The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT has finally become available and the usual websites have reviewed cards from various OEMs.
While AMD has thoroughly shaken up the CPU market, they appear to be struggling to do the same with graphics cards. The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT has come out to middling reviews, it is not a bad card, but the performance per £/$ is not quite what people hoped for.
It is not quite as black and white as that, the RX 5500 XT 4GB appears to be actually a decent alternative vs the Nvidia GTX 1650 according to overclock3d but they did not compare it to the GTX 1650 Super, and in this case, they are almost identical in performance.
Anandtech has done a nice summary of performance at 1080P.
| Relative Performance | Relative Price | |
| RX 5500 XT 4GB vs GTX 1650S | 0% | 6% |
| RX 5500 XT 8GB vs GTX 1660 | -8% | -5% |
| RX 5500 XT 8GB vs RX 580 8GB | 8% | 11% |
| RX 5700 vs. RX 5500 XT 8GB | 60% | 60% |
In the UK on Scan currently, the cheapest options for each card include:
- PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB – £159.98
- PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Red Dragon 8GB – £179.99
- Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB OC – £125.48
- ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Twin Fan 4GB – £137.99
- Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6GB Twin Fan – £172.99
Where the Radeon RX 5500 XT does do well is the idle power draw and acoustics, in particular being considerably better than the older cards from AMD.
If you are not too fussed about things like power draw then the much older Radeon RX 590 will likely offer the best performance per pound. The XFX AMD Radeon RX 590 FATBOY 8GB sells for just £165.49 and this is will likely outperform the RX 5500 XT 8GB and GTX 1660
Overall, AMD is moving in the right direction, but not quite delivering the knockout punch we saw with the Ryzen CPUs.