AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (Desktop) vs AMD Radeon RX 580 (Desktop) vs AMD Radeon RX 540X

AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (Desktop)

The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT is a fast upper mid-range gaming graphics card for desktops. It uses the Navi 10 chip (RDNA architecture) and is manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 2,304 cores (36 CUs - compute units) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (14 Gbps). The clock speed is specified by AMD at 1,365 - 1,875 MHz (base - max).

The Navi 10 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 RX 5600 XT is slightly better than a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) and for less demanding games QHD (2650x1440) with maximum settings. 

The TDP of the RX 5600 XT is specified at 185 Watt and the energy efficiency should be similar to the RTX 2060 desktop GPU.

AMD Radeon RX 580 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon RX 540X

The AMD Radeon RX 540X is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip (most likely). It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process and technically similar to the older Radeon RX 540. The only difference so far is a 4% higher theoretical peak performance (1.25 versus 1.2 TFLOPS according to AMD). Compared to Nvidia graphics cards, the gaming performance should be between the GeForce GTX 950M and GTX 960M.

The similar named Radeon 540X (without RX) offers a smaller memory bus and therefore also a slightly reduced performance.

The features of the Radeon RX 540X are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. Due to the slower specs, the Radeon RX 540 use slightly less.