AMD Radeon Pro 5500M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (Desktop)

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500M is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features all 24 CUs of the chip (=1,536 shaders) and therefore 2 more CUs than the similar named mobile Radeon RX 5500M and desktop RX 5500. However, the clock speed of the GPU and memory is reduced by quite a bit in the Pro models. It was announced in the high end models of the 2019 Apple MacBook Pro 16 with 4 or 8 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory.

The Navi 14 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the Pro 5500M is said to be up to 2.1x compared to the old Radeon RX 560X (predecessor). Although the GPU has two more CUs than the Radeon RX 5500M, the slower core clock speed leads to a 13% slower peak performance according to AMD (4 versus 4.6 TFLOPS). Therefore, the gaming performance should be slightly below the Radeon RX 5500M which was about 1.9x faster than the Pro 560X (Alpha 15 vs MBP15 2019) in games under Windows. Compared to Nvidia GPUs, the performance should be between the GeForce GTX 1650 and GeForce GTX 1060.

The similar RX 5500M chip is specified with a TDP of 85 Watt and therefore 20 Watt more than the slower clocked Radeon RX5300M. In games the power consumption of the chip ranges between 64 and 105 Watt (Ghost Recon gameplay recorded with HWInfo64). However, according to AMD the Pro 5500M is rated at a TGP of 50 Watt and may therefore use selected chips.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super is a powerful, mid-tier, Turing-based, desktop GPU. The GTX 1660 Super is based on the TU116 chip with 1,408 shader units, 48 ROPs, 88 TMUs and a 192-bit-wide memory bus (GDDR6 clocked at 7 GHz, effectively 14 GHz, bandwidth: up to 336 GB/s).

The TU116 chip and other Turing-based GPUs are produced using the 12-nm manufacturing process. However, the GeForce GTX 1660 does not offer the latest features such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Real Time Ray Tracing. Nevertheless, there are some architectural improvements when it comes to floating point and integer performance. These operations can now be carried out simultaneously. Other notable features include Adaptive Shading, unified cache, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as H.265 encoding and decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

At Full HD resolution, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super performance lies between a GeForce GTX 1660 / GTX 1060 and a GTX 1660 Ti / 1070. Therefore, it is most suited for demanding games of 2019 in full HD resolution and maximum detail settings, or QHD at slightly reduced settings.

The energy consumption of the GeForce GTX 1660 Super amounts to 125 watts and therefore 5 Watt higher than the GTX 1060 or GTX 1660 Ti.