AMD Unveils Radeon RX 5500 Navi For Desktop And Mobile To Take On GeForce GTX Turing
AMD is making available two version of the Radeon RX 5500: the Radeon RX 5500 Series for desktops and the Radeon RX 5500M, which is the first 7nm Navi-based GPU for laptops. Both variants feature a total of 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors and a 128-bit memory interface. The main differences between the two come down to the amount of GDDR6 memory onboard and clock speeds.
The Radeon RX 5500 (desktop) features a max Game Clock of 1717MHz, a Boost Clock of 1845MHz and up to 8GB of GDDR6. The GPU is also rated at up to 5.2 TFLOPs. The Radeon RX 5500M, on the other hand, has Game/Boost Clocks of 1448MHz and 1645MHz respectively and maxes out at 4GB of GDDR6. Likewise, its compute performance tops out at 4.6 TFLOPs.
Put it all together and AMD says that Radeon RX 5500 offers a 12 percent improvement in absolute gaming performance over the Radeon RX 480 while reducing power consumption by a significant 30 percent. Not surprisingly, AMD is putting the Radeon RX 5500 and Radeon RX 5500M up against NVIDIA's Turing-based GeForce GTX 1650 and GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile.
In AMD's own selection of hand-picked gaming titles, it is claiming that the Radeon RX 5500 delivers up to 37 percent better performance than the GeForce GTX 1650, with 90fps showings in Fortnite and up to 173fps in Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p.
As for the Radeon RX 5500M, the first laptop to launch with this GPU will be the MSI Alpha 15, which packs in a Ryzen 7 3750H processor and a 144Hz 1080p display. In this rig, the Radeon RX 5500M is delivering up to 30 percent higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile.
According to AMD, pre-configured desktop machines with the Radeon RX 5500 including the HP OMEN Obelisk, HP Pavilion, Lenovo Legion T530, and Lenovo IdeaCentre T540 gaming desktops will ship in November. The aforementioned MSI Alpha 15 will ship later this month. Standalone Radeon RX 5500 desktop cards will ship "this quarter", but AMD wasn't more specific than that. The company also hasn't made any announcements regarding pricing, although we'd expect it to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1650.
