Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. The Division 2 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. F1 2019 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Gears 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)13. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)14. Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, 1440p, 4K)15. Clock Speed16. Temperatures17. Acoustics18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

It has been over two months since AMD first announced the RX 5500 series of GPUs. Since then, Nvidia has launched both the GTX 1660 SUPER, and more recently the 1650 SUPER, in a pre-emptive attempt to render AMD's new GPUs dead on arrival. Today, we can finally assess the performance of the Navi-based RX 5500 XT.

The first thing to note is that this review is concerned with Sapphire's RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB. 5500 XT is available in both 4GB and 8GB models (the only difference is the VRAM capacity), so if you want to see our review of an 8GB card, head over to the ASRock Challenger HERE.

Secondly, AMD disclosed pricing to us yesterday, with the 4GB model retailing for £159.99 here in the UK, while the 8GB model is £20 more expensive at £179.99. Considering GTX 1650 SUPER cards start at £149.99, this really is a head-to-head battle between Team Red and Team Green in the ~£150 market segment.

The last point to note in this introduction is how RX 5500 XT fits in with the rest of the RX 5500 series. When AMD made the initial announcement back in October, core spec was announced for the RX 5500 ‘series', but the 5500 XT was not explicitly mentioned. As it transpires, both the RX 5500 and RX 5500 XT use the exact same GPU, with the same core count. The primary differences are that RX 5500 (non-XT) has slightly lower clocks, is only available as a 4GB model, and is only available to OEMs. RX 5500 XT is available as a standalone part, so unless you want to buy a pre-built system, you can forget about the non-XT version of the 5500.

GPU	RX 5500 XT	RX 5700	RX 5700 XT	RX Vega 56	RX Vega 64
Architecture	Navi	Navi	Navi	Vega 10	Vega 10
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	14nm	14nm
Transistor Count	6.4 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	12.5 billion	12.5 billion
Die Size	158mm²	251mm²	251mm²	486mm²	495mm²
Compute Units	22	36	40	56	64
Stream Processors	1408	2304	2560	3584	4096
Base GPU Clock	n/a	Up to 1465MHz	Up to 1605MHz	1156 MHz	1274 MHz
Game GPU Clock	Up to 1717MHz	Up to 1625MHz	Up to 1755MHz	n/a	n/a
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 1845MHz	Up to 1725MHz	Up to 1905MHz	1471 MHz	1546 MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 5.20 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 10.5 TFLOPS	Up to 12.7 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 10.4 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 21.0 TFLOPS	Up to 25.3 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 162.4 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 330.0 GT/s	Up to 395.8 GT/s
ROPs	32	64	64	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 59.0 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 94.0 GP/s	Up to 98.9 GP/s
Memory	4/8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB HBM	8GB HBM
Memory Bandwidth	224 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	410 GB/s	483.8 GB/s
Memory Interface	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit
Board Power	130W	185W	225W	210W	295W

With that in mind, GPU specs for the RX 5500 XT have therefore been online for two months, so nothing new is revealed to us. Built on the same Navi architecture as the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, and fabbed on TSMC's 7nm process, the RX 5500 XT consists of 22 Compute Units (CUs) and 1408 Stream Processors.

The same 14Gbps GDDR6 memory has also been brought down from the RX 5700 series, with 4GB or 8GB models. The 5500 XT however has a narrower, 128-bit memory interface, meaning total memory bandwidth is 224 GB/s, or half that of its pricier brethren.

As for clock speeds, the Sapphire card here follows the reference specification with a 1845MHz boost clock. Total board power is rated at 130W, or 30W above GTX 1650 SUPER.

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