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Introduction
AMD will soon be launching its Radeon RX 5500 series of GPUs. This article today is an announcement of that upcoming launch, with just a smidgen of information AMD is trickling out about the GPUs. Of course, we would rather just have the launch be the official announcement, but AMD has chosen to release an announcement before the launch. Therefore, we will tell you all the official information we know about it directly from AMD.
Here is the official press release.
Firstly, this will be a manufacturer add-in-board partner video card launch. AMD won’t be sampling reference video cards; all video cards will be coming from add-in-board manufacturers for this series. Here’s what we know, this series of GPUs is coming in the 4th Quarter of 2019. We are now in that 4th Quarter starting with October, so anytime between now and the end of the year, we will see this launch. Realistically we expect it rather soon, most likely by the end of this month.
What to Expect
This is AMD’s lower-end NAVI RDNA GPU product lineup. You can think of it like this, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series replaced the Vega series. The new Radeon RX 5500 series will replace the Polaris series. Polaris was the Radeon RX 590, RX 580 and RX 570 series of video cards.
Now we do not yet know the price range of the Radeon RX 5500 Series, so it is hard to say if it will replace the Radeon RX 590 or not, but certainly, the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 are prime targets. That’s the range of video cards these new NAVI RDNA based video cards will now replace. These video cards will be cheaper to produce for AMD and should provide a good cost versus performance range of video cards that should offer a better experience than Polaris.
In the press briefing material, AMD actually compares performance with the AMD Radeon RX 480. The AMD Radeon RX 480 is the Ellesmere GPU released in the summer of 2016. That one, of course, was replaced by the AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris GPU in the Spring of 2017.
Therefore, the more recent GPU to compare Radeon RX 5500 Series with is the Polaris Radeon RX 590/580/570 series of GPUs. It will be interesting to see how performance and pricing compare, Polaris has been with us now for more than two years, so it is certainly due for an upgrade.