AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB Linux Gaming Performance

The GPU power consumption of the Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB version was right in line with the 4GB version, which is a big improvement compared to the likes of the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 graphics cards.

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB graphics card did appear to run a few degrees warmer than the Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB used in the launch-day testing.

Simply put, from all the OpenGL / Vulkan Linux gaming tests done at 1080p using both Steam Play and native titles of 2019 and older games, there wasn't any real difference in performance in spending the extra $40 USD in going for the RX 5500 XT 8GB. If running at higher resolutions, obviously more vRAM would come into play, but this Navi 14 graphics card is really just catered for 1080p gaming. There can be some compute workloads where the RX 5500 XT 8GB version would pay off, but there still isn't any released AMD ROCm compute support yet for Navi, so only after that comes can we run some OpenCL/compute Linux benchmarks on this low-end Navi offering.

The Navi 14 Linux support is still coming in shy of what users are reporting for the Radeon RX 5500 XT on Windows, so hopefully that will improve in short order. As for right now a Radeon RX 590 can be acquired for around the same price as these retail RX 5500 XT 8GB cards while offering better performance. On Windows at least the RX 5500 XT is comparable to the RX 590 while under Linux with the present open-source drivers is right below the RX 580.

As the Linux driver support matures for Navi 14, we'll be back with more benchmarks.