AMD Radeon RX 5500 series graphics cards expected to launch December 12th
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It’s coming up to two months since the Radeon RX 5500 series was officially revealed and AMD’s entry-tier graphics cards still aren’t on store shelves. AMD was immensely proud that a Radeon RX 5500 could absolutely tonk the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 but it didn’t actually give us a way to buy one. The long wait could be over soon though; AMD is expected to launch the Radeon RX 5500 series on December 12th.
The news comes via Chinese news site IT Home, who claim there is a concrete December 12th launch date for the Radeon RX 550 Series graphics card series, corroborating previous murmurings we’ve heard of the launch date.
AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 series will comprise three distinct GPUs – the AMD Radeon RX 5500 4GB, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB, and the AMD Radeon RX 5500M 8GB for mobile platforms.
In terms of performance, AMD stacks the RX 5500 directly up against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, claiming it is, on average, 37% faster than a GeForce GTX 1650. Considering Nvidia has since launched the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super 4GB, this claim perhaps doesn’t hold up so well by now.
The Radeon RX 5500 is pretty much identical to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, the only difference being the video memory. The RX 5500 packs 4GB GDDR6 VRAM while the RX 5500 XT benefits from 8GB GDDR6.
All of AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 graphics cards utilise a variant of the 7nm Navi 14 GPU. It has a die size of 158mm2 and is just 71% the size of the previous-gen Polaris GPU found on the Radeon RX 480. Improved power efficiency is the key here, with 1.6x performance per watt.
Both graphics cards have a 7nm Navi GPU with 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TMUs, and an undisclosed number of ROPs. It’s got a base clock speed of 1670 MHz and a maximum boost clock of 1845 MHz. On the memory front it’s got 8GB GDDR6 memory through a 128-bit memory interface, offering up 224 GB/s memory bandwidth. The Radeon RX 5500 XT will guzzle 110W TDP, providing 5.19 TFLOPs of compute performance. We’d expect the vanilla Radeon RX 5500 to consume marginally less.
The remaining question is one of price. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super are available from between $150-175 so we’re probably looking at somewhere within this price range.
