AMD Radeon RX 5500M vs NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (Laptop)

AMD Radeon RX 5500M

The AMD Radeon RX 5500M (or RX 5500 Mobile Graphics) is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 1,408 cores clocked at 1,645 MHz (max. Boost, 1448 MHz max game clock) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (14 Gbps).

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 RX5500M should be between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and the normal GeForce GTX 1660 Ti according to AMD. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) with high or maximum settings in demanding games. AMD states that the 5500M should be able to hit a performance of up to 4,6 TFLOPS (theoretical) versus 5,2 (+12%) of the desktop Radeon 5500. In our gaming benchmarks with the MSI Alpha 15, the RX 5500M however was slightly slower on average than the older GTX 1060 (mobile) and therefore between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

The 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). In the MSI Alpha 15 the power consumption was clearly higher than the GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and only slightly below a normal GTX 1660 Ti (measured in The Witcher 3 with an external monitor).

NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 (sometime GTX 1030 called) is an entry level dedicated graphics card for desktops. It is based on the GP108 chip using the Pascal architecture in 14nm FinFET. It features three streaming multiprocessors (SMs) and therefore 384 shader cores, 24 texture units and 16 ROPs. The 2 GB GDDR5 memory are connected with two 32 Bit memory controller (48 GBit/s). The shaders are identical to other Pascal cards like the GTX 1050 and therefore also the support for DirectX 12 FL 12_1.

The performance is slightly below the Radeon RX 550 from AMD and therefore only suited for low to medium detail settings of modern games like Battlefield 1.

The TDP of the GT1030 is specified as 30 Watt.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (Laptop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 SLI for laptops is a combination of two GTX 1080 graphics cards in SLI mode. Each card renders one frame at a time (AFR mode) but depends for most games on a good profile in the driver. Therefore, the performance can range from no gains over a single GTX 1080 to up to 90% faster performance. Sometimes, the combination may also suffer from micro-stuttering. The technical details of the card are identical to a single GTX 1080 (see for more information) and the power consumption is doubled. Therefore, the 1080 SLI combination is only found in huge clunky laptops.