AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Review: 7nm RDNA on a Budget

In the end, the AMD RX 5500 XT is a competent 1080p /Ultra gamer, even on the the 4GB capacity cards. For improved performance and futureproofing, you may want to opt for the 8GB variant. That said, the 8GB version pushes the price up into direct competition with the GTX 1660. We’ll leave the comparison between those two cards to our upcoming review of the 8GB variant of the RX 5500 XT.

According to Steam stats, the majority of users play PC games using monitors at 1920x1080 resolution or less. While the mid-range and high-end cards have no issues running 1080p (even high refresh rate), the budget end can struggle at times to reach 60 fps for smooth gameplay. AMD’s RX 5500 XT was tasked to do this job and for the most part, accomplishes it using Ultra settings.

In 8 out of 11 titles, the 5500 XT was able to produce close to 60 fps (57+) or well over with our settings. Only in Metro: Exodus, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Borderlands 3 does it slip below what many would consider unplayable fps. In these titles, image quality settings need to be adjusted for a better gaming experience. Other titles were right at or above the magic threshold.

Overall, the card generally performs faster than the GTX 1650, trades punches with the GTX 1650 Super and falls well short of the GTX 1660 in all titles, save for Gears of War. In the games where the 5500 XT card falls short of the GTX 1650 Super AMD compared it to, it wasn’t by much and seems to be a result of the performance hit when running Ultra settings and the 4GB of RAM/128-bit bus of the model we tested.

According to AMD’s testing, titles such as Borderlands 3 gain 12% (on high), Forza Horizon 18% (ultra) and Ghost Recon Breakpoint a 20% increase, just by moving from 4GB to 8GB. I suspect we’d see that trend across more than just their tested titles. Although I did not have time to thoroughly test the 8GBmodel that literally arrived as I was wrapping up this review (full review coming soon), we ran it through a couple of titles to see the difference. There were huge gains in Forza (90 fps), Battlefield V (90 fps), Far Cry 5 (83 fps), and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (63 fps).

The Division 2

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Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

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Borderlands 3

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Gears of War 5

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Strange Brigade

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider

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Far Cry 5

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Metro: Exodus

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Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

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Forza Horizon 4

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Battlefield V

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