AMD launches the Radeon RX 5300M mobile GPU

The latest member of the Radeon RX 5000 family based on the Navi 14 chip was just launched with Apple’s MacBook Pro 16. AMD is slowly diversifying the price points for its RDNA architecture and this time the red team is adding a budget gaming option for sub-$800 laptops.

Compared to the Radeon RX 5500M GPU launched a few months ago, the 5300M model comes with exactly the same number of compute / texture units and ROPs, but the frequencies and bandwidths were toned down even further. Thus, default clocks are set to 1,181 MHz down from 1,448 MHz, and boost clocks were reduced from 1,654 MHz to 1,445 MHz. The FP32 throughput did not take a significant hit, as it is only 0.5 TFLOPs lower. Memory speed is still in line with the 14 Gbps GDDR6 specs, yet the bus was reduced to 96 bits, so the bandwidth can only reach 168 GB/s, and the maximum amount is now limited to 3 GB.

Anandtech estimates that these reduced specs should lead to an 18% performance drop compared to the 5500M model, and this does not include the 25% drop in memory bandwidth and VRAM capacity. Even though AMD does not specify the TDP ,it is expected to be lower than 85 W. Nevertheless, there may still be enough overclocking headroom. It is worth noting that the new Apple MacBooks come with a custom 5300M version that retains the full 128-bit memory bus bandwidth, though it only features 20 CUs.