AMD Radeon RX 5500 leak shows a budget GPU aiming to blow Nvidia’s GTX 1650 out of the water
Leaked marketing materials make a strong pitch for a 1080p gaming champ
Following its recent reveal by AMD, further details of the Radeon RX 5500 range of budget GPUs have been spilled online, which will be firmly targeting Nvidia’s GTX 1650, aiming to outdo that rival product by some considerable margin.
The leak is apparently genuine, with presentation materials shared on Reddit which come directly from AMD’s marketing system (somehow). They show that the RX 5500 series slots in below the RX 5700, and above the existing RX 560 graphics cards, seemingly replacing the RX 570/580/590 GPUs which are no longer mentioned in the product stack.
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The RX 5500 range are ‘performance’ GPUs targeted at mainstream gamers and esports titles; essentially 1080p gaming in general, as we already know.
According to the materials, AMD is pitching this against Nvidia’s GTX 1650, and the GPU maker provided a bunch of comparative benchmarks to show how much faster the RX 5500 is in some popular games and esports titles at the intended 1080p resolution.
Going by AMD’s benchmarking, the Radeon offering is up to 40% faster than the GTX 1650 in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and up to 75% faster in Battlefield V. It’s also up to 52% better in Overwatch, and 37% quicker in Apex Legends.
Broadly speaking compared to AMD’s existing range, the performance level seems to be pitched between the RX 580 and RX 590 (which as mentioned may be outgoing models now).
Pricing is key
Naturally, we have to take the aforementioned hand-picked benchmarks from the company itself with a pinch of salt, and at any rate, everything really depends on how the pricing of the RX 5500 is pitched against the GTX 1650. But presumably seeing as AMD is comparing the two GPUs in its marketing campaign, we can assume that the asking price will be set at around the same level as that Nvidia card.
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Hopefully we’ll know more about the pricing soon enough, seeing as the RX 5500 is expected to launch in the next couple of months.
There is no mention of an RX 5500 XT model here, incidentally, but that’s not to say it won’t be coming down the road. The graphics grapevine insists that there will be a number of such budget (Navi 14-based) AMD graphics cards, potentially five models in fact (one of which is the RX 5500M mobile variant of this GPU, mind you).
Meanwhile, further out and at the high-end of the GPU market, maybe AMD also has a chance with its rumored ‘Nvidia killer’ if its rival’s next-gen graphics cards have been delayed, which is the latest suggestion from the rumor mill.
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Via Tom’s Hardware
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).