Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB vs. 4GB Gaming Review

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Red Dead Redemption 2

1080p “High” Settings

Red Dead Redemption 2

In our first comparison, we are testing Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p with all “High” settings enabled across the board, except for Textures at “Ultra.”  The 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT video card is on top, and the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT video card is on the bottom.  We will follow this format for the rest of the review.

In this first test, we see absolutely no differences in performance between the 4GB and 8GB models.  Performance is not playable at these settings; the Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU is strained already.  Still, the game can be set a bit higher so let’s turn up the settings even more.

1080p Custom “High-Ultra” Settings

Red Dead Redemption 2

For our next performance comparison, we turned the settings up as far as we could on the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT.  We were mostly able to set everything to “Ultra” except for a couple of settings we had to keep on “High.”  If we tried to raise a couple of the settings to “Ultra” it wouldn’t allow us to actually apply them, because it would exceed the VRAM framebuffer counter in the game.  So, these settings are literally as high as we could set them on the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT.

With these settings up as high as we could set them, we still don’t see any performance differences at all between the 4GB and 8GB video cards in this game.  What we do see though is that the framerate is extremely low as the Radeon RX 5500 XT struggles in this game at such high settings.

1440p Custom “High-Ultra” Settings

Red Dead Redemption 2

In this graph we have bumped up the resolution 1440p (2560×1440) to really give the cards a hard test.  We again used the same method to turn up all the settings as high as we could at a combination of “High” and “Ultra” settings.  Once again, the limit was the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT which did not allow us to enable some settings at “Ultra.”

We once again do not see any performance differences here.  The results are within the margin for error.  What we do see are very unplayable levels of performance now below 30FPS at this resolution and these settings, but there are no signs that 8GB is allowing any better performance in this game.

Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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