 5500 XT ends, and where the next card picks up.Fataliity - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Ryan - Have you tried AMD's new performance boost on the 5500XT to see how it performs? The resolution scaling when moving screen etc? I imagine the Algo feature was built for this card, considering its release and drivers release were in sync. So I'm just wondering how it helps for a budget card?Thank you!
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
I've tried it. I don't care for it. But I'll give AMD tons of credit for trying new ideas.But I'll save that for once I can write up something proper.
Zoomer - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
Overclocking?Hrel - Thursday, December 12, 2019 - link
Nah, its pretty bs you didn't include 4k results. The ONLY reason to buy the 8gb version is 4k and now I gotta go elsewhere to find out how the gpu uses that extra vram. Very dumb not to include 4k.