AMD's new Radeon RX 5500 series is geared towards 1080p gaming on a budget

After leaks earlier this week, AMD announced the Radeon RX 5500 series graphics products today. The new lineup is aimed for optimal gaming performance at 1080p resolution and is meant to capture the market share of gamers who might not want to break the bank when shopping for a new graphics card.

The RX 5500 series is based on the 7nm RDNA architecture that AMD touted a few months back, and includes two renditions in the family—the Radeon RX 5500 for desktop PCs and the Radeon RX 5500M for laptops. The firm has said that with the help of the 7nm RDNA architecture, the Radeon RX 5500 series churns out "1.6X higher gaming performance-per-watt than current Radeon graphics cards based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture."

By targeting the realm of 1080p gaming, the Radeon RX 5500 series is a direct competitor of Nvidia’s GTX 1650. And AMD has claimed that its new lineup offers performance boost figures north of 30 percent on both mobile and desktop variants:

The Radeon™ RX 5500 graphics card provides up to 37 percent faster performance on average than the competitive product in select titles at 1080p. For mobile gaming, a laptop configured with the Radeon™ RX 5500M GPU provides up to 30 percent faster performance on average than the competition, and delivers up to 60+ FPS in select AAA titles and up to 90+ FPS in select eSports games.

The firm provided Monster Hunter: World, Borderlands 3 and The Division 2 as examples of the titles in which the GPUs excel in pushing out stable 60fps, but Apex Legends, Fortnite and World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth will see north of 90 fps.

To make these figures possible, the Radeon RX 5500 series takes advantage of the following features:

• Radeon™ Image Sharpening (RIS) – Brings crispness and clarity to in-game visuals that have been softened by upscaling and post-process effects in DirectX® 9, 12 and Vulkan® titles. When paired with Radeon™ GPU upscaling, RIS enables sharp visuals and fluid frame rates on high-resolution displays.
• AMD FidelityFX – Offers an open-source toolkit for game developers to add high-quality post-process effects to help make games look beautiful while offering the optimal balance of visual fidelity and performance. Available on GPUOpen, FidelityFX features Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), which draws out detail in low-contrast areas while minimizing artifacts caused by typical image sharpening routines.
• Radeon™ Anti-Lag – Anti-Lag significantly decreases input-to-display response times, including making Borderlands 3 up to 23 percent more responsive7 with Radeon™ RX 5500 series graphics and offering a competitive edge in gameplay.
• Largest gaming display ecosystem – With over 950 supported monitors to choose from, gamers can enjoy stutter-free, tear-free gameplay with AMD Radeon FreeSync™ and Radeon FreeSync™ HDR technology.

Furthermore, the Radeon RX 5500 series is included in the AMD Radeon Raise the Game bundle, "offering gamers their choice of Borderlands 3 or Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon® Breakpoint with the purchase of eligible pre-configured desktop and notebook systems powered by Radeon™ RX 5500 and RX 5500M graphics," the firm wrote in its press release.

As far as availability and pricing are concerned, AMD says the mobile version will first see the light of day on the upcoming MSI Alpha 15 laptop while the desktop versions will be available starting next month and within Q4 2019. Interestingly, the firm did not release any figures for the latter but since it compared the performance of its latest offerings to Nvidia’s GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Mobile GPUs you can expect the desktop unit to be placed at a very competitive price—perhaps around the $150 mark.

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