Exclusive: First 5300M Benchmarks | AMD Radeon RX 5300M takes the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 to the cleaners despite clock and memory constraints

The AMD Radeon RX 5300M is the new entry-level GPU in the Navi 14 family. While Apple gets to have an exclusive Pro version of the RX 5300M with a 128-bit memory bus (224 GB/s) and 4 GB VRAM, the rest of the world has to make do with a cut-down 96-bit bus (168 GB/s) and 3 GB VRAM.

Considering just the Fire Strike graphics score, the RX 5300M managed to amass 10,306 points, which is 33% higher than the GTX 1650 Max-Q and nearly 11% higher than the standard GTX 1650. The RX 5500M continues to lead by a comfortable 14% margin.

The RX 5300M posted a GPU score of 14,265 points in the 3DMark 11 Performance benchmark. The performance difference now becomes more palpable, with the RX 5300M scoring 24% higher than the GTX 1650 Max-Q and about 8% higher than the GTX 1650. The RX 5500M, on the other hand, has a good 24% lead over the RX 5300M.

The AMD Radeon RX 5300M is Team Red's lowest rung offering in the Navi lineup. The RX 5300M is essentially a gimped RX 5500M, and this could very well be AMD's best possible achievement with Navi 14 in terms of improved power efficiency even if it does come with a performance penalty. That being said, the RX 5300M looks to be an excellent alternative to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 series and will likely be lapped-up by many laptop OEMs in the coming months for introducing affordable yet fairly capable gaming laptops. 

We should mention one thing here, though. Synthetics tell only half the story and these scores may not reflect real-world gaming performance. The Radeon RX 5500M performs, on an average, somewhere between the GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q in gaming. Therefore, even though the RX 5300M seems to have outdone the GTX 1650 in synthetics, we would still keep our expectations tempered with respect to games, where we suspect the GTX 1650 could still have an edge thanks to its higher clocks and memory.

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