4GB vs 8GB Performance
With the 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT doing so well, we had to find out what the difference in performance is between 4GB and 8GB if the video card is the same. We can do this because we have both a SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB and a SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB video card. Both are the same video card, the same factory overclock and design, only one has 8GB and the other 4GB. Therefore, we can put them head-to-head in this game to see the difference VRAM capacity on its own makes.
1440p
From this graph we can see that at 1440p with “Medium” settings enabled the 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT is 20% faster than the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT. They are the same card, same GPU performance, yet having 8GB of VRAM at this setting is 20% faster in this game compared to 4GB.
1080p
Moving down to 1080p at “Medium” also shows the 8GB video card is 21% faster than the 4GB video card. That means just having double the VRAM alone gives the Radeon RX 5500 XT 20% more performance in this game.
We should also note, we are testing on PCI-Express 3.0 with an X470 chipset. It is very possible that with PCI-Express 4.0 on the new X570 chipset the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT can make up this performance if it is VRAM bottlenecked. With 8GB it is not, and this shows its true potential. Another way around that may be to upgrade to X570 with PCI-Express 4.0. We wanted to point this out because it is a potential, though we have not directly tested this yet. We do have plans to test video cards between PCIe 3 and 4 in a future review before we move over to a new X570 platform and CPU on our test bench in the future. Still, the benefits of 8GB of VRAM cannot be taken lightly.