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

At 1080p and medium settings, this 4GB card is a winner.

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Sapphire recently released an updated version of the Trixx software with a newly designed GUI and other tweaks. The software’s opening screen, labeled Dashboard, includes GPU clock rate, memory clock rate, GPU temperature, and GPU load indicators. The GPU voltage field was greyed-out. We’ve seen this updated software twice recently, and there are no overclocking options available. Outside of the Trixx Boost section, the software for this card is essentially for for monitoring purposes.

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The Hardware Monitor tab conveys a lot of the same information already available in GPU-Z’s Sensors tab. It’s just reflected in line graph form exclusively.

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TRIXX Boost is Sapphire’s attempt at making upsampling plus Radeon Image Sharpening a more commonly-used combination of features. This was a big part of AMD’s Radeon RX 5700-series story, which we didn’t get to explore since a proper analysis requires careful consideration of image quality. After all, you’re running games at a lower resolution, then upscaling the final output, and applying a contrast-adaptive sharpening algorithm. By default, TRIXX Boost is set to use an 85% resolution scale. At 4K, the feature creates a custom 3264x1836 resolution, which you choose instead of 3840x2160. Just remember that RIS is limited to DirectX 9, DirectX 12, and Vulkan support for now.

Performance naturally improves quite a bit compared to native 4K. But you’ll have to decide for yourself if the trade-off in quality is acceptable. We played around with TRIXX Boost briefly in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus and couldn’t tell the difference between 3264x1836 and 3840x2160. Every game is going to be different though, as will each gamer’s opinion of fidelity.

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Joe Shields
Staff Writer, Components

Joe Shields is a staff writer at Tom’s Hardware. He reviews motherboards and PC components.