AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB Linux Gaming Performance

Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card as the sub-$200 Navi 14 graphics card in versions with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. In our launch-day Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux testing the benchmarks of this budget 7nm graphics card was done using the 4GB review sample, but with Phoronix readers being curious about the 8GB version, I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT GV-R55XTOC-8GD for some additional Linux testing. Here are those results.

The RX 5500XT 8GB features the same specs as the 4GB version aside from the vRAM: 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors, up to 5.6 TFLOPS of compute, 130 Watt board power, PCI Express 4.0, and other common Navi/RDNA features.

For carrying out the RX 5500 XT 8GB testing with most graphics card AIB vendors not being particularly interested in Linux given the extremely low Linux gaming market-share, for doing this round of testing I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT (GV-R55XTOC-8GD). This card was available via retail channels on launch day for $209 USD and remains at that price, higher than the $199 USD reference price for the 8GB version and while the 4GB version is coming in at the %169 price point.

Give there is just the memory differences, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB was working under Linux fine just like the 4GB version but with the caveat you need to be using the yet-to-be-stablized Linux 5.5 kernel and Mesa 19.3+. The Navi 14 support in Linux 5.4 didn't yield working support but just ring time-outs at boot time. But as long as you are comfortable manually upgrading your system to Linux 5.5 and Mesa 19.3 (or ideally Mesa 20.0-devel as used in this testing), you should be in good shape.

The graphics cards tested in this comparison included:

- GTX 960
- GTX 970
- GTX 980
- GTX 1050 Ti
- GTX 1060
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1650
- GTX 1650 SUPER
- GTX 1660
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- GTX 1660 Ti
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- R9 285
- RX 550
- RX 570
- RX 580
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- RX 5500 XT 4GB
- RX 5500 XT 8GB
- RX 5700
- RX 5700 XT

Tests were done on the same Intel Core i9 9900KS test system with ASUS PRIME Z390-A, 16GB of RAM. Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and running Ubuntu 19.10 with the NVIDIA 440.36 binary driver and the Linux 5.4/5.5 + Mesa 20.0-devel Git driver stack from the Oibaf PPA. All benchmarking was performed via the Phoronix Test Suite.