AMD Quietly Outs Radeon RX 5300 Navi 14 Cards Ahead Of Critical Big Navi Launch

AMD's Navi family of graphics cards falls into a pretty tight price range currently, from the $170 Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB to the $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT, where AMD's Navi-based GPU ambitions max out (for now). Anything priced lower than that relied on the older cut down GCN Radeon RX 500 parts. While NVIDIA counts down to an expected Ampere launch on September 1 and we know that AMD's own Big Navi isn't in the too-distant future (with real-time ray tracing features in tow), the red team did announce a new GPU: the Radeon RX 5300. 

If that number sounds familiar, it's because a variant of this GPU has been shipping in Apple's 16" MacBook Pro for months now. This, however, marks the first time Navi has stretched down towards bargain bin status as a desktop graphics card. Apple's Radeon Pro 5300m, the desktop RX 5300 and even the desktop Radeon RX 5500 XT all share the same GPU, however—Navi 14. That means this card should be somewhat familiar.
 

On the desktop, the Radeon RX 5300 has 22 Compute Units which works out to 1,408 stream processors, the exact same number as the desktop Radeon RX 5500 XT5. However, to keep the RX 5300 at its board target power of 100 W, the maximum boost frequency of 1,645 MHz is a sizable step down from the RX 5500 XT's 1,845 MHz. Still, the Radeon RX 5300 is good for 9.26 TFLOPs of compute power and filling 52.6 gigapixels per second thanks to its 32 ROPs. This all results in better-than GeForce GTX 1650 performance, according to AMD's numbers above.
The bigger difference with the AMD Radeon RX 5300 is in its memory configurattion. It still uses the same GDDR6 of its larger sibling, but the path has been trimmed from 128 bits to 96 bits. That means that with 14 Gbps GDDR6, AMD gave the Radeon RX 5300 168 GB/s of bandwidth compared to the RX 5500 XT's 224 GB/s. At lower resolution and other scenarios where memory bandwidth performance is secondary, the two cards should rate 10-15% of each other, but we expect the bandwidth limitations will severely handicap the Radeon RX 5300 at higher resolutions. Also contributing to that disadvantage is that the RX 5300 officially tops out at just 3 GB of onboard VRAM. 

With its 100 Watt board power, we expect that cards based on the Radeon RX 5300 will still have a 6-pin PCI Express connector. While pricing hasn't been announced, we feel that this card will probably slot in at around $130, thanks to the cut in memory bandwidth and capacity. Look for it at retail soon, hopefully.