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The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Review, Feat. Sapphire Pulse: Navi For 1080p
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[Image: 5500XT_Car_678x452.jpg]

2019 has been a tremendous year for AMD on all fronts. Their CPU division has, of course, been flipping tables left and right across consumer, server, and workstation CPUs. Meanwhile the GPU division has spent their year wrapping up and shipping their Navi GPUs, the first parts utilizing their new RDNA architecture. Now, as the rest of 2019 quickly runs by, AMD’s GPU division is going to get in one final word with the launch of their new mainstream, 1080p-focused Radeon RX 5500 XT cards.

The launch of the 5500 XT has been sort of a weird path for AMD. The company first announced the overarching Radeon RX 5500 series back at the start of October. That announcement was OEM-centric, with AMD announcing the parts that their OEM partners would be shipping in desktops and laptops for the holiday season. Retail cards were part of AMD’s plans as well, of course, but those received a rather nebulous “Q4 2019” launch date. But now with less than two weeks to go until Christmas, the retail RX 5500 cards are here at last – and not a moment too soon.

Launching today are AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT cards. These cards are aimed at the sub-$200 market for 1080p gaming, effectively (and finally) replacing AMD’s long-lived Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 cards, and going head-to-head with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 families. As is typical for AMD in this price range, the company is actually launching two different configurations of the RX 5500 XT: we’re getting both 8GB cards, as well as 4GB cards as a budget option. Both cards are clocked the same, but as we’re entering 2020, the ramifications of 4GB of VRAM versus 8GB are great enough that it creates some real differences between the cards. The 8GB RX 5500 XT will be taking up the all-important $199 slot, while the 4GB RX 5500 XT will hit the shelves starting at $169.

Underpinning the new cards is AMD’s new Navi 14 GPU. As has been the case with lower-end GPUs in past generations, AMD has taken the constituent parts of their Navi architecture and assembled a smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry GPU that’s better suited for the sub-$200 market. In the process Navi 14 forgoes some CUs, some ROPs, and some memory bandwidth compared to the original Navi 10, but it retains all of the features of the underlying RDNA (1) architecture, including the efficiency improvements AMD has made there. And, for that matter, it gets the full-fat media processing block as well.

In terms of die size and transistor counts, AMD has dropped about 3.9B transistors from Navi 10, which comes to 38% fewer transistors overall. This translates into a die size of 158mm2, an almost perfectly matched 37% smaller than Navi 10. Compared to AMD’s previous generations of parts, comparisons are a bit rocky since performance targets and die sizes have gone up overall, but this works out to a transistor count about 12% higher than Polaris 10/20/30, in just 70% of the space. Polaris 11 (used in RX 460/560) might be a more apt comparison here, in which case AMD has increased their transistor count by 113% while only increasing the die size by 28%.

These improvements come thanks to TMSC’s 7nm process, of course. The heart of AMD’s entire next-generation product stack across CPUs and GPUs for 2019, AMD is once again using this process for their latest Navi GPU. This remains a critical edge for AMD on a competitive basis, as NVIDIA is still using TSMC 12nm – a 16nm-derrived process – for their GPUs. This gives AMD the ability to lay down smaller transistors operating at lower power levels, with the trade-off being that 7nm is a younger, more expensive process. And, if reports are to be believed, one that TSMC’s customers are jockeying to secure wafer starts due to very high demand.

Curiously and atypically for an upper-tier XT-type part, AMD is not using a fully-enabled Navi 14 GPU here. While AMD has never officially confirmed the complete specs of Navi 14, we know from other Navi 14 products – particularly, the Radeon Pro 5500M parts going into Apple’s laptops – that Navi 14 comes with 24 CUs. So a 22 CU part by contrast is an unexpected castration, though ultimately it doesn’t affect performance too much. AMD hasn’t specifically said why they’re not using all 24 CUs, but given how price sensitive this market is and how popular TSMC’s 7nm process has been, I would not be surprised if AMD is aiming to get as many useful dies as they can off of their Navi 14 wafers.
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A different new review: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...500-xt-4gb
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