AMD May Be Spicing Up The Graphics Card Game With The Radeon RX 5500 XT [WORK]

AMD may not keep us waiting much longer for the anticipated Radeon RX 5500, which the company unveiled back in October. The new graphics card, particularly the rumored Radeon RX 5500 XT could be coming next week, according to VideoCardz (opens in new tab).

AMD may be spicing up the graphics card game with the Radeon RX 5500 XT

There's still little detail on the Radeon RX 5500 XT. We know the 5500-series graphics cards will have 22 compute units with 1408 stream processors, a bit more than half of those found on the RX 5700 XT. The new cards will use a 128-bit memory bus (half that of the 5700-series) and offer up to 8GB of GDDR6, according to an official slide from AMD, shared by Hot Hardware (opens in new tab).

That leaves some room for guessing as to just what the RX 5500 and 5500 XT could do. The two cards would need to differentiate somehow, and if it's not in stream processors or clock speeds, it could be in memory. VideoCardz believes the RX 5500 may come exclusively with 4GB of GDDR6 memory while the RX 5500 XT could offer 4GB and 8GB variants, similar to the way the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 has come in 3GB and 6GB variants.

AMD is playing a hard game against Intel on the processor side and Nvidia on the graphics processor side. This has been working for AMD in the processor fight, with Ryzen CPUs stealing market share from Intel, but Nvidia's cards still offer the most power at the high end.

AMD has still managed to make progress against Nvidia's market share, and these new Radeon RX 5500-series cards could help it snag even more of the budget market. Team Red will be positioned to challenge Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1650 and 1660 models, including the Ti and Super versions. Given that Nvidia effectively has six graphics processors in the low-to-mid-range space, it makes sense for AMD to introduce more than just one version of the RX 5500.

Leaked benchmarks have shown the Radeon RX 5500 giving the GTX 1650 serious competition, and a higher-spec 5500 XT could be the card to run against the GTX 1660. If the new graphics cards come out this month, we may get to see just how the competition heats up just in time for the next big shopping rush.

The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT has finally arrived and while the launch didn't go smooth, the end product is a card that should definitely spice up the mainstream graphics segment. The Radeon 5600 XT is positioned not only against NVIDIA's Turing GeForce GTX lineup but also GeForce RTX lineup of graphics cards, with a starting price of $279 US.

Well, in terms of performance the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB is supposed to be much faster than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti at about 20% average. This would allow AMD to reach near RTX 2060 performance at a lower price point which is very impressive on paper. To cut down the costs, AMD had to go with 6 GB GDDR6 memory whereas their RX 5500 XT supports up to 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM. It is quite the sacrifice but in the market where the RX 5600 XT is competing, you won't find much aside from 6 GB cards (RTX 2060, GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660 SUPER).

Unlike the GeForce RTX cards which had some feature advantage over the Radeon RX 5700 series cards, the GeForce GTX cards don't feature RTX/DLSS support. This puts them just on par with the Radeon RX 5600 series in feature set with the exception of the Turing NVENC encoder which does an exceptional job for gamers on a budget. The Radeon RX 5600 is supported by the latest AMD Adrenaline 2020 Edition bringing features such as Radeon Boost, Integer Scaling, Radeon Image Sharpening, Radeon Anti-Lag, and Freesync support. These are an impressive list of features on their own and something to really consider when comparing AMD's and NVIDIA's budget tier range of cards.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at the SAPPHIRE Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT OC. This is SAPPHIRE's only available variant of the RX 5600 XT lineup making the choice for a SAPPHIRE card in this segment really easy . The card has an MSRP of $289.99 US which is a modest $20 US premium for the custom graphics card and puts it right in line with some of the lesser cost variants of the RTX 2060.

As you can tell, AMD is changing a lot in terms of architecture with RDNA (Radeon DNA) compared to GCN. There's a new Compute unity design, a more streamlined Graphics pipeline & a multi-level cache hierarchy. Aside from the GPU architecture, support for GDDR6 memory is another major change that brings AMD's graphics cards on par with NVIDIA in utilizing modern memory designs for higher bandwidth.

Note that the included screenshots here were captured directly with the RX 6500 XT, with the graphics settings detailed above. If a game is tested with a timedemo, we manually played the game in order to see if the performance translated to real-world gaming. All things considered, we achieved a nice blend of quality and performance in Valhalla with the RX 6500 XT, but it became clear pretty quickly that this is one GPU that will make settings tweaking a common affair.

Like Valhalla, Borderlands 3 features a built-in way to render the game at a lower resolution, should you desire high-end detail levels, but are fine with a reduction in sharpness. With this card, some of that sharpness can be restored with the help of FidelityFX. Neither this game, or Valhalla, feature either DLSS or FidelityFX Super Resolution.

I would like to build Windows VM with graphics card passthrought for some games.At this moment i have only one video card R7 250.R7 250 will be used as video output for Host.I will buy one more video card.I read many manuals and everywhere stays that passthrought GPU would be isolated from Host OS.My motherboard supports SR-IOV.Can it help me to share new video card between Host Linux and Guest Windows without reconfiguring and reboot?Guest Windows would run only for some games and it will mostly be off cause it will be used only for some Win-only games.

I have not thought about audio.Also does exists Looking glass for audio?Or is possible to use default KVM video output via VMM with where game is rendered by passed through video card?Or it will crate to much latency?

Parallels Desktop has no access to the Mac's device's physical graphics cards. Instead, Parallels Display Adapter driver (which is part of the Parallels Tools installation) interfaces with virtual hardware and provides 3D acceleration features. The actual acceleration is achieved by translating Direct X commands from the guest OS to the OpenGL API on the macOS side.

Most Mac computers have an integrated graphics card, which is built into the motherboard and shares memory with the CPU. It provides a more economical alternative to the standalone card, known as "discrete graphics" or "dedicated graphics." In this case, Parallels Desktop will use the resources of the built-in Mac built-in graphics.