First leaked AMD Radeon RX 5500 GPU benchmarks don’t look right at all
The AMD leaks are coming thick and fast now with the Radeon RX 5500 graphics card spotted in the GFXBench database. AMD’s unannounced Radeon RX 5500 appeared in a benchmark run for GFXBench v5, providing a strong indicator that AMD could be gearing up for the unveiling of low-end and mid-range video cards for its Radeon RX 5000 series.
There’s not a great deal to go on here but the Radeon RX 5500 would be a 7nm Navi GPU which will likely be using a Navi 12 architecture. For point of reference, the Radeon RX 5300 series leaked earlier will be using Navi 14. This provides further evidence of AMD’s Radeon naming conventions lining up with Ryzen – 5300, 5500, 5700, 5900.
In this particular ‘Manhattan’ benchmark test, the Radeon RX 5500 notches up a score of 5021 frames in the OpenGL test, equivalent to around 81 frames per second. The previous-gen Radeon RX 570 scores 7891 frames in the same test, so this would actually make for really disappointing performance.
We really wouldn’t be paying much attention to the results achieved here though as, in separate run in Manhattan 3.1, the Radeon RX 5500 performs extremely well. Bizarrely well, in fact. It outscores both the Radeon RX 5700 and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. We have a graphics card which is simultaneously performing almost half as well as an RX 570 and yet 60% faster than an RX 580, which has the whiff of bullshit if ever we’ve smelled it.
Still, we can only talk about what’s in front of us, and we’d imagine the final performance of the Radeon RX 5500 will be somewhere in between these two extremes. Stacking up against Nvidia, the Radeon RX 5500 should be expected to compete in the region of the GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. This would mean AMD will be using these chips to phase out the Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 590.
With such wildly differing benchmark results from the same database we’ll have to take a wait and see approach on this one. It does provide the vaguest of confirmations that more Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards are at least on their way.
