It looks like we will be seeing the AMD Radeon RX 5500 a lot sooner than expected, as new reports say it will be formally announced by AMD on October 7th. It is also being reported that the SKU which will launch will be the Radeon RX 5500 XT, with board partner Gigabyte already prepped with half a dozen custom-design cards, all of which have 8GB of memory.
Another interesting thing is that VideoCardz is also reporting that the RX 5500 will be based on the latest “Navi” family of GPUs that make use of the RDNA architecture, so they will be built on the 7nm process. There were a lot of rumors that the RX 5500 series could possibly be a re-brand, so this is great news if it turns out to be true. That 8GB of VRAM that these cards have will actually be newer GDDR6 and run across a 128-bit wide memory bus. The card is expected to have 22 RDNA compute units which works out to 1408 stream processors.
Based on these specifications it looks like the RX 5500 XT will be a viable successor to the RX 580 or even RX 590, which they can sell for around the $200-250 range and also compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660. The card would be good for 1080p AAA games with high settings and 1080p eSports titles at high refresh rates. NVIDIA already has a response in the works with their GTX 1650 Super and GTX 1660 Super, which will have beefed up specs.
